I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.

I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.

I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".

It also is like a restaurant where everyone is required to be silent and not use phones...

It's probably just because my interests are obscure but my assumption has always been I live in my own bubble. Even my friends don't consume anything like the same media I do, going back to the early aughts.

About once a month I'll be watching a YouTube Short and my wife will yell out "Hey, I saw that on Tiktok"

Could be that.

Metaphorically...Both of you were offered "the same meal at the cafeteria" so to speak. Based on what "others" who visited that particular cafeteria had eaten in the past.

This happens all the time to me when I visit friends. I realize the reason I have a suggestion on my youtube was because that was what the person who I was just visiting would want to watch.

Linkedin does this too with suggested contacts. I would imagine spotify and others do as well.

I said one day to a friend of mine how it was "getting creepy" and his response was "Isn't this what we have been asking for though?"

It’s fascinating how they’ve affected culture to the point where people don’t even see them anymore.

Personalization is profoundly powerful technology at scale. Do not underestimate their influence. What you talk about is the ever present concern of people who know you will talk, and almost everyone talks.

Cow hoof trimming (a Scottish guy Hoof GP and a US one someone the hoof guy), painting restoration (complicated name Beaumsometing), cooking (an Aussie guy Andy, and a British one who dances at the end of the preparation) and science (Veritaserum, Numberphile etc.)

I skipped the French channels about cooking (grolandiers) and science.

I now realize that I am really bad with the names of the channels :)

You think, that's just a joke?

Just wait until you're married...

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-neko/

Unimaginable today.

I suppose the FDR had better writers, and was better at sticking to his scripts.

But there were a lot of people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" rather than use his name. And Edmund Wilson quoted somebody at a dinner party in the 1930s, where someone denouncing Hitler was answered with "That's going too far. You're talking about him as if he was Roosevelt."

The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc.

But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.

If it turns out that people don't behave as we had hoped, we can always say that the approach that was implemented is not the true approach.

That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years -- and TTBOMK the system that gets chosen has so far had capitalism as an important component every single time, despite the option to vote for parties that eschew it partly or completely.

>That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years

Not sure what country you live in but in Canada they just give you a list of 4 or 5 names of people and you choose one, there's no asking of people what they'd like to do in the slightest. In fact, it's even worse: the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.

It is fascinating how well done story telling can make people oblivious to what physically occurs.

If the answer is no, then the fact that no one currently on the ballot represents such a party is just evidence that Canadians, today, have almost no interest in these political approaches.

>the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.

I agree this is a serious problem with existing democratic systems, but I don't know what to do about it. In theory people punish politicians who fail to deliver by voting them out, but in practice, a lot happens between elections, and people's attention wanders.

I think the counterargument that I would mount is that what people want, or think what they want, isn't necessarily what is good for them. This is obviously a very dangerous line of thought - because it can justify all sorts of oppression - but I think it's nevertheless true.

I find solace in knowing that I don't have a say in it. Because regardless of what the idea was, whenever someone tried to force everyone to go along with it and base a society on it, it turned out disastrously.

The only thing we can all do it be open minded, honest, and set a good example for the next generation who will take over and hopefully improve on what we did, while making their own mistakes.

It's a tradeoff. Some things are better, other things are worse. There's nothing wrong, and everything right, with examining those tradeoffs and deciding if they need adjustment.

Without regulation, this is what happens - the bank would collect your organs for payment if they could. Buinesses have no ethical standards.

Profit maximing business did not invent antibiotics, did not invent sanitation, did not create public sewers, running water, soap, GPS, and clorination of water.

Soviet russian and chinese industrialization was different, but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.

Of course. "Industrialization requires profit, except when it doesn't". Got it.

> but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.

I didn't realize they used steam ships to transport slaves from Africa to Americas, where they made them work in factories to produce industrial goods.

If you don't industrialize, slavery never ends. It was everywhere in human societies until industrialization.

The Bible has passages on how to be a moral slave owner.

As far as conflating industrialization with capitalism, I'm sorry, I'm actually very far left politically but this is just a fact. It's underappreciated in the west that 5 year plans worked well, but they were following a template 200 years, 2 full centuries, later. 100 years after successful British capitalists banned slavery.

And calling 'industrialization' 'capitalism' and 'profit maximizing business' all the same thing and then shrugging it off after getting called out, you are just showing that you ignorant of what any of it means. And your last two sentences are non-sensical -- I literally cannot figure out what 5 year plans have to do with slavery in the west.

There's a principle of charity when reading that you may want to consider.

There happens to be a correlation with a bunch of nice things because we happen to live in the modern era, but you can't attribute everything to capitalism because, as we noted it was not the only system in place which did these things.

I would like you to find some scholarly research which can bolster your theory.

I agree, though, it is very easy to isolate nowadays. And fewer and fewer third spaces exist if one were looking to interact.

I like it. Instead of sitting around talking about whatever the big media gatekeepers shoved down our throats we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.

We have fewer cultural touchstones, but they still exist in the form of things like major events (like Covid) or heavily advertised media.

That's the theory, yes, but what I've been seeing is people increasingly just staying in their own little world and not talking about those things with each other much at all.

I get similar responses. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on HN who understands how free markets work.

For example, most people would say that hard work leads to success. This is incorrect. It's creating value that leads to success. I very rarely hear the latter, in fact, pretty much never.

When I was a kid, I made some pocket money by mowing lawns. None of my customers ever asked me how I was going to do it, or how hard I worked at it. They did not give a damn. They only cared about was the lawn mowed. Using scissors, a push mower, a gas mower, or a rider mower all came with a huge variance in how hard the work was. None of that had any influence on what I was paid for it.

> t's just that for many people, hard work is the safest, and sometimes the only, way to get there

A lot of people are disappointed because hard work got them nowhere. It's because they weren't working on things that other people valued.

For example, the hardest job I ever had was working for the city maintaining the sidewalks. I was utterly exhausted at the end of each day. The job paid minimum wage, because the work had little value to it.

The jobs I've had since paid a lot more, and the work wasn't hard. It was just that the work was much more valuable.

> most people incapable of realising

I never said they were "incapable". I said they think differently.

> you're neither the only person

Of course there are other people that understand them. It's just that they are rare.

The idea that "legions of HNers" are telling you you're wrong sounds like confirmation bias. I basically see the same old discussion about free markets vs. market regulation every day on HN and it's not as if there was ever a clear-cut consensus. Maybe somewhat expectedly, radical positions such as "markets should be 100% unregulated" or, conversely, ones espousing something close to communism are comparatively rarer than ones in the middle (most people don't tend to have radical views), but that doesn't mean you can't see them often enough here (ok, maybe I haven't seen communist takes here that often, but definitely libertarian ones).

More importantly, even if everybody was disagreeing with you, it could be that they're right and you're wrong. Or that nobody is right or wrong because it's a matter of opinion. I haven't seen you take that option seriously, instead it's just other people who "don't understand" free markets

I don’t think most people would agree with that these days. I know most of the people around me wouldn’t

You are in a minority because of those caveats. 'Sound mind and body' and 'success' are vague enough to lend themselves to many interpretations and act as an escape hatch you can jump out of when someone points out any one of numerous exceptions to that statement.

No. You need to also be in a position to capitalize on it. There also has to be no value add involved. You can profit from destroying value ...

It's really scary how effective it is on me. I completely understand how it's designed to work and what it's trying to do and yet it's extremely effective.

Why do you think content that is excluded from the algorithm is more legitimate?

How do you know it was excluded?

What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?

I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Maybe this is true for the US, but in other places of the world, societies aren't yet as polarised (although, sadly, it looks as though we're copying the American model more and more).

Maybe you should make it more precise what you mean by left and right, otherwise it's always easy to call something "right-wing" just because it's more to the right than whichever positions you espouse.

(For the record, I always considered myself to be rather center-left, and I still hold many positions that are broadly left-wing, but recent events have made me realise that there's also a huge part of leftism with which I fundamentally disagree, so I'm not sure if I want to call myself that any more.)

