Lots of people would be willing to do lots of things for lots of money until you actually give them the opportunity to do so. It's easy to spend hypothetical money.
App economy is a lot more complicated than that. Many people won't bother installing something for free even if it potentially could help them, yet they'll spend more coins on their favorite gambling game.
Probably they're interpreting your first question as "would it be reasonable for me to offer this for sale for $5?" They may not be personally interested in buying it but can still tell you whether a price seems fair or not.
For instance, I think it would probably be fair for you to sell your car for the blue book value... but I'm not offering to buy your car. I don't need another.
Agree. The question also lacks a "when" part. If it were "Would you pay $5 for this NOW?" then the answer has a higher chance to be NO, regardless of whether the other person think it is a good deal. The question is more like a phrasing trap to make the other person look inconsistent.
Were you asking them to open their wallet and hand you 5 dollars and that's it, or were you asking them to go to an unfamiliar website, click around, enter their credit card information, and then spend time learning how to use the software, and do it all right now?
The difference between "Would you pay for this if it was instantly applied and took 0 effort to implement" versus "would you go through <these steps> and pay <this much> to achieve <this> outcome?"
I think people just kind of don't expect you to have a card reader and be willing to take payment right there if it seems like you're just explaining your startup idea. They're just being nice to you.
I think that's still a good measure of things. What people say they'd do, and whether they'll actually do it involves all of these details, the time spent, friction, mental burden, sheer changing of mind at the last minute etc.
GP has a point about Point of Sales tech, and especially the reluctance of many people about giving credit card info to a random website.
I wonder if the use of a Sales Website facade is more accurate about this -- by this I mean the practice of setting up a sales site before the product is ready, solely to count how much of your traffic converts. It's not an uncommon practice and I'm guessing it would give a more accurate estimate than simply asking "would you pay for this?" merely as a hypothetical.
Essentially the observation was the same. A person claiming they'd buy something is worthless information. He had some strategies for getting around it that I've long since forgotten.
It's apparently not on archive.org yet. I just dropped my copy into my next donation box. It'll be there eventually now.
The term he used was "pretotyping" that term will probably yield everything you need.
The reverse is also the case. In market research, the death knell of your research is if you include the question of "would you prefer money or X."
People always choose hypothetical money as it's a wildcard, even if in actuality they will spend ridiculous amounts of it on the thing you are testing in the first place.
The existence of hypothetical money in surveys screws them up terribly, as people are both willing to spend and accept hypothetical money in ways that often don't translate to reality.
>Among iPhone owners, a striking 91% of respondents indicate that they would prefer Apple to release the iPhone every other year rather than every year. Among respondents not owning the iPhone, this fraction is even larger, at 94%.
I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.
I can't help but think that this study simply shows that more people should mind their own damn business.
Would that really help? There's a virtually unlimited supply of "stuff" one could desire & buy. There might not be a new iPhone this year, but would you look at that shiny new watch/console/TV/etc.
Either you care about owning status symbols or you don't, I don't think taking one of them off the market would make a difference.
The peer pressures to have an iPhone within a lot of groups are very real and strong. Having a "Blue bubble" is shunned in many circles [1]. It's a sad reality.
A part of it is likely iPhones managed to create a class of their own whereas nobody cares what brand of 65" TV someone has or who designed their 300 m^2 house.
I'm not sure if this is directly relevant since parent was discussing the pressure of owning the latest iPhone, not just an iPhone.
That said, I've read about the "blue bubble" phenomenon and it's truly a bizarre manifestation of consumerism. I'm European and the Android market share is really high over here, so I haven't witnessed it first hand.
The blue bubble thing isn’t about iMessage as much as it is about android messages sucking so hard it affects iOS users. SMS/RCS don’t support large files, (There’s no practical limit with iMessage) and video / images look like garbage. It intentionally corrupts the shit out of gps coordinates. It can’t even make decent audio or video calls. It’s tied to a phone number, and there’s no way to know if the recipient number even supports sms without sending one.
Also, green bubble messages are not e2e encrypted, and their contents are sold en masse to (or simply slurped up by) surveillance organizations.
iMessage has none of those issues. Signal only has a few of those problems. Its bubbles are blue (not by Apple’s doing, but still, blue bubbles, cross platform, and it is not intentionally a royal pain in the ass like android messaging).
