Oh its bad but even worse since "unalived" was still too spicy so its now things like "alt F4 life" or some shit. I like the creativity, but the censorship levels make me want to scream.
Alt F4 life has some creativity I can appreciate. Until everyone repeats it far too much. Tiktok just seems like the same few things repeated endlessly. I hear it on my partners phone. Oh, this 5 second soundtrack again that I have heard 2000 times before. How original... And then again when the video loops and repeats.
I often get told to take pictures vertically. Sure, let's get more sky in this picture. Its not like we are at the beach with a nice view on the horizon or anything. I live by the coast in Hampshire, the Isle of Wight is pretty much always in the background of any picture taken by the beach. At least it is when visibility is more than a couple of km.
What I fear is when TikTokās (or YouTube, Facebook, whatever) shaping of public opinion becomes more dramatic and blatant.
For instance, letās say a leader connected to the Tiktokās owner didnāt like their political opponent? What if they just deprioritized them from the algorithm, so their name is basically unknown?
Or what if a certain scandal was countered by boosting opposition videos?
If this sounds like Iām describing extant scenarios, wellā¦ yes.
Censorship is no longer hard. Itās statistical. Truth doesnāt matter if it doesnāt show up in feeds, and this is more scary to me than any mental effects Tiktok may be having.
If it helps, I once years ago spent easily 12-16 hours a day on TikTok but don't watch any these days. I'm actually quite intolerant towards short videos and don't like even watch things people try to show me. People can change, they just gotta notice how harmful it is to their brains. Embrace the boredom.
Legitimately though wtf happened? Before covid I was the weird one for being online all the time, now I'm weird for wanting to have actual conversations now and everyone else is glued to the screen.
I was hanging out with this late gen Y crowd, and literally everyone had their phones out and were messaging other people in the friend group who weren't currently hanging out. Instead of hanging out, they were messaging others who weren't and might later. Then when those people stop by, they'd start messaging other people they're not with. Now and then they'd look up to say "so and so is doing so and so" to someone, like give an update from the person that wasn't there.
Kinda agree. We fucked society up with phones. I both admire that we can hold such a powerful computer and carry it in our pocket, and hate that it's normalized.
There is an episode where a new game is brought on board. It's really enjoyable, and once people start playing, they don't want to stop. Soon, the whole crew is addicted. It turns out the creators of the game are using it for mind control.
Seems like the perfect metaphor for modern cellphone/app usage.
I dont think that in the 60s-90s anyone would have necessarily anticipated the existence of smartphones as they are now. Rather than it being a ādeliberateā choice not to have them in the show. Its just not a futuristic idea of communication that existed at the time. Theres not smartphones in The Jetsons either. Earlier ideas of what the future would be like were a lot more utopian than the dystopian hellscape induced by smartphones and social media. Their various ideas of the future were a modification of the way people actually lived then, which was simultaneously less connected but also more interpersonally social. They dreamed of a more connected future, but not one where that level of connection would rip apart established social fabrics
There's not a whole lot of entertainment value in having a bunch of people sitting in silence texting other people off screen with the occasional loud video being played to nobody. Even if they are in space.
Ditto for AI. Oh, sure, they played with AI, but always in an embodied holodeck character or an android, never as a disembodied computer program. Imagine a show where every major decision point on the bridge was "do what the computer says."
My friend group was really late to adopt smart phones. I was always the nerdy one, so i had a cracked iphone as soon as it was available. Years later, tgey still rocked the dumb phone. None of us cared about social media at all. The smartphones slowely dripped in, because that was the only thing that you can get.
Boy that broke our whole group. A thing we would always do is hang out, listen to music, talked about movies, whatever. I did this for a long time my the last guy without a smartphone. The day he got an iphone, that was gone. We did it one or two more times and then we kinda drifted apart. Instead of talking about movies and music it was: let me look this up... I saw this thing on (whatever)
This was before tiktok, i can't imagine what younger people go through.
While I agree it got worse, I remember some people doing exactly that when I was in high school in the 2000s - sms were enough to constantly distract them form what was going on in front of them
Algorithmic flattening will be the death of me. Everything is homogenized and made palatable for the masses, either that or engorged to extremes to capture the last neuron that still has an attention span.
