Comment by iambateman
5 days ago
First of all – the essay is phenomenal and his book is available online for free – https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36...
> “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content.
This idea – that meaning is replaced by intensification – helps me understand a lot about the world today.
For people confused like me on what intensification means, it means maximizing the amount of attention and interaction that occurs. On Youtube this would be the metrics that drive engagement, including views, likes, comments, shares, and watch time. The issue is that the content focuses on driving engagement at the expense of communicating ideas with coherence and depth, for example by sensationalizing or oversimplifying a complex issue (especially for things like political discourse focused on sound bites and emotional appeals, or with virtue signaling and outrage culture). I think the above commentor is right, in my opinion, intensification shapes our world into being very reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues, and platforms like Youtube Shorts and Tiktok take this to its furthest possible level.
For an excellent, prescient, hilarious, and terrifying book on this topic, I highly recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.
OP here -- excellent suggestion, I've been heavily influenced by this book and would also recommend Postman's "Technopoly"
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The creators publication frequency is also an important factor. If you don't put out content at least once per week you fall off the recommended and lose a lot of views. Once your content is shallow, simple and without reflection, you are trapped in a hamster wheel of click bait vapidness.
Is this accurate in all cases? Isn't Jenny Nicholson one of the bigger YouTubers, with videos coming out maybe once or twice a year?
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You see this a lot in strange ways these days. Rage bait, feigned ignorance, and things like that. It’s anti-quality and it’s just as effective (if not more) than quality content.
What was the Twitter joke. 'If I want an answer to a programming question, I post the question, and then an incorrect response from a different account.' No ones posting to help, but a lot will post to smugly correct the wrong answer.
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This is enabled by the Internet and, weirdly enough, by the robustness of our social norms and legal system.
It's possible to make 80% of people mad, 20% of people happy, and benefit from the 20% while the 80% can't do anything to you.
"at the expense of communicating ideas with coherence and depth"
To be fair, while shorts is clearly designed to generate high virality and compete w/ TikTok, YouTube does incentivize longer form content. For regular videos the platform appears to optimize for engagement at about the 10 minute mark.
Political/social discourse is complex and I believe goes beyond a simple soundbite problem. One could argue this began with 24 hour news cycles with all the time in the world, and news had to become entertainment to fill the space. The movie "Network" presaged this sensationalized this culture situation well before it became a thing, and certainly well before social media was conceptualized.
> YouTube does incentivize long
If they only gave you the option to remove shorts from results...
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I think the above commentor is right, in my opinion, intensification shapes our world into being very reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues
In fairness, this is how the world has always been.
In the US for instance, back when there were only 3 networks and a channel for public tv, people were "reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues".
To some degree yes. Funny enough, llamaimperative's book suggestion goes into detail on how television is where this really started ramp up and how the Age of Reason was likely the peak of rational argument, where the focal point of transfer of information was through the written word.
"He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
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That's such a wrong take. Sunday TV was so boring because it was filled with panels of knowledgeable people calmly talking about subjects they were extremely knowledgeable about in calm, rational productive manners. Todays panels start with known battle lines already drawn populated with non-knowledgeable grifters.
TV was also required to air a minimal amount of educational television for children under 16 during the day. I learn way more on days home sick (latchkey kid) than I'd learn at days in school.
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I wouldn't necessarily say intensification is the issue, but more misrepresenting the truth or flat out lying.
Shouting "SO AND SO MAYBE MIGHT HAVE POSSIBLY DID THIS BAD THING BUT I DON'T HAVE ANY EVIDENCE!" from the rooftops won't provoke much action as shouting the same but reinforcing that it is definitely true, for sure, of course it is.
Then with human behaviour/intelligence there's the spectrum of people who care about fact-finding or not and will react according to new information depending on this. Some of it is general laziness, they can't be bothered fact finding, and some of it is tribal, they accept x must be true because it's about y tribe where they're a member of z tribe.
That's why it's so easy for politics, big tech, etc to manipulate people; because we're all still monkeys!
Baudrillard just gets more relevant every day. Honestly I find it hard to imagine how someone could have media literacy in the modern day without coming to an intuitive understanding of semiotics, whether they know it or not!