Same with streaming services, I'll skip over whatever their major ads are pushing at me (for example, the large banners at the top of the screen when you sign in, the "featured" category, etc.) and I won't be satisfied with whatever they decide to show you (repeatedly) in whatever random categories the algorithm presents to me that day. I use the search function a lot there too, often just entering "random" strings of 3-4 characters and seeing what comes back as I keep scrolling down.

Like with youtube, you can tell that when they're pushing something hard enough they'll just insert that stuff into the results of any search you enter, but I'm often surprised to find a lot of things I want to see that the streaming service had never shown me before that way. I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.

The more I can eliminate or avoid things being pushed at me and decide for myself what content to consume the more variety I see, but at a certain level you're always left with whatever people are willing to show/sell you which is frustrating. Exploration and recommendations from actual humans are more fun anyway.

For news and other topics I want information on I try to look at stuff from multiple sources and perspectives to avoid the filter bubble problem and to get an idea of what people who'd disagree with me are thinking or understanding about a topic. I find that when I'm reading content from people/perspectives I strongly disagree with I automatically read what they're saying very critically and that practice carries over so that I can't help but do it even when I'm reading things from people/sources I personally trust generally. Terrible arguments, bad facts, and attempts to mislead are pretty common everywhere and this does make me a lot less confident in what I "know", but that's probably a good thing.

I wish Netflix/Comcast/Prime had a ribbon called "randomly selected" that was like shuffle play on my stereo, and have it change daily.

If you want my political take, I have searched for intelligence and consistency my entire life without realizing it up until the last few years. Ive been through several different sources, from corporate news to noam chomsky, conspiracy grifters to their critics; learning the truth about what happens in the political realm requires a level of diligence that seems to defy what can be presented to another. It would require so much time to understand all the relationships, motives, and the evidence for them, that it would be a several year endeavor. Given the fact that I have other things to do with my life, I have to start with what values I can follow and the heuristics that can be applied out of them; so I have decided on the nonagression principle, arguementative ethics, anarchocapitalism and their related concepts. I have chosen these because I have found them to be logically and morally consistent, and when idle I occupy my brain by trying to poke holes in these ideas, unsuccessfully to date. Values in hand, and having enough life experience to see that values seperate pro-social and anti-social behavior, I have committed myself to placing those values above whatever day-to-day contrivances I have; however much easier it would be for me to violate those values is not my concern, I follow those values because I value them more than any personal problem I have.

Those values now firmly at the center of my thinking, I can apply the heuristics that can be derived from them, and quickly dismiss propaganda that calls me to any kind of political action. I dont vote, I dont intend to start, and if I am listening to anyone saying anything about politics, even someone I like, I am left only to try to poke holes in whatever they say. This leads to me being the most critical of people I like, which is probably a reasonable way to approach these topics.

For a couple activist products, Showtime recently ran a miniseries documentary on Reagan, and HBO one on Kennedy. The 6 hour Reagan documentary was about everything that was wrong about Reagan (it even criticized Reagan for recovering rapidly from the assassination attempt), and Reagan did nothing right. The Kennedy documentary was the other way, Kennedy was a god among men and never put a foot wrong.

I subscribe the the "Garbage Day" substack by author Ryan Broadrick.

Through this I recently discovered what many consider the first major Gen-Alpha meme: Skibidi toilet

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KrlkXOxlvCk

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet#Reception_and_i...

[3]:https://garbageday.email/about

He also had an event in NYC recently and I went in terrified that i'd be the only millennial in the room (vs Gen Z) but it turns out the majority of the people there were millennial which was a surprise. Thinking back on it,I guess millennials were unique in that they saw the "old internet" before capital took over and they remember a time when computers weren't just walled gardens serving up what others want you to see. As a result, events that talk about the internet, what it was like and where its going appeals to that generation I guess?

Sorry to say, but this is the akin to the “We are all different” meme. The quintessence of the internet and social apps is to organize individual and hence form large quantities. This is called a bubble.