Since you are in Europe, you probably don’t use SMS, and are therefore shunning the green bubbles just as much as any iOS user.
My impression was that you could send SMS through iMessage but when it's between iphones it doesn't use old school phone tech at all and just goes through the internet like other web based messaging apps. But only between apple devices of course.
Yes. It auto upgrades to a decent protocol when you are sending to an apple device. You can associate any combination of phone numbers and email addresses with it, so you don’t need a phone number to send iMessage messages.
I thought it was green bubbles which are shunned. In any case, it seems like a good way to get vain and vapid people to self-select their way out of your life. Would you really want to be friends with the sort of people who exclude others for consumer choices like that? Dreadful.
The unhappy feeling caused by "keeping up with the Joneses" in a society rife with "conspicuous consumption" is not the fault of an individual, but rather the result of a complex interaction between personal, social, and environmental factors. For example, in unequal societies, where there is a large gap between the rich and the poor, people tend to have less trust in each other and in the institutions that govern them. Living in a less trusting society is obviously detrimental in ways that are hard to ameliorate for oneself as an individual.
Even counteractive techniques such as mindfulness, or gratitude journaling must first be acquired—and not "for free," either!
You insist, vehemently, that the fault lies with the insecure so, from whom are you trying to deflect blame?
I mostly just dont see why it’s relevant. What decision is this supposed to inform? Whether or not Apple releases a new phone? Clearly Apple will do what they see fit, which is releasing more often, and if they are wrong Apple will pay the price. And they clearly have not been wrong.
If I felt that an investment had a 2-3 year life before being semi-formally deprecated, I would feel more like buying it. The thing is, that I can't think of consumer objects I routinely buy where the pressure to show I have the "newest" one is so strong. Nobody cares if my kindle is old.
Amongst my colleagues, like me it's a badge of honour to run an old phone. The last nokia standout only ditched it when they turned off 2G. He went with a minimalist phone which could do google maps acknowledging GPS was useful. He does nothing else. On the whole, chosing to run a phone with high MaH battery life and at least some commitment to update is a good choice. Apple actually can conform to this, because the older models are 7 years in, with software support.
Good point. Perhaps I should have qualified to tech. That said, I bet amongst the gamers there is significant pressure over GPU, and which generation of Playstation you're on.
> The thing is, that I can't think of consumer objects I routinely buy where the pressure to show I have the "newest" one is so strong. Nobody cares if my kindle is old.
Honest question: who cares if your iPhone is old? Maybe I'm in a wrong demographic but flashing top new smartphone in front of acquaintances stopped mattering around the time when everyone graduated and got a job (so everyone could buy one and it stopped being "cool").
I tend to agree with your conclusion, but this this was a survey, and people were being asked their opinion. Was there even an "I dont care care" option. How much do they care, and have they ever thought about it before being asked?
Real opinion surveys are hard and you cant infer much from the results.
Perhaps some of those 94% believe Apple shouldn't waste the physical resources to create an iPhone every year. If they used an extra year worth of time and resources on making the phone better, maybe it wouldn't be such an incremental upgrade, use less precious physical resources, and create less waste.
> I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.
People around you see if you have the shiniest, most expensive toy or not. It's stupid to care about it — but we're stupid and that's nothing we can really do about it. Comparing yourself with others and caring about social status is something that's built-in very deep in our psyche by evolution. It's irrational to try to ignore or completely conquer something so foundational to our being; the best we can hope for is to channel it to something better.
Of course, HN is full of people on autistic spectrum or adjacent (me included) who may not feel the same emotions or psychological reactions as a neurotypical. But, once again, it's irrational to judge an average human being by yourself in this case.
It's irrational to expect humans to not have any irrational thoughts or inclinations.
They're doing it (I presume) in the middle of the day, and for a couple of hours maybe. They're not keeping the victims up for 48 hours straight playing the music.
When you have an audience of people who are forbidden from leaving, you have some level of obligation to use their time wisely. The myth of "yeah you're forced to be here, but it's for your own good!" really breaks down when the "good" use of their time is intentionally annoying them to extort money. I hated things like this when I was in highschool. It made me think (often rightfully) that even from an academic perspective my time would have been better spent at home playing Counterstrike.