I called myself a Semiotics Engineer for 4 years, but the title didn't catch. I did domain analysis, logical model creation, concrete model creation in XML/OWL/KML, model review and improvement, semantic reasoning-based system design/implementation, and message system design/implementation. This was before the rise of ML.
What's your take on LLMs ? I ask you to comment on any aspect, whatever you think is the most interesting from a semiotician's perspective.
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That collection of skills is still valuable.
Him and also Marshal McLuhan. McLuhan realized all the way back in the 60s that computer technology (like all technology) in some sense wants things and manipulates the user to get it. The 'electric' technologies have their own logic and are not neutral on questions of humanity, politics, nature, etc.
Yes, the 21st century is the age of simulacra and simulation. Post-truth society.
I'm pretty sure this was set in motion in the 20th century. This century is only about refining and monetizing it to the nth power.
OP here -- I like Baudrillard and McLuhan but the media theorist who best captures the present IMO is Flusser: https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/the-discourse-is-the-cybe...
Heh, I wonder if (hope that ?) Discord and WhatsApp are the equivalent of railroad's robber barons : they brought world-changing technology, but at the cost of tyrannical greed, before their abuses being reigned in by regulations.
Though now that I think of it, didn't that only happen when their power was on the way out, replaced by trucks and container ships ?
I find the ideas of Baudrillard really accurate in describing some parts of modern life, but to be honest I feel like he just saying random stuff when I tried to read one of his book. It's so metaphorical and abstract it's very difficult to understand what exactly he is saying.
My best experience reading Baudrillard was out loud with a group. Some passages spoke to some but not others, but most generated discussion. Some are also obvious to us now in the TikTok age - uncannily so.
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He's not "just saying random stuff", he was a very serious thinker. Unlike Derrida he wasn't much of a joker.
Perhaps language is fundamentally metaphorical, and perhaps reality is actually abstract.
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It also explains why there's been an alarming trend over the last 10 years of people just getting more vehement about everything.
We started attaching public comment boxes to everything and now everyone thinks their opinion on everything is important.
10? We’ve been getting steadily more polarized since at least the 80s.
Possibly true, but I'm sure you'd agree that it can't really be called steadily since around 2010-2014
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So basically since when cable TV came into mainstream existence.
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I think human nature dictates that this opens up a literal market for the opposite. People aren't served by exhausting hysteria, it's just a cheap date, a way to grab low hanging fruit. The more that's focussed on, the more an opportunity arises to cover abandoned needs and wants.
The question becomes, is YouTube's algorithm good enough to itself pick up on this new market and serve it? I see no reason it couldn't. It's possible human algorithm-minders might sabotage this instinct by going 'no, this is the big win' and coaxing it towards MrBeast stuff, but surely the algorithm will eventually win out?
> is YouTube's algorithm good enough to itself pick up on this new market
Something I find interesting is that there are good channels producing very high quality (non-extreme or non-intense) content for many interests on YouTube and they coexist with the hyperbolic large channels. I suppose that they make less money, but they do so without a large production crew. I think the algorithm is supporting both types of content (content for myriad mindless viewers, and content for the fewer discerning viewers) and accommodates both scales.
By "human nature", what exactly are you referring to? The statistically most common amount of extremities?
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and I think "literally" abuse is a sympton of that
They changed the definition of 'literally' to fit the modern meaning. You can no longer call it abuse now as the misuse fits the new definition.
See definition 2 here:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/literal...
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Dickens did it. And people have been doing it since the 1700s.
Not to mention, if you're using the word "literally" to mean "something that actually happened", you are also using the word wrong. Because it means "relating to or expressed in letters".
I also notice people complain about "literally", but they never complain about "really" which also gets used in the same ways even though it means the opposite.
And I've noticed people do it as a substitute for intelligence. They complain about these things to seem intelligent. To seem knowledgeable. But when confronted with knowledge that contradicts the complaint, they try to dismiss the knowledge rather than adjust their point of view. Similar with fewer/less. These words mean the same thing. There are no rules as to when to use one or the other. There was the preference of one guy, who even said that he had no reason for it, he just liked it. And people took that as an ironclad rule. Or the gif debate. People try to invent all of these rules, but get pissy when you point out all the places where English does not follow those rules.