Honestly, we all still get up in the morning, eat, drink, sleep and nowadays you have to draw distinctions by what kind of apps the kids use, what values they share.

>> I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.

You may be tricked by the phenomenon called media. Only because it is shown on TV doesn’t necessarily mean changes in behavior. Same goes for apps nowadays. Perceived importance vs actual is an old phenomenon.

In Germany for example at the height of the so called student revolution in 1968 a maximum of 10% was actively engaging in protest activities. Imagine that. These “revolutionary people” tried to engage with media and organize accordingly.

I am curious to find out how many people voted and correlate them with protestors.

Subcultures created first and foremost for likes and shares to sell clothes and feed the algorithm.

That's what will come out of this, in my opinion.

Partly, monetization is synonymous with release; a part of the consumption platform itself. You launch on Spotify and YouTube, monetization is already there or just a click away.

Another factor seems to be the survivorship bias. The ones that stick around are the ones with enough monetization to pay out and continue working with consistency.

It does seem like creators generally have more control though, if they don't sign away rights for an infusion of capital. This is replaced with a percentage of sales paid to some service (hosting the content and providing advertisers, printing tshirts as a service, etc...), if product isn't bought in bulk and inventoried

I think "we have no clue what's going on online" is never been more true as actions like cancel culture have moved huge swaths of people off of the big guys and created other areas like Rumble - and the smaller alternatives. but to think that these smaller more diverse cultures aren't being commercialized and monetized - except for a few rare cases - just seems, to me, silly.

just my opinion mind you.

My opinion is that the communities I've found the most fulfillment/happiness in have are not funded primarily as a commercial operation. Sometimes they are related to commercial things (fandoms, user groups), but the community itself is not trying to sell itself, its users, its data, etc. My opinion is that it would be better for all internet-based communities if there were lower-friction ways to start an online community without giving yourself up to commercialization of a platform. Through the many layers of tech that would require changing/tweaking to fix this. All the way down from network layer DDoS mitigation to application layer maintenance and hosting.

It was even more balkanized in the days before the Internet. It's much easier now for a meme to go viral (for good or for bad) because everyone on the Internet is potentially connected to everyone else. You didn't know how many kids were actually listening to that loud radio station in the past, any more than you know how many people are actually listening to what's trending on Spotify. But Spotify gives you access to the work of many, many more people than you could possibly get access to in the past.

Mosaication? Atomication?

I recently bought my nephew a box of Pokémon cards. I don't play Pokémon, I have no interest in it and frankly it seems kind of dumb. But I would never say that because all I wanted at age 12 were boxes of comic book cards and Magic the Gathering cards. Equally dumb, at least! So I 'get' it, unlike my mother who, though sometimes obliging, thought all of these hobbies were incomprehensible nonsense.

This doesn't seem to be a passing phenomenon. Once you've established a perspective that respects and expects change, there's no law of nature that will magically revert that. That doesn't mean it will be frictionless. And it does require some conscious effort to keep up. I have TikTok on my phone. I rarely use it, but I'm familiar with it and it's not foreign to me. I see it as my task to refuse to let changes in technology or culture become foreign to me. And that task seems vastly easier today compared to the pre-internet era of scarce information, overwhelming monoculture and insular, defensive subcultures.

That's a broad brush you're painting with, amigo. As a 49yo father w/ two teen daughters (17 and 15), I've been surprised and delighted at the strong bonds I have w/ each of them (esp. my 17yo). We "hang out", and seek each others' company, to our mutual enjoyment -- it's absolutely nothing like my relationship w/ my own parents at their age.

Edit: PS I think I agree w/ your main point; it was this one bit I wanted to counter.

This is not the norm though. I wonder why people think countering something with an individual experience that's clearly distinct from the norm is a counter? It's not. His generalization is correct, your counter isn't evidence against it.

Part of the reason for the generational gap isn't just because of different culture. But it's also because where kids and adults are all day. Adults are at work, kids are at school. So the social connections, hierarchy and the dynamics are all completely different universes.

A lot of kids don't give a shit about grades because often that's not part of the social hierarchy at school. Money isn't even that huge either. It's when they get out of school all the rules change. That's why there's always this younger generational gap between teens and adults but less of a gap between say 20s and 30s.

You should mention this in your reply because it seems like an attempt at refutation. Like the generality is obviously wrong. It's not. The broad brush is correct. Your experience is the anomaly.

"Fun". Well if you have a family you need to support, I think it becomes a lot more obvious why "fun" is something that should often be dropped. There are other things that need to be done and they are definitely not "fun". You will, however, be rewarded in other ways that entertainment simply cannot.

Maybe I was just playing the wrong games.

On the other hand you have games which are designed almost like an art piece or a one-and-done thing where you experience what the designer intended and then you're done. For instance it's an old game but take Battle Chess for instance, you buy it, you play it for like an hour and it's chess with extra cool animation and art. Great, now when you want to play chess, you crack open Battle Chess, and when you don't want to play chess anymore you close it. A lot of indie games and adventure games still have this philosophy where it's more about delivering a high quality good experience that is finite, not stretching everything out to infinity.

I've had the reverse epiphany: That if I view aspects of my real life that seem difficult to make progress on as being more like a computer game, I can increase my motivation to tackle them.

I think for most people it’s like interactive light television watching. Not great to do it obsessively but it can be relaxing and/or mentally stimulating.

Rarely for Xbox, Playstation, and PC, but frequently for Nintendo. Mario Kart with friends is a certified hoot.

I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan:

>Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.

https://betonit.substack.com/p/leave-anger-behind

In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class.

Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)

I'm old, but feel the same reluctance (it slips sometimes; I am only human). Not because I fear any particular reprisal, but because I cannot comprehend that that someone else gives a rat's ass about whatever random firing of neurons happens to be going on in my mind. I certainly couldn't care less about theirs.

This is definitely one of the more interesting fantasies the right enjoys portraying, for sure. Part of standard playbook at this point it's becoming hard to treat these type of comments as organic.

Bud Light got cancelled for giving one can of beer to one trans influencer for a social media spot.

I’m old enough to remember the Dixie Chicks getting cancelled for opposing Bush and the Iraq War.

The issue and fear is as it has always been for left leaning movements: the tendency to splinter into little factions of slightly differing values and goals, and the purity testing and infighting that follows and keeps the majority of movements from doing anything remotely useful.

It was very much by the modern playbook, though it looked slightly different. Something offended some sensitivities, though it was a benign as an unexpected break up. My previous friend made a great effort to convince others of how immoral and cruel our other friend was, and some people kind of bought into the drama I guess.

It was a matter of reputation assassination based around some collective sense of what’s proper and what’s not. The path from reality to the conceived reasons for the cancellation was long, grey, and blurry, but they pushed hard on it.

One very common thread was how often I would think “wow, I could so easily get put in the same bucket. We all could. None of us are much better, we all make mistakes like this”. It seems true then and it’s true now. I say the wrong things sometimes. I’m accidentally insensitive. I don’t know as much as I could in order to navigate some social situations better.

What caused the dissolving of the friendship eventually was when I asked my friend why I’m any different from the person he was targeting. His response was totally irrational, unkind, and seemed almost pathological. I realized I had a very unhealthy friend who was harming my other friends and social circle. And that eventually I could be his target, too. I just had to upset him in such a way that I would be dead to him. What a precarious and unsettling way to be friends.

Anyway, all that is to say it seems familiar going back most of my life now. The only difference now is that it seems to be very identity-oriented and politically driven. It’s not as personal. That is a very eerie thing to me.

(That's what makes the current meltdown/full-scale civil war on the left over Israel and Hamas—involving at least four of the above six factions—so hilarious to watch.)

You are saying that not all Democrats are leftists, that is true of course. But almost every leftist is a Dem.

This was written by a socialist (George Orwell) in 1945.

You mean non-conforming opinions on totem topics of the (US) left. aka "purity spiral", groupthink, echo chamber.

Also true of the US right, to less extent.

Time and time again, the leftist vanguard eventually find themselves on the wrong end of ideological purity. Remember that Lenin was on the outs with Stalin at the time of his death, and Trotsky met an unfortunate end.

