None of these companies are making money, so all we need to do is wait until the VC money runs out and it turns out there’s no market for any of this slop if the people creating it have to actually pay for it.
Oh boy, it’s this again. You’re essentially admitting to having had no meaningful experiences in your entire life, as you’re incapable of imagining doing anything other than consuming content. Good art says something about the world, not other art.
How ironic that your response, "Good art says something about the world" is also just repeating a meme you've heard, a no-true-scotsman fallacy wrapped in an old cliche.
It's a meaningless, religious statement. Good art is impossible to define, and everything says something about the world.
I too can repeat tired memes to support my position, ie. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
The truth is, the process of creation starts with something called inspiration. Inspiration is theft. Again, man has no ideas in a vacuum.
As you believe you've led a far more interesting life than me (!), please cite some examples of what you believe to be "good" art. Then let's investigate how devoid of any influences it actually is.
Well, your claim was 99%, and you’re making the claim so the burden of proof is on you, so you first: Give me ninety-nine examples that support your position and explain why for each of them, and then I’ll give my one and do the same and we can see who has the stronger body of evidence.
Wow! Thanks for cluing me in, I’m trying out “connect to server” in the files app now.
Obviously none of this is massively impressive to anyone who has used Android including myself, but a lot of the assumptions surrounding iOS and iPadOS being inflexible are somewhat outdated.
That reasoning doesn’t make any sense. Half a billion litres of Coca Cola are produced every single day, but the chance of a bottle of Coca Cola being made whose quality is similar to that of a good imperial stout is exactly zero, even though they’re both brown carbonated beverages. No amount of quantity can overcome a process intended to standardise for something other than quality. If the algorithm aggressively selects for mediocrity, mediocrity is what will be produced.
The quality of Coca Cola can only be compared to other colas. Comparing a soft drink to an imperial stout makes no sense. In my book, the imperial stout always has zero quality, because I would never see a reason to voluntarily drink it, whereas I might indulge in a diet coke every now and then.
But that’s why comparing subjective qualities of different things is a waste of time.
YouTube has many highly educational videos that are better than most professional production tv, especially for the hard sciences.
But GP said their reasoning worked regardless of what standards for quality were being used. It was a much stronger statement than the one you’re defending.
Comparing one billion exact copies of the exact same thing to a different thing that shares some superficial qualities doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when the GP is simply saying that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms.
Edit: to phrase it differently, GP stated that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms. The short form
content on both platforms isn’t all good, but there is so much variety that some of it is. You responded that Coca Cola isn’t an Imperial Stout. It isn’t, but that has absolutely nothing to do with GP’s point.
I'm not sure I understand your analogy. YouTube has both diversity and quantity at levels tens of orders of magnitude higher than any high-quality-low-quantity good. Given the subjectivity of quality and amounts considered it's simply statistical fact that YouTube will always have things at the highest ends of subjective quality for any category.
The algorithm doesn't select for mediocrity - it selects for viewership, but regardless there are millions of creators at there that aren't optimizing for views anyway. It's the same reason some set of random blog posts or comments on sites such as this one will have quality similar to snippets of the highest quality technical documentation. Sheer diversity and quantity will always win.
YouTube I'd grant you, not Shorts/Reels/TikTok - the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced. To me that reads akin to "there are so many tweets that for any criteria a [set of tweets] demonstrate quality similar to any long-form written piece."
> the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced
why not? seems like a tautology. what's a robust set of criteria we can use the evaluate this objectively. I bet you TikTok will win. mind you I am not saying the average TikTok is good, just that there's probably some set of videos that that are of comparable quality than something put together over a longer period of time like a novel.
I understand what you're saying and that you're not talking about the average. The problem is specifically that short form things are short. It's like the monkeys on typewriters - you'll get some beautifully crafted sentences, but you're never going to get a number of sentences that add up to an actual work of Shakespeare - they're aren't enough atoms in the universe for the number of monkeys and typewriters you'd need.
But that’s more of a theoretical truth than a practical one, isn’t it? High quality novels are easily found. TikTok videos of equally high quality and depth? Perhaps not so, or exceedingly rarely.
Infinite monkeys with infinite time could surely also produce something spectacular and eye-opening, statistically speaking. But umm, