I assume the logic is that you can now sell the TV for less than competitors, which would surely bring customers. Seems pretty straightforward and inline with how the whole TV broadcast industry has subsidized content with ads for decades.
It's going to get increasingly difficult to sell software when there is no moat to replication. We're quickly reaching the point where you can just tell an agent "learn what this software does and then code it".
As is the incessant stream. If there is a pause at all in the next video loading the addicted user can break free.
One of the issues with federated anything is that there will be good servers and bad servers.
Good servers get hammered, and if you're popular you might end up perversely paying for people to watch your videos having to fund your server to maintain its performance.
This happened with mastadon, matrix and will be far worse if they want to deliver tiktoks insane performance.
Birth rates took a dip with broadband, smartphones, and TikTok.
Dopamine and attention sinks are pulling society in directions counter to evolutionary programming. Our runtime algorithms optimize for different things.
No value judgment, but it's interesting. I haven't had kids (yet?), and I feel the internet (and the career that revolves around it) is the biggest reason why.
> No value judgment, but it's interesting. I haven't had kids (yet?), and I feel the internet (and the career that revolves around it) is the biggest reason why.
How exactly the internet and the career prevented you from having kids? Have you discussed this with your partner?
"The phone killed babies" tracks with my intuition about this. Data correlates.
Finances aren't keeping me from having kids. The internet is. Smartphones are. Weird as that sounds. I can unpack more and expand this into a conversation.
This is completely ignoring the most common reason for not having children that I've heard amongst friends and family: "I can't afford a house, I'll never be able to afford kids."
Parents for all of human civilization and history have lived in worse.
The fastest growing populations have less money and safety nets than middle class folks.
It's the dopamine and time suck.
Men and women aren't bored and looking to fill the void and boredom with children. (Kids also can't work as free labor on the farm anymore, either, but that just adds to this argument.)
Kids keep you from nights out with the friends, dating, concerts, fortnite, girl gossip, phone time, etc.
People are choosing "I don't have time for kids (now)" and continuing with their dopamine filled lives. House purchase planning is orthogonal.
I guess there is an argument that every food product should add opium to their ingredients to make sure it's bought by as many people as possible and eaten as frequently as possible
But I don't think that's healthy for either the product or society
Old-school social media can be addictive too. I don't use any social media where complex algorithms decide what I see, but I have trouble wasting far too much time on discord.
Discord is communication with fellow humans. Tiktok is one-way consumption mostly. Discord is mostly text. Tiktok is mostly speech-free momentary videos, adjusting to the minute hints in your reaction.
Discord is designed to gamify communication. It has 'features' like likes, reacts, gifs, roles, badges, etc. Many communities add bots that enable profile leveling, quests, challenges. These things are designed to reward and drive engagement, and lights up the reward centers of the brain. Between an IRC user and a Discord user, the Discord user's going to be much more addicted.
Clearly discord has more of a vested interest in boosting engagement - especially now that they are showing people "quests". What a quirky and fun way to say "ads"!
But at the same time I don't necessarily buy the idea that all of their reactions/roles/badges/etc are exclusively malevolent engagement-driven design decisions meant to hook people. I do think that some of them are legitimate improvements to chat communication, and as a result many of those features have proliferated across other messaging platforms. Hell, most of them didn't even originate at discord at all but were cribbed from their competitors.
To be clear, I 1000% agree with you that IRC is less addicting. Even just by simple merit of not having multi-device push notifications. Those pull me back into the app. But push notifications across devices are also just objectively useful. I name that one in particular because it's one of the biggest and most notable features that prevents me from returning to IRC, where I happily did most of my chat until the mid 2010s. I'm actively shopping for a discord alternative as a regular user who is fed up with discord's march toward enshittification, and matrix looks like it gives me most of that convenience without the worst parts of discord.
Social media is its own problem
. It’s got nothing to do with the algorithms and everything to do with being able to trivially broadcast to the entire planet.
Even with no algo the people posting want maximum exposure and have every incentive to try to get it.
I wonder if it'd be possible for the host to use custom algorithms, that way you can have instances with very limited recommendation systems or ones with something more tiktok-like
What a coincidence! Good thing that after the DOGE cuts and tax increases through tariffs, the deficit has been closed. Huh, I'm seeing a deficit of $1.8T in 2025, same as the deficit of $1.8 in 2024, the gauge must be broken...
Edit: hold on, breaking news from 1776: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices" -Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
It's definitely cooked in the sense that the content is garbage, but whenever was that not true?
I'm hoping they're cooked because they're putting all of their eggs in the AGI basket instead of making useful AI products, and they probably won't figure out AGI.
Piracy took a huge toll on Dreamcast. It came out during the rise of P2P file sharing and you could just burn CD's of the games to play without needing to mod the console in any way.
They also have a strange obsession with stories about vaccines, rare scary ailments, and child porn. I suppose these topics get them good engagement, but not something I want to read about (constantly) on a tech blog.
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