Fella this is Facebook and twitter times. We are deeper in the Facebook an twitter duopoly than before, and that is what allowed things to get this bad
One of my coworkers was laughing the other day about how he's always on tik tok while he's driving.
He didn't get the reaction he was looking for, because I was just like "what the fuck is wrong with you!?!"
I was driving with another coworker the next shift and despite having his airpod in one ear he was in the passenger seat scrolling through tik tok with his phone on speaker. Every 5 seconds it was a new audio clip. After about 2 minutes I was starting to contemplate driving into the side of a bridge and ending it all.
These people have NPC-ified themselves, and they basically have the AI behavior routines of zombies, just ones that can do a slightly more convincing emulation of socializing.
Brain dead by way of vanity and consumerism.
Sorry, turns out that a wide swath of humanity is too dumb to recognize what this stuff does to them, that our technological abilities have evolved way, way faster than our biology has.
We never should have made computers this user friendly. Because, when, you do that, it lowers the barrier of entry/usage down so low that you end up programming the less aware users, moreso than the software.
Not to mention that TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook are all owned and controlled by delusional narcissist freak anti-social Epstein class people, who openly view normies as dumb cattle who exist to be distracted and surveilled and groomed and conned.
So give them a simulation of socializing, a simulation of culture, a simulation of even rebelling against that culture... so long as they control the black box algorithm, the algo that knows them better than they know themself, the algo that harvests them via either subscription payments or data extraction.
They figured out how to induce drug addiction behavior, without selling an actual drug... they hacked the human brain, via a much more advanced version of basically networked, interactive television.
The Wachowski's were truly visionaries ahead of their time.
We're all a bunch of brainless pods hooked into the apparatus of the Epstein class. They're puppet-masters controlling literally everything now...because they are controlling the flow and storage of information and drip-feeding us what they want us to have and nothing more.
They are gatekeeping reality from us.
Not just social media...legacy media is just as bad...if not worse. Remember, Sinclair and Nexstar own the vast majority of local news networks. In some networks (i.e. Providence, RI), there is a legit duopoly -- Nexstar owning WPRI (CBS Affiliate), and Sinclair owning WJAR (NBC Afiliate) and now WLNE (ABC Affiliate).
They didn't just buy the rights to air The Price is Right when they bought those stations. They bought control over the news staff, directly. People that have built up generations of trust with the community. Maybe even interacted directly with you or someone in your family at a public event.
Hell, the meteorologist from one of these stations did the commencement speech for my highschool graduation.
There's like, two or three conglomerates that handle the majority of terrestrial radio stations, too. And ditto for print media...at least the "big local" papers. I wouldn't be surprised if the local city papers are seeing the same fate.
Who controls the past now controls the future, who controls the present now controls the past.
The only difference is that you're getting older, so you're experiencing it more viscerally than when you were ten years younger and didn't know better
Functionally very different things. Those old games weren't programmed to feed you a never-ending stream of content that's designed to provoke ever more extreme reactions from you to keep you engaged with the feed. Did they provoke extreme reactions? Maybe, but that's more because they needed to be hard enough that you couldn't finish them during a rental period and you had to buy them.
It is kind of wild to me that out of all the websites on the internet, 4chan of all places remains one of the few where you stand a chance of seeing a relatively unbiased set of viewpoints. As in, there's no algorithm or underlying agenda promoting certain posts to you and not others. You're going to see posts from users all over the world and they are going to contain every conflicting opinion that mankind is able to hold.
In some ways it reminds me of Lemmy, in that way. I'm glad to hang out with this population instead of that one though. 4chan has had a bit of a reputation for a decade or two now, and the kinds of folks that are drawn to that reputation are usually something of a self-selecting crowd of assholes. I was one of them when I was a teen but I grew out of it.
Lemmy is more beholden to the āupvote algorithmā though, where the most popular posts (and engagement bait) tends to snowball and more obscure posts get less attention.
4chan is chronological. Itās more pure, in a way.