Yeah, I was surprised how hated my comment was. I was thinking something like, "pfft, kids these days are too soft." Or something like that.
When I was in middle school, we had an annual fundraiser for the American Heart Assoc. It was one of those "____-a-thon" style events where we all had to jump rope for as long as we could, and we gathered pledges from family members ("only 1¢ per jump, Aunt Sally!"). But this was only for an hour, and it replaced our normal PE period, so it wasn't a diversion from the normal course of schooling. And not everyone participated.
That's the kind of thing I had in mind when writing that comment, but now I'm realizing the parent comment was talking about the entire student body, for the entire school day.
I agree with you. My original take was hot... and bad. :)
Facebook, Twitter, etc. describe the tactics they devise to manipulate computer users as "products". "Products" that sell for zero dollars. In the real world,, one might imagine a product strategy something like
1. Create a product that solves a problem
2. Sell the product to those affected by the problem
Under the so-called "tech" company version of reality, the process is more like
1. Create a "product" that creates a problem
2. Create a "product" that purports to solve that problem
3. Conduct surveillance and sell advertising services to someone else
To me, social media companies rarely discuss their "products" (advertising services). They discuss their free bait, calling this "products". The service being sold is not even being sold to the person using the "product" (taking the bait).
Istagram is an American country, so it should probably be considered to be counter to the national interests of any country other than America and maybe America's close strategic allies. Particularly, if you're the leader of a country America considers to be a strategic rival, then you should definitely give serious consideration to blocking American social media.
Personally I think it's bad for America too, but it's unlikely that they're deliberately inflicting damage to America in an act of information/culture warfare. But other countries, particularly America's rivals, would be wise to assume that's what is happening to them.
I don't understand why they don't just make the "reciprocity" argument. The fact that we allow Chinese social networks in the US while they block ours doesn't pass the smell test. To me, this line of argument is easier to rally around as it's more business focused and avoids free speech/national security debates which only serve to muddy the waters
I thought that only authoritarian regimes are blocking foreign medias and that’s a bad thing. At least that’s sth US was preaching. It seems freedom of press or free market is only good when it serves you.
Not really discovering anything new here. Just showing that countries only use values at their convenience.
I think here, the question of reciprocal digital communication and the (free) flow of information is markedly different from the reciprocity of physical goods, as the latter has historically had far stricter entry requirements, regulatory, monetary, or otherwise.
Regarding the former, none of the global players are perfect when it comes to unencumbered access to their respective digital markets, but as Tiktok (and recently Temu) demonstrate, getting a foothold in one may be easier than another.
PRC regulatory requirements for communication is expensive for domestic players, why should western entrants be spared? That's like allowing PRC auto in US on less stringent safety requirements. The reason FB and twitter pulled out in 09 after minority/terrorist attacks was because they didn't have the moderation system in place, while PRC platforms had 10000s of expensive, physical bodies doing the grunt work at the time. Which was prescient, and it wasn't until western platforms started implementing mass moderation post NZ shooting that they started initatives to retner PRC market (FB & Google at least), because they finally spent the money and can now scale it in PRC. It was only internal drama at FB and Google that killed the project. If anything TikTok has to bend backwards harder than US platforms to appease US gov because they don't know what "speech" triggers US politicians, whereas in PRC, western companies just had to say yes to censorship and access requests.
> unencumbered access to their respective digital markets
I wonder about this. Up until recently dominant networks were US native or backed by US companies (e.g. even Spotify for instance has a US office, is traded on the NY exchange and is backed by US cloud services) so we haven't seen what happens when a sheer foreign company gets a foothold in the market. Until Tiktok.
And as Tiktok is getting banned, I get the feeling any other foreign company reaching a dominant position with no US transparency would get the same treatment under national security or any other pretense, with US politicians opining that citizen data getting sucked away isn't acceptable. Especially as the foreign compnay's money doesn't land in their party's pockets the same Meta's or Alphabet's money does.
Except the US still wouldn’t have achieved reciprocity by banning tiktok. China can and does already enact whatever protectionist policies they want including against non tech.
I can't think of a reason to do this. Is this a revenge fantasy? So what if others disagree with me or I with them? Isn't that part of a fruitful discourse?
This is not the dystopian future we imagined, yet here we are. I’m scared to think where we will end up in 20-40 years time as our marketing and psychology capability increases.
I'd like to see the results of a study for "How much would you pay to have your parents/grandparents Facebook accounts deactivated?" Facebook is probably leaving money on the table!
How this level of title editorializing is possible on HN? It just picks Tiktok purely as a bait, but actual research includes multiple websites and also luxury brands.
Email hn@ycombinator.com if you have concerns. The mods do care and will fix editorialized titles pretty quickly, but they can't keep up with everything as it is submitted. Emailing them helps keep the site clean from clickbait titles!
Submitted title was "Study: Users would be willing to pay $28 to have their peers deactivate TikTok". That was badly editorialized (which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Even the article's own title is somewhat baity so I've changed it to a more neutral version of the subtitle.
I mean, yeah, that's an incredibly small amount of money to get everyone else to do something. I'd pay $1000 to have everyone lose their cars. Heck, if you could guarantee it would happen, I will pay $100k today so that everyone in the USA can no longer drive their cars.
That means the opposite. The disutility is really low and the network utility is positive. If I charged you $29 to have all your peers lose Tik Tok, you'd say no. $29 is too much because Tik Tok doesn't hurt that much.
Think about how much you'd pay for something that actually hurt. Would your ceiling be $28? I think not.
> I will pay $100k today so that everyone in the USA can no longer drive their cars.
It's nice to know that you'd happily pay a sum of money you're capable of paying to ensure ambulances can't get their patients to a hospital, people can't drive their wives in labor to have the baby delivered, trucks can't transport medicine between cities, farmers have no efficient way to get their food distributed once harvested.
One of the contributing factors here is that we keep calling these "social networks," but that's not really what they're being used for.
If you look at an average user's feed, it probably breaks down into 30% traditional advertising, 20% nontraditional advertising (via influencers and friends shilling for their employers and promoting their side hustles), 30% content by people they have no social relationship with (celebrities, etc.), 15% low-quality posts from acquaintances, and 5% content from legitimate friends.
That is a whole lot of junk to have to sift through just to get the occasional scrap of legitimate social interaction.
These are advertising networks first, and social networks a distant second, even though they ostensibly involve social graphs.
So I can understand the fatigue people feel about having to scroll and scroll and scroll just to stay in the loop with people they have an existing social relationship with and genuinely want to know what's going on in their lives.
Exactly. I don't care what my friends do on Netflix or Youtube or TikTok or even Instagram. My life and those of my friends don't much intersect with the digital video entertainment we consume. Facebook and text messages are where I interact with friends. On neither do I see non-friend stuff nor ads (I use FB on desktop with filters)
Speaking as a 33 year old with a freshly 18 year old sibling I'd say TikTok fills a similar niche to YouTube. You aren't really chatting on TikTok even if some people might post. What you're most likely doing is finding videos which you then share via another medium like Discord. Discord+YouTube+TikTok is a huge thing with younger netizens (and of course gamers in the case of Discord). YouTube is still popular but TikTok is less censored (this is probably the wrong word since YouTube has edgy content, but it seems to recommend more sanitized content than TikTok which most heavy users I've known agree has a much better/unrestrained recommendation algorithm).
So saying people use TikTok directly to keep up with their friends might not be the full picture. But I'd still say for many people TikTok plays a role in keeping up with your friends in that trading TikTok finds is a popular activity for many friends.
In my opinion, there is no way that early Facebook was reducing happiness and life satisfaction in aggregate. I doubt you were a Facebook user in that period if that’s your perception. It was so benign in the early days.
If I wasn't on Facebook then I wouldn't have been able to join my local running group. That is one demonstration of how it has increased my happiness by me being on it. However, if Facebook didn't exist then the running group would probably use some other platform so in aggregate Facebook hasn't improved things; just made it easier for groups to organise.
Nah, it was good in ‘04 ‘05. Being able to see photos other people took of you at parties was a novelty and was welcome. It was like a phone book with photos.
Even later the groups function was great for many.
On balance it’s been bad, but it has its moments in the sun.
It was also a desktop experience so it wasn’t nearly as potent as it was when the smartphone showed up
>Actually I wonder if there’s a market for an actual social network that is restricted to only being social.
There's a huge market for them. They're called private group chats, and they're popular everywhere. The problem is that you can't make much money off of that, precisely because they're socially valuable (i.e., they're strictly socially-driven, so there's no opportunity for in-line advertising, or recommending "new connections").
Group chats are such a poor substitute though. On 00’s Facebook you could post once for all of your friends to see, and they didn’t have to all know each other.
I find group chats to be a pretty excellent solution, though I am less gregarious than average. Occasionally I post something in multiple groups or create a new "temporary" group in order to share it with people from different circles; this creates some detritus but not often to the point of being much of a downside.
The problem I most often experience with group chats is that not everyone's on the same platform (excepting SMS) but old fashioned social media has that issue too.
They also don't scale super well to large clubs or organizations, where I think having topic-oriented posts or threads as the default becomes valuable.
> On 00’s Facebook you could post once for all of your friends to see, and they didn’t have to all know each other.
I consider the inability to do this a feature, not a bug. Group chats are socially segmented, with friction between those segments. That crazy uncle who loves conspiracy theories will be confined to just the group chats you have in common. You don't get insufferable loudmouths at scale, amplified by social media reward structures and algorithms.
There is one, it's called Hallo. I have it and don't have a single friend on it yet which is a shame. There's a few more "healthy rules" like no influencers, no more than 100 friends, etc.
Makes me think of the shift from reality TV (real people living authentically on TV) to “reality TV” (the genre with it’s specific formulas/tropes/manipulation).
That's fediverse. It's all run by people who can't be arsed running an ad network, and because it's federated the users can just go elsewhere if you did try something like that.
I watch TikTok and read reddit religiously because I'm in my 50s, and I need to make sure I can understand what is relevant to the younger people I work with. Also understanding memes, etc. so that I don't get too old with my thinking.
It actually works great. I'm not going around saying "hello fellow young people, did you see the top post on reddit?" but it's good enough so that I'm not clueless as to what's being said in our chat rooms and I can comment.
Thank you for the reminder of how unimaginative 20 year olds are about their future.
That's not a dig at you. You're too busy doing stuff and getting along to actually have any idea what life is about. That has to be a biological necessity or you'd implode
1) Yes why would you assume a a GenX would not know how to navigate algorithmic filter bubbles?
2) The low quality content on the fyp is actually representative of the state of affairs for many youth. Media and data literacy is not a strong point of GenZ. The amount of ridiculous conspiracy theories(both left and right) going viral is a parallel universe of the infamous boomer political chain emails.
1) you can know how to navigate filter bubbles but the moment you do, you’ll be shoehorned into things that interest you. Which is how it works. Which is fine, but it’s a bad tool to discover things you aren’t interested in.
2) this is the kid of comment that makes me feel more confident. Like… shut up. No, you won’t better understand the youth by ingesting garbage and calling them media illiterates just talk to people and ask questions.
More fool you, I'm so imaginative, I imagined the point I'm arguing against. Normally I might apologise and hang my head in shame but age is an interesting thought exercise. So come with me if you will, ignore me if you won't.
The point I was trying to make is that you are unable to imagine what browsing Reddit at 50 will mean to you; how important staying contextualised with pop culture will be to you.
Your Ego is ephemeral, in constant flux. You can't imagine yourself accurately. When you're young you know things will change but it's impossible to predict how those events —health, jobs, homes, children, deaths, friendships, hobbies, your politics, etc— will change who you are.
I'm also saying that's okay. As long as old.reddit.com still works in 30 years, we'll all be okay.
Nah you’re just so lost in old age branded wisdom you cannot imagine my state of mind. That’s ok too. You just don’t understand that my youth is different than your youth.
Or perhaps this is a deeply irritating conversation and insulting line of conversation despite claims otherwise.
It’s not exactly hard to watch a few 30 second videos and pick up some new slang via contextual learning. It’s a skill we all learned in elementary school.
Sometimes, I wear a T-shirt that shows someone snorting a line of apps with a razor blade and a mirror nearby. Addicts are addicts. Perhaps, it's a socially-acceptable form of addiction with personal, interpersonal, etc. tolls nonetheless.
Interestingly, in Some Smaller Democratic Countries, Facebook may function as the essential platform for society-level political discussion. In my Small Country, government members have made relevant statements first via their social media accounts, not via journalism. Most public intellectuals here seem to have a FB account, and a probably increasing amount of discussions in "real journalism" actually stem from some FB thread that went out of hand.
