Tag: internet

TikTok and the Sorting Hat

TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graphs at scale because it doesn’t really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that it its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is passive personalization, learning through consumption. Because the videos are so short, the volume of training data a user provides per unit of time is high. Because the videos are entertaining, this training process feels effortless, even enjoyable, for the user.

the reason tiktok has taken off is because it’s recommendation algorithm is really good, and it doesn’t need a social graph to thrive.

Prison TikTok

Behind bars, but still posting on TikTok

The reason that people find that so shocking but interesting to watch is because we have been sold this false bill of goods that the people behind bars are animals. This shows that they are somebody’s mother, somebody’s father, somebody’s kid. And they do in fact sometimes laugh, despite the brutality all around them.

Instagram Look Dies

As Instagram has grown to more than 1b monthly users, it has ushered in a very particular aesthetic: bright walls; artfully arranged lattes and avocado toast; and millennial-pink everything, all with that carefully staged, color-corrected, glossy-looking aesthetic. Photos that play into these trends perform so well on Instagram that the look became synonymous with the platform itself, then seeped into the broader world. But every trend has a shelf life, and as quickly as Instagram ushered in pink walls and pastel macaroons, it’s now turning on them. “Avocado toast and posts on the beach. It’s so generic and played out at this point. You can photoshop any girl into that background and it will be the same post. It’s not cool anymore to be manufactured.”

the sooner all this garbage burns to the ground, the better.

Instagram is garbage

INSTAGRAM was leaving its trace on the physical world. People in search of ’grammable content were mobbing restaurants, public lands, and private neighborhoods in greater numbers, causing their stewards to think differently about design and crowd control. I read an article about rue Crémieux in Paris, where residents of pastel-painted houses were begging for a gate so tourists would stop taking photos in front of them. “It’s become hell. On weekends we get 200 people outside our windows. Our dinner table is right by the window and people are just outside taking pictures.”

Internet of beefs

The standard pattern of conflict on the IoB is depressingly predictable. A mook takes note of a casus belli in the news cycle (often created or co-opted by a knight, and referred to on the IoB as the outrage cycle), and heads over to their favorite multiplayer online battle arena (Twitter being the most important MOBA) to join known mook allies to fight stereotypically familiar but often unknown interchangeable mook foes.

Squashing ISIS

ISIS is now harder to track online—but that's good news

technologies like the Dark Web are often thought of as fitting to the group’s security demands, they are largely useless to its outreach goals. ISIS needs to be where more users already are; otherwise, it’s just talking to itself alone in an empty room. For the first time since ISIS embraced social media in the early 2010s, there seem to be strong signs of the government-tech sector collaboration myself and others have been calling for. ISIS is not gone and will not be for a long time, but a critical pillar of its life force has been cracked. It’s something to not only embrace, but also demand continue.

Internet GDP

Are we undermeasuring productivity gains from the internet?

the productivity slowdown implies a cumulative loss of $2.7t in GDP since the end of 2004; in other words, output would have been that much higher had the earlier rate of productivity growth been maintained. If unmeasured gains are to make up for that difference, that would have to be very large. For instance, consumer surplus would have to be 5x higher in IT-related sectors than elsewhere in the economy, which seems implausibly large.

and

the US productivity slowdown dates back to 1973, and that is perhaps the single biggest problem for trying to attribute this gap mainly to under-measured innovations in the tech sector