Why are people so obsessed with what other people are doing? 5 years ago, libtards said what you do doesnāt matter as long as you donāt hurt or bother anybody. Now theyāre pissed off when other people want to be on their phones all day.
Any kind of social media with algorithm optimized feeds wants controversial content. It keeps the users engaged, exposing them to more ads and sponsored content.
Outrage against a legitimate problem with nostalgia for times the problem still existed in other forms and some ableism sprinkled in for spice. Delicious.
It's not ableist to point out the epidemic of 'TherapySpeak' on TikTok.
They didn't actually make any ableist insults.
It is a legitimate problem that TikTok is a prime vector for spreading and normalizing medical misinformation regarding mental health and psychology terms and concepts.
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I'd settle for getting rid of 'tiktok speak'.
'So my brother uses a lot of dr*gs and I'm worried he's going to buy a pewpew and unalive himself'
That kind of brainrot. It's infecting the rest of the Internet.
Oh its bad but even worse since "unalived" was still too spicy so its now things like "alt F4 life" or some shit. I like the creativity, but the censorship levels make me want to scream.
Alt F4 life has some creativity I can appreciate. Until everyone repeats it far too much. Tiktok just seems like the same few things repeated endlessly. I hear it on my partners phone. Oh, this 5 second soundtrack again that I have heard 2000 times before. How original... And then again when the video loops and repeats.
And the voice! The same one over and over.
It's not just the censorship on TikTok. They can do whatever the fuck they want with their shitty ass platform.
What bugs me is the people who adopt that EVERYWHERE. Like hey guys we're on the grown-up Internet now we can stop talking like 9 year olds.
Tiktok bullshit is banned on my pihole. Stupid fucking name too, "tiktok". Spy central brain rot.
Now operated by Barron Trump, right? More spy shit, or psyop shit. It's trash.
I just don't like how much video is vertical now.
Yeah, I remember everyone was making fun of people recording videos vertically 20 years ago, now somehow it's the norm.
I often get told to take pictures vertically. Sure, let's get more sky in this picture. Its not like we are at the beach with a nice view on the horizon or anything. I live by the coast in Hampshire, the Isle of Wight is pretty much always in the background of any picture taken by the beach. At least it is when visibility is more than a couple of km.
It'd be marginally less irritating if we'd stuck with 4:3 aspect ratio I suppose.
I hated TikTok since day1. For me it was just a worse Vine, especially the moment people tried to use it for more serious shit.
A solar flare would solve lots of things besides TikTok.
It would cause many problems too, but I'm not sure they're worse than the problems we have now.
A catastrophic one would result in probably 80% of the population dying in a year. Starvation, exposure, lack of medicines, etc.
You judge if thatās worse.
Hmm... Which 80%?
Start from oldest, poorest, and medically needy, then work your way up the financial ladder. The rich will hide in their bunkers.
As always, it would be mostly folks who had the least agency in the world.....hate it
That's up to them. The idea of direct democracy is not forbidden knowledge.
Worth it
EDIT: Still worth it.
Humans are like this in times of unprecedented abundance. They will not become more reasonable when times become hard.
And neither will I. Good luck everyone.
What I fear is when TikTokās (or YouTube, Facebook, whatever) shaping of public opinion becomes more dramatic and blatant.
For instance, letās say a leader connected to the Tiktokās owner didnāt like their political opponent? What if they just deprioritized them from the algorithm, so their name is basically unknown?
Or what if a certain scandal was countered by boosting opposition videos?
If this sounds like Iām describing extant scenarios, wellā¦ yes.
Censorship is no longer hard. Itās statistical. Truth doesnāt matter if it doesnāt show up in feeds, and this is more scary to me than any mental effects Tiktok may be having.
Ahh fortunately I'm old and date other people who don't use tiktok either.
people use other short form content platforms besides tiktok
My boyfriend defaults to Instagram reels if he's unstimulated for approximately 3 seconds...
If it helps, I once years ago spent easily 12-16 hours a day on TikTok but don't watch any these days. I'm actually quite intolerant towards short videos and don't like even watch things people try to show me. People can change, they just gotta notice how harmful it is to their brains. Embrace the boredom.
You mad? probably should break up with them then. There is always another mirage over the next horizon.
Shouldn't you be on reddit?
Red flag, gaslighting, narcissist. What other buzzwords are we missing?
Vine was a thing but died and then there was not much until tiktok became popular
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRZ_yKjSPaY&ra=m
Imagine them watching seven samurai, with 20 minutes of chanting on an empty road at the start.
Legitimately though wtf happened? Before covid I was the weird one for being online all the time, now I'm weird for wanting to have actual conversations now and everyone else is glued to the screen.
Whatever is intelligent, people trip over themselves and trample each other to do the opposite.
My youngest is always calling out my music as "this is a Tiktok song" ... child, that song is almost older than I am.
I was hanging out with this late gen Y crowd, and literally everyone had their phones out and were messaging other people in the friend group who weren't currently hanging out. Instead of hanging out, they were messaging others who weren't and might later. Then when those people stop by, they'd start messaging other people they're not with. Now and then they'd look up to say "so and so is doing so and so" to someone, like give an update from the person that wasn't there.
Kinda agree. We fucked society up with phones. I both admire that we can hold such a powerful computer and carry it in our pocket, and hate that it's normalized.
Someone pointed out how there's no phones in Star Trek and it's probably deliberate. I get it.
Data: Captain Picard, we are being hailed!
Picard: don't put video on
Data: but they want to video chat sir
Picard: text them "what's up"
There is an episode where a new game is brought on board. It's really enjoyable, and once people start playing, they don't want to stop. Soon, the whole crew is addicted. It turns out the creators of the game are using it for mind control.
Seems like the perfect metaphor for modern cellphone/app usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
I seen it yeah
I dont think that in the 60s-90s anyone would have necessarily anticipated the existence of smartphones as they are now. Rather than it being a ādeliberateā choice not to have them in the show. Its just not a futuristic idea of communication that existed at the time. Theres not smartphones in The Jetsons either. Earlier ideas of what the future would be like were a lot more utopian than the dystopian hellscape induced by smartphones and social media. Their various ideas of the future were a modification of the way people actually lived then, which was simultaneously less connected but also more interpersonally social. They dreamed of a more connected future, but not one where that level of connection would rip apart established social fabrics
There's a lot of newer Trek shows that seem to have stayed away from smartphones too, though.
There's not a whole lot of entertainment value in having a bunch of people sitting in silence texting other people off screen with the occasional loud video being played to nobody. Even if they are in space.
Yeah, well it sucks in real life too
Ditto for AI. Oh, sure, they played with AI, but always in an embodied holodeck character or an android, never as a disembodied computer program. Imagine a show where every major decision point on the bridge was "do what the computer says."
Well yeah, but they are based on the universe that was invented earlier. It would be pretty jarring for them to have made a change like that
Look, this is a boring conversation right? I feel mildly gaslit, can we talk about anything else?
They have communicators and iPads.
Yeah I was talking about your garden variety "tiny pocket screen" type of deal
My friend group was really late to adopt smart phones. I was always the nerdy one, so i had a cracked iphone as soon as it was available. Years later, tgey still rocked the dumb phone. None of us cared about social media at all. The smartphones slowely dripped in, because that was the only thing that you can get.
Boy that broke our whole group. A thing we would always do is hang out, listen to music, talked about movies, whatever. I did this for a long time my the last guy without a smartphone. The day he got an iphone, that was gone. We did it one or two more times and then we kinda drifted apart. Instead of talking about movies and music it was: let me look this up... I saw this thing on (whatever) This was before tiktok, i can't imagine what younger people go through.
While I agree it got worse, I remember some people doing exactly that when I was in high school in the 2000s - sms were enough to constantly distract them form what was going on in front of them
Glad to be an older millennial. Was in my late 20ās when smart phones were normalized
I have experienced this. Fuck those brainrotted folks
The irony of saying this on 4chan.
4chan: the place that makes you unable to like things unironically, because honesty is cringe, and every normie is a secret hypocrite.
Imagine living through the age when the normies ate everything that was fun about being on the internet. Can't say i blame them.
Stares at vore comics for 40 hours every week
Then anonn goes to church for communion
The 4chan TradCath is the strongest evidence against God's existence I've ever experienced.
Kind, vengeful, no God would tolerate this shit without smiting it like Gomorrah
There must be ten righteous people on TikTok.
What do you mean? 4chan is a symposium of the elite and enlightened.
(/s)
Algorithmic flattening will be the death of me. Everything is homogenized and made palatable for the masses, either that or engorged to extremes to capture the last neuron that still has an attention span.
Fella this is Facebook and twitter times. We are deeper in the Facebook an twitter duopoly than before, and that is what allowed things to get this bad
Donāt forget scrolling while driving.
One of my coworkers was laughing the other day about how he's always on tik tok while he's driving.
He didn't get the reaction he was looking for, because I was just like "what the fuck is wrong with you!?!"
I was driving with another coworker the next shift and despite having his airpod in one ear he was in the passenger seat scrolling through tik tok with his phone on speaker. Every 5 seconds it was a new audio clip. After about 2 minutes I was starting to contemplate driving into the side of a bridge and ending it all.
Listening to someone scrolling TikTok reels on their phone with the speaker on is a unique form of psychological torture
Oh no.
Oh no.
Oh no no no no no.
In that super high pitched modulated voice. Id rather be water boarded.
Dude I see this way too often. I say there's a 50% chance I look over and someone is on their phone
Tbf, there's a 50% chance I'm in gridlock traffic.
Everyone could be scrolling their phones on the train or the bus, but that's for poors and city slickers.
I need to be jerking off to OnlyFans from the driver's seat of a Ford F-Over9000
Its one of the filters, of the great filter.
These people have NPC-ified themselves, and they basically have the AI behavior routines of zombies, just ones that can do a slightly more convincing emulation of socializing.
Brain dead by way of vanity and consumerism.
Sorry, turns out that a wide swath of humanity is too dumb to recognize what this stuff does to them, that our technological abilities have evolved way, way faster than our biology has.
We never should have made computers this user friendly. Because, when, you do that, it lowers the barrier of entry/usage down so low that you end up programming the less aware users, moreso than the software.
Not to mention that TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook are all owned and controlled by delusional narcissist freak anti-social Epstein class people, who openly view normies as dumb cattle who exist to be distracted and surveilled and groomed and conned.
So give them a simulation of socializing, a simulation of culture, a simulation of even rebelling against that culture... so long as they control the black box algorithm, the algo that knows them better than they know themself, the algo that harvests them via either subscription payments or data extraction.
They figured out how to induce drug addiction behavior, without selling an actual drug... they hacked the human brain, via a much more advanced version of basically networked, interactive television.
The Wachowski's were truly visionaries ahead of their time.
We're all a bunch of brainless pods hooked into the apparatus of the Epstein class. They're puppet-masters controlling literally everything now...because they are controlling the flow and storage of information and drip-feeding us what they want us to have and nothing more.
They are gatekeeping reality from us.
Not just social media...legacy media is just as bad...if not worse. Remember, Sinclair and Nexstar own the vast majority of local news networks. In some networks (i.e. Providence, RI), there is a legit duopoly -- Nexstar owning WPRI (CBS Affiliate), and Sinclair owning WJAR (NBC Afiliate) and now WLNE (ABC Affiliate).
They didn't just buy the rights to air The Price is Right when they bought those stations. They bought control over the news staff, directly. People that have built up generations of trust with the community. Maybe even interacted directly with you or someone in your family at a public event.
Hell, the meteorologist from one of these stations did the commencement speech for my highschool graduation.
There's like, two or three conglomerates that handle the majority of terrestrial radio stations, too. And ditto for print media...at least the "big local" papers. I wouldn't be surprised if the local city papers are seeing the same fate.
Who controls the past now controls the future, who controls the present now controls the past.
Now testify.
That... that was 8 years ago, now.
... some of us did not need to be told twice to WAKE UP, but most... well, they preferred the blue pill.
And a perfect example.
Frank Coletta was an anchor on WJAR since like the 1970s. He's in that picture, saying that line.
Fascist talk
Can you explain?
That's it, there not any thought process behind it.
Explicitly dehumanizing
Don't kill the messenger.
It's not. It's exactly the same.
The only difference is that you're getting older, so you're experiencing it more viscerally than when you were ten years younger and didn't know better
Uhh people spend like 8 hours on average on their phones now, that was most definitely not the case when I was growing up.
i was playing console games for 10 hours a day in the 80s and 90s
Functionally very different things. Those old games weren't programmed to feed you a never-ending stream of content that's designed to provoke ever more extreme reactions from you to keep you engaged with the feed. Did they provoke extreme reactions? Maybe, but that's more because they needed to be hard enough that you couldn't finish them during a rental period and you had to buy them.
Not the saem
I would legitimately wish all 8 hours were instead spent trolling some random naked in rust.
Maybe Real Lifeā¢ should just get good?
Man that's what it is. Real life just sucks. So depressing.
I think it actually started, ironically, with the writers strike.
People used to spend more time on the couch watching broadcast TV!
Bring it back!
If people brought their tv to every event and outing ever I'd have the same criticism
And television isn't tailored to each individual with content engineered to make sure they don't look away for as long as possible
Just make cell phones heavier.
Problem solved
Somehow 4chan sounds like a healthier option.
As long as you stay off b/ and pol/ it probably could be.
Even pol/ has pro Ukraine and pro Russia posts. Itās not tailored to only show you only one worldview.
Well I was talking more about the kind of people frequenting those boards, not necessarily the content.
It is kind of wild to me that out of all the websites on the internet, 4chan of all places remains one of the few where you stand a chance of seeing a relatively unbiased set of viewpoints. As in, there's no algorithm or underlying agenda promoting certain posts to you and not others. You're going to see posts from users all over the world and they are going to contain every conflicting opinion that mankind is able to hold.
In some ways it reminds me of Lemmy, in that way. I'm glad to hang out with this population instead of that one though. 4chan has had a bit of a reputation for a decade or two now, and the kinds of folks that are drawn to that reputation are usually something of a self-selecting crowd of assholes. I was one of them when I was a teen but I grew out of it.
Lemmy is more beholden to the āupvote algorithmā though, where the most popular posts (and engagement bait) tends to snowball and more obscure posts get less attention.
4chan is chronological. Itās more pure, in a way.
Anon has become the boomer.
Okay fine, you either die a zoomer or live long enough to see yourself become the boomer.
And this was 3 years ago.
Deeply melodramatic. Humans have always been and will always be annoying
Why are people so obsessed with what other people are doing? 5 years ago, libtards said what you do doesnāt matter as long as you donāt hurt or bother anybody. Now theyāre pissed off when other people want to be on their phones all day.
Tiktok is the main instrument for far right radicalization. Fuck tiktok.
With all the left artsy and dance people, why does the left not build a competitor that takes over?
Because with leftist content you just can't generate as much controversy.
I dunno. Some people thought it was controversial when we joked that Kirk stopped being racist.
Its just a joke, I will keep laughing at them when he dies.
TikTok needs controversies?
Any kind of social media with algorithm optimized feeds wants controversial content. It keeps the users engaged, exposing them to more ads and sponsored content.
The libs are not the ones on 4chan, big dawg.
It's harmful for those people's brains. And it's really annoying to listen to someone scroll those videos with the sound on right next to you.
I guess some things really must get worse before they get better
4CHDESS = 4chan derangement and estrangement syndromes (there's a whole group of them)
4D chess, 4 chudess
The exact same as been said about facebook, video games, TV, and cinema even before.
I bet the same will still be said of the next thing that get popular among young people...
Honestly, yeah
Aw dude
Outrage against a legitimate problem with nostalgia for times the problem still existed in other forms and some ableism sprinkled in for spice. Delicious.
It's not ableist to point out the epidemic of 'TherapySpeak' on TikTok.
They didn't actually make any ableist insults.
It is a legitimate problem that TikTok is a prime vector for spreading and normalizing medical misinformation regarding mental health and psychology terms and concepts.
Can't forget the misogyny!
Yeah! Didn't notice that first. Truly this green text keeps on giving