I find this really interesting sociologically, because at the algorithms level, this means that political discussion in A Small Society is actually curated or influenced under-the-hood by a US-based Megacorp.
Basically, if you're not on FB in My Small Society, you're missing out a good deal of political discussion.
There have been attempts of building local, homemade online environments for political discussion in my country, but these haven't really taken off, because, well, everybody's already on Facebook, including politicians. My only hope is that FB will become increasingly annoying to use because of their ad policies, and maybe this would cause more people to abandon the platform and build homemade alternatives on their own.
IMO all kinds of decentralised Smolnet-like things might have good potential for political discussion in Small Societies, but maybe they're still waiting for their time. Quite possibly, simply waiting for the next generation of users -- that are more touchy about the technical, surveilliance and algorithm-level details of online discussions.
The only thing I miss from being only a HackerNews/X user is birthdays and events.
As adults realize more and more people are not daily Facebook users, invites has gone back to other platforms like eVite but overall, the lack of seeing the latest TikTok trend is much better mentally and productivity wise than endlessly scrolling through content I don’t care about.
168 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadMoney is only a tiny corner of the issue.
When this kept happening I realised the only thing that matters in sales is... actually making sales. Everything else is window dressing.
A dozen catering trays of salad get tossed into compost.
All the fried chicken is gone in less than 5 minutes.
For instance, I think it would probably be fair for you to sell your car for the blue book value... but I'm not offering to buy your car. I don't need another.
Were you asking them to open their wallet and hand you 5 dollars and that's it, or were you asking them to go to an unfamiliar website, click around, enter their credit card information, and then spend time learning how to use the software, and do it all right now?
It's all really dumb and obvious in hindsight.
I wonder if the use of a Sales Website facade is more accurate about this -- by this I mean the practice of setting up a sales site before the product is ready, solely to count how much of your traffic converts. It's not an uncommon practice and I'm guessing it would give a more accurate estimate than simply asking "would you pay for this?" merely as a hypothetical.
Essentially the observation was the same. A person claiming they'd buy something is worthless information. He had some strategies for getting around it that I've long since forgotten.
It's apparently not on archive.org yet. I just dropped my copy into my next donation box. It'll be there eventually now.
The term he used was "pretotyping" that term will probably yield everything you need.
People always choose hypothetical money as it's a wildcard, even if in actuality they will spend ridiculous amounts of it on the thing you are testing in the first place.
The existence of hypothetical money in surveys screws them up terribly, as people are both willing to spend and accept hypothetical money in ways that often don't translate to reality.
I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.
I can't help but think that this study simply shows that more people should mind their own damn business.
Either you care about owning status symbols or you don't, I don't think taking one of them off the market would make a difference.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
That said, I've read about the "blue bubble" phenomenon and it's truly a bizarre manifestation of consumerism. I'm European and the Android market share is really high over here, so I haven't witnessed it first hand.
Also, green bubble messages are not e2e encrypted, and their contents are sold en masse to (or simply slurped up by) surveillance organizations.
iMessage has none of those issues. Signal only has a few of those problems. Its bubbles are blue (not by Apple’s doing, but still, blue bubbles, cross platform, and it is not intentionally a royal pain in the ass like android messaging).
Since you are in Europe, you probably don’t use SMS, and are therefore shunning the green bubbles just as much as any iOS user.
Even counteractive techniques such as mindfulness, or gratitude journaling must first be acquired—and not "for free," either!
You insist, vehemently, that the fault lies with the insecure so, from whom are you trying to deflect blame?
Amongst my colleagues, like me it's a badge of honour to run an old phone. The last nokia standout only ditched it when they turned off 2G. He went with a minimalist phone which could do google maps acknowledging GPS was useful. He does nothing else. On the whole, chosing to run a phone with high MaH battery life and at least some commitment to update is a good choice. Apple actually can conform to this, because the older models are 7 years in, with software support.
Let me introduce you to the Garment District (Fashion Industry).
People spend thousands for clothes they only wear for a couple of nights out, over a few weeks.
It's a fairly wild industry.
Honest question: who cares if your iPhone is old? Maybe I'm in a wrong demographic but flashing top new smartphone in front of acquaintances stopped mattering around the time when everyone graduated and got a job (so everyone could buy one and it stopped being "cool").