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But come on, that's been going on for literally centuries.
I think this is a bit of a warped view as this is true for the biggest channels, but the medium and long tail on YouTube has a lot of substance in computer science, engineering, geology, climate science, and much more.
When I was a kid there was Mr Wizard, and then Bill Nye, but it was far more limited than what I watch with my kid.
The land of videos with <1M views is full of gems - and many of the top notch science channels (eg Mark Rober), still give their creators a handsome income. And many of the channels, like Rober, do regularly crack 1M and the recommended list.
I disagree. I think those things you mentioned as being in the long tail are just things that you like and that you think have value. But there's no reason in theory that the same radicalization process can't be happening with those areas as well.
And if it was happening, what would it look like?
I have a theory, but I don't want to give the game away yet.
This is similar to what Vlad Vexler refers to as "being captured by the algorithm". That there are people on YouTube (and other platforms) that begin to mold themselves to fit into the algorithm's dictates so as to increase views and engagement. This means they may drift from their original political stance, for example, in order to please the algorithm. And this drift isn't always conscious - in fact it likely isn't conscious most of the time.
If you want to be a content creator on these platforms and you don't want to be captured by the algorithms you have to be very conscious that algorithmic capture is a constant danger. You have to be willing to lose algorithmic points and give up income that you're getting from the platform if push comes to shove. You have to constantly be on your guard.
I guess this just comes down to people losing themselves in the pursuit of money and power and status etc. That is the reason they please the algorithm. They lost touch with themselves, who they really are and their true passions and interests. Usually because of a trauma in the past they're trying to compensate for.
Exactly, intensification or acceleration, this is exactly the root of most issues. Since we've mastered energy (and in particular oil&gas), the world has been on an acceleration binge, which is now causing a lot of friction and overheating in the relationships and environment.
We need to slow down and to connect back to nature
Slowing down is not a solution since we're heading for a wall in some dimensions and a cliff edge on others. We need to find ways to drastically change course.
We need to build maps and steering wheels.
And we need to convince everyone to do it, or we just end up in the Red Queen scenario.
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on the contrary, slowing down it's the only way forward
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You might enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
Now I understand why numberphile has videos about infinity. I jest, but it seems like only certain content creators can get on the intensification train.
Seriously though, this is true. My YouTube feed has none of this "intensification" stuff. Perun, Blancolirio, everything Brady Haran has made (he's the guy behind Numberphile, Sixty Symbols, etc), Applied Science, etc.
I think the idea that media aimed at education or sharing a passionate hobby is different from media that exists in the first place to just make money. If you start out with a goal that involves communication, I think it's more likely to stick than if your goal was just to become the Death Star from the start!
It's hard to realize just how unrepresentative that is and how much of a minority that makes you.
Just like it's easy for people into video games to think the latest Steam-chart topping indie hit is really popular.
And then you look up the numbers and it turns out something like FIFA (EAFC) makes more money than every single indie game on Steam combined.
Intensification is the aim and result of Google, specifically their "online ad services" racket.
It is not created merely by the sharing of videos over the internet.
Such sharing was happening long before Google Video or YouTube existed.
Some HN commenters want readers to believe that YouTube, with its ridiculous "recommendations", is synonymous with sharing videos over a computer network... and that it's impossible for internet subscribers to share videos with other subscribers without a YouTube middleman. They warn that YouTube must exist, that surveillance, advertising and recommendations are essential, otherwise sharing video over the internet will become impossible and terrible things will happen.
News flash. Terrible things are happening as a result of YouTube. More specifically as a result of Google's surveillance and advertising tactics.
> This idea – that meaning is replaced by intensification – helps me understand a lot about the world today.
I don't see much difference to the "old world" either. Yellow journalism existed in the 1800s. We just do it in a more modern format.
Grabbing someone's attention through any means (often using tricks like ragebait that appeal to psychological weakness) is the only goal.