"like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children", Jacques Mallet du Pan said of the French Revolution.

I dont know anyone who does. I think most of the 'online' is bots talking to each-other

For a time after Ukraine war began, everyone was accised of being a russian bot, and I was like 'do you think noone else has bots? Lobbyists, think tanks, dictators, secret services?

Russian bots were just low quality, and so they were obvious. The good ones would not be

I saw a good description (on /r/4chan, no less) of leftist NPCs: People who constantly check in on each other to see what the latest things are to embrace/avoid. What a miserable way to live.

Caplan's quote sums up the logical conclusion of such living, and the consequent omnipresent fear of one day being on the outs from an errant word, thought, or deed.

The next time you are about to post something online, or say something to friends, or patronize a business, do you first ask yourself "What would it do to my public image if other people I knew saw me doing this?", and let that affect your behavior? Not me.

PS - I can also say that I have never up/downvoted a comment anywhere simply because I disagreed with it. I have upvoted many comments critical of me, or something I believe in/agree with, because of their eloquence or wit. I downvote very, very, very few comments, and only because they are completely useless (say, off topic), or ridiculously foul-mouthed in an inappropriate context (by the same token, I have upvoted such if funny enough). Even if few others seemingly believe in the original rationale for up/downvoting, I still do.

In the case of youtube, you can just open the front page in an incognito tab. There's also the trending category which isn't catered to you specifically but to what's popular in your country/area around you.

Distills the cesspool of the algorithmic feeds to present up-to-date trends, popular memes, etc. as well as a general commentary of the sad state of the modern Internet and our engagement-driven AI-training future.

I don't have a desire to join all the 'socials' myself, but it is nice to try and view at arm's length what 'the new generation' is seeing and thinks is popular.

I agree in some ways but also just look at music festival lineups and associated set lists ?

me: "Hey, nephew! Scooby doo Ohio rizz!"

nephew: "Holy shit uncle Sam."

Even Reddit was never really the front page of the Internet. That's a marketing slogan. I was pretty heavily online from at least 2003 to 2010 or so and never visited Reddit at all. I have no idea if any of my friends and other acquaintances did, but it was nothing they ever talked about to the point that I felt like I was missing out, and that includes friends I only knew from the Internet.

Go back before film and television existed and then what? You think there was any kind of meaningful cultural similarities between young people in Russia and young people in Argentina in 1890?

Where I think the disconnect you feel is very much real is that communities that cut across generations have largely disappeared. In the past, they may have been hyperlocalized, but they were real. 80 year-olds and 16 year-olds regularly interacted with each other, whether that be at church, service jobs, multigenerational housing, or simply that people visited each other in-person more often, if only because those visits were often only around the block. An old person in 1780 may not have had any clue what anyone was up to in another country or even another subnational district, but they probably felt like they knew their own grandchildren. I certainly spent quite a bit more time in the 80s hanging out with and talking to my aunts and uncles than I currently spend with any of my nephews and nieces.

The "pretty distinct cultural trends and identity" you're thinking of are what happened to get recorded by historians and/or make it into a popular Hollywood movie. It's very far from everything. As just a simply example I can think of from my own childhood, it became huge for a few years in the late 80s for kids to pull the magnets out of large speakers and use them to sift iron from sandboxes at playgrounds and schools. The idea was to trade in the metal to hobby shops for cash. Talk about it to any kid from my school district in 1989 and I guarantee they'd know what you were talking about. This wasn't obscure middle of nowhere. I lived 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Yet I have never seen this depicted in extant media, can find no evidence on the Internet it ever happened, and have never talked to anyone I didn't grow up with that would know what I'm talking about if I mentioned it.

FWIW, it changes based on your IP location at the very least.

Part of it is economics/incentives leading journalists to have to churn out a lot of content. Part of it is laziness as it's a lot easier than going out into the field and actually talking to people.

From this part:

Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case.

Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism.

The opinions you encounter as typical there tend to be the very fringe single digit percents of each political faction. Viewing the world through it exclusively is perilous.

I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.

Publisher of NYTimes is on the record in a few interviews basically saying that yes, his journalists are putting in less work into their pieces (because they are forced to produce more pieces per day).

Gregory F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), is a retired[1] American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, best known for frequently being quoted as a "man on the street" in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts from 1995 to the present. He has been quoted in hundreds of articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a "man on the street" rather than a newsmaker or expert). Although he always gives his real name, he has admitted to making things up to get into the paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Packer

[0] https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...

Two that really stuck out to me was-

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”

Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”.

Robotbeat, I'm thinking more like 60 years ago.

The upper crust of Manhattan is filled with left of center people who think taxes on the rich are too low, but they themselves aren't rich (because Manhattan is expensive and they spend/save all their income) and that Trump is bad because he raised their taxes when he capped SALT.

I have friends here who semi-jokingly call me a republican for being more center-left than them & not wanting to watch John Oliver, while they own $10M of rental properties & don't think they are rich. The kind of upper class folks who have laid off numerous people in their career without a hint of remorse, but also think the social safety net is too weak. People who vote for AOC but plan to move to FL for tax purposes. Etc.

Basically the Loro Piana $500 ballcap demographic.

This is your NYT reader.

Yes, I know libertarians call themselves “classical liberals” and the left uses “neoliberal” as a similar epithet for anyone more centrist than themselves, but that was the connotation of the word.

I remember coming to the realization when reading a fluff piece that the author had basically interviewed their mates and made it a story. I think the specific article was about marrying later, and they'd just interviewed a bunch of uni-educated people of a certain socio-economic wealth. No stats, no experts, just 'gut' feeling about what was happening. And once you saw it, you realized a significant chunk of the non-news stories were like that. This was in the 90s/00s.

I think a lot of lifestyle articles have been that way for a long time, pre-internet, it's just that the lifestyle articles are more prominent now.

1. Make few accounts on twitter

2. Post some bullshit

3. Quote it

[1] https://mediaengagement.org/research/can-journalists-also-be... [2] https://archives.cjr.org/editorial/the_right_debate.php

Twitter for a brief moment used to work like a Global Broadcast Radio, where everyone could hang out to get a sense of What Is Going On, even if results skewed towards the interests of terminally online people.

Current siloed content feels more like hyper-personalized newspaper. The content is there, but there is limited opportunity or common ground to share and discuss it with friends.

That siloing, along with Instagram's discouragement of user generated content, appears to suggest that Big Tech don't want to deal with opposing users (or any user at all) interacting with each other. IMHO.

I feel very lucky I was already out of university by the time algo-feeds became mainstream, otherwise it would be hard to chat about "latest episode of Game of Thrones". Or just generally chit-chat about "some stuff that everyone saw online".

I think Sportsball news is the last vestige of “shared culture” you can talk about over beer after work and be reasonably confident 30% or so of your mates can follow along. It’s so weird. 10 people who work together, around the same age, same social and economic class, and nobody can think of a topic that more than one of them know anything about, until someone says “How about those Warriors?”

I was so glad to be missing out.

Sure, it's just an anecdote, no perhaps I was unlucky, but I want to show that it's not always a positive thing to have this "shared culture" that you speak of.

Not quite death, but certainly agree about news outlets no longer seeing it as okay to say that “The internet is freaking out about X”

https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitte...

>Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and his official purchase of the platform, just over one year on from his taking of the reins.

   For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent, 
   while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period. 
   While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets 
   still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this 
   data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely.
   Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86 
   per cent.

The overall usage stat does line up with X's own claims about traffic though. i.e. X is saying that traffic is higher than it has ever been and this source suggests the same as well.

Bots gonna bot. So far they’ve not caught any of mine I setup this last year.

Each bot sticks to a context, simulates some time wasting doom scrolling at random to look human, posts affiliate links otherwise with AI generating the message payload in response to a Tweet by its mark.

I love how easy the internet made it to fleece potato brains

I have many questions

Is this the growth?

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/26/x-twitter-usage-statistics-...