Real opinion surveys are hard and you cant infer much from the results.
People around you see if you have the shiniest, most expensive toy or not. It's stupid to care about it — but we're stupid and that's nothing we can really do about it. Comparing yourself with others and caring about social status is something that's built-in very deep in our psyche by evolution. It's irrational to try to ignore or completely conquer something so foundational to our being; the best we can hope for is to channel it to something better.
Of course, HN is full of people on autistic spectrum or adjacent (me included) who may not feel the same emotions or psychological reactions as a neurotypical. But, once again, it's irrational to judge an average human being by yourself in this case.
It's irrational to expect humans to not have any irrational thoughts or inclinations.
Social media is a near zero cost good. Seeing the ratio of preferences indicates something about what buyer behaviors are driven by.
The iPhone example is likely a reference or contrast point.
Finally - marketing is industrialized poking your nose in someone’s business is, and selling them things.
I think it's a fine idea for a fundraiser.
When I was in middle school, we had an annual fundraiser for the American Heart Assoc. It was one of those "____-a-thon" style events where we all had to jump rope for as long as we could, and we gathered pledges from family members ("only 1¢ per jump, Aunt Sally!"). But this was only for an hour, and it replaced our normal PE period, so it wasn't a diversion from the normal course of schooling. And not everyone participated.
That's the kind of thing I had in mind when writing that comment, but now I'm realizing the parent comment was talking about the entire student body, for the entire school day.
I agree with you. My original take was hot... and bad. :)
t. Insta user, never had tiktok
Personally I think it's bad for America too, but it's unlikely that they're deliberately inflicting damage to America in an act of information/culture warfare. But other countries, particularly America's rivals, would be wise to assume that's what is happening to them.
On principle the "reciprocity" card can't be used only when it helps and discarded otherwise.
Not really discovering anything new here. Just showing that countries only use values at their convenience.
Regarding the former, none of the global players are perfect when it comes to unencumbered access to their respective digital markets, but as Tiktok (and recently Temu) demonstrate, getting a foothold in one may be easier than another.
I wonder about this. Up until recently dominant networks were US native or backed by US companies (e.g. even Spotify for instance has a US office, is traded on the NY exchange and is backed by US cloud services) so we haven't seen what happens when a sheer foreign company gets a foothold in the market. Until Tiktok.
And as Tiktok is getting banned, I get the feeling any other foreign company reaching a dominant position with no US transparency would get the same treatment under national security or any other pretense, with US politicians opining that citizen data getting sucked away isn't acceptable. Especially as the foreign compnay's money doesn't land in their party's pockets the same Meta's or Alphabet's money does.
Lets take your auto example: China imposes a 40% tariff on US vehicles, which is extremely high. The US only recently hiked their tariffs against Chinese vehicles to 27%. https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
I’m eagerly anticipating the first social media company to take money from every user in order to shut it all down and burn the code.
Even the article's own title is somewhat baity so I've changed it to a more neutral version of the subtitle.
That means the opposite. The disutility is really low and the network utility is positive. If I charged you $29 to have all your peers lose Tik Tok, you'd say no. $29 is too much because Tik Tok doesn't hurt that much.
Think about how much you'd pay for something that actually hurt. Would your ceiling be $28? I think not.
It's nice to know that you'd happily pay a sum of money you're capable of paying to ensure ambulances can't get their patients to a hospital, people can't drive their wives in labor to have the baby delivered, trucks can't transport medicine between cities, farmers have no efficient way to get their food distributed once harvested.
If you look at an average user's feed, it probably breaks down into 30% traditional advertising, 20% nontraditional advertising (via influencers and friends shilling for their employers and promoting their side hustles), 30% content by people they have no social relationship with (celebrities, etc.), 15% low-quality posts from acquaintances, and 5% content from legitimate friends.
That is a whole lot of junk to have to sift through just to get the occasional scrap of legitimate social interaction.
These are advertising networks first, and social networks a distant second, even though they ostensibly involve social graphs.
So I can understand the fatigue people feel about having to scroll and scroll and scroll just to stay in the loop with people they have an existing social relationship with and genuinely want to know what's going on in their lives.
So saying people use TikTok directly to keep up with their friends might not be the full picture. But I'd still say for many people TikTok plays a role in keeping up with your friends in that trading TikTok finds is a popular activity for many friends.
Actually I wonder if there’s a market for an actual social network that is restricted to only being social.
Maybe you can only have 100 connections and you can’t post links or rants. Just life updates and photos.
They used to be social networks until they got littered with short-term engagement boosting content and ads. Facebook in 2006/2007 was so awesome.
It demonstrably reduces happiness and life satisfaction. It’s just bad.
And it’s easy to quit. Really.
Even later the groups function was great for many.
On balance it’s been bad, but it has its moments in the sun.
It was also a desktop experience so it wasn’t nearly as potent as it was when the smartphone showed up
There's a huge market for them. They're called private group chats, and they're popular everywhere. The problem is that you can't make much money off of that, precisely because they're socially valuable (i.e., they're strictly socially-driven, so there's no opportunity for in-line advertising, or recommending "new connections").
The problem I most often experience with group chats is that not everyone's on the same platform (excepting SMS) but old fashioned social media has that issue too. They also don't scale super well to large clubs or organizations, where I think having topic-oriented posts or threads as the default becomes valuable.
I consider the inability to do this a feature, not a bug. Group chats are socially segmented, with friction between those segments. That crazy uncle who loves conspiracy theories will be confined to just the group chats you have in common. You don't get insufferable loudmouths at scale, amplified by social media reward structures and algorithms.
I believe Path tried to do this too, and failed.
Many I’ve been exposed to wouldn’t know what to post if it wasn’t regurgitated content or rants.
We could go back to the early days of Facebook and Twitter: “I’m having toast! And it’s not burned!”
It could be an improvement.
The price to delete forever and never look back will be higher.
$0 is my price.
I just struggle to see how your strategy makes any sense or what the purpose of it even is.
Because the top stuff on that is usually click bait trash and tabloid level celebrity shit and political garbage and sports.
I just don’t see anyone learning anything interesting from that. Main page Reddit is mind rot.
(extra credit for bussy, i'm only a decade out from zoomerdom and i don't know how to break that down)
That's not a dig at you. You're too busy doing stuff and getting along to actually have any idea what life is about. That has to be a biological necessity or you'd implode
Seems like you’re too unimaginative to consider a younger perspective imo.
2) The low quality content on the fyp is actually representative of the state of affairs for many youth. Media and data literacy is not a strong point of GenZ. The amount of ridiculous conspiracy theories(both left and right) going viral is a parallel universe of the infamous boomer political chain emails.
2) this is the kid of comment that makes me feel more confident. Like… shut up. No, you won’t better understand the youth by ingesting garbage and calling them media illiterates just talk to people and ask questions.
The point I was trying to make is that you are unable to imagine what browsing Reddit at 50 will mean to you; how important staying contextualised with pop culture will be to you.
Your Ego is ephemeral, in constant flux. You can't imagine yourself accurately. When you're young you know things will change but it's impossible to predict how those events —health, jobs, homes, children, deaths, friendships, hobbies, your politics, etc— will change who you are.
I'm also saying that's okay. As long as old.reddit.com still works in 30 years, we'll all be okay.
Or perhaps this is a deeply irritating conversation and insulting line of conversation despite claims otherwise.
I find this really interesting sociologically, because at the algorithms level, this means that political discussion in A Small Society is actually curated or influenced under-the-hood by a US-based Megacorp.
Basically, if you're not on FB in My Small Society, you're missing out a good deal of political discussion.
There have been attempts of building local, homemade online environments for political discussion in my country, but these haven't really taken off, because, well, everybody's already on Facebook, including politicians. My only hope is that FB will become increasingly annoying to use because of their ad policies, and maybe this would cause more people to abandon the platform and build homemade alternatives on their own.
IMO all kinds of decentralised Smolnet-like things might have good potential for political discussion in Small Societies, but maybe they're still waiting for their time. Quite possibly, simply waiting for the next generation of users -- that are more touchy about the technical, surveilliance and algorithm-level details of online discussions.
As adults realize more and more people are not daily Facebook users, invites has gone back to other platforms like eVite but overall, the lack of seeing the latest TikTok trend is much better mentally and productivity wise than endlessly scrolling through content I don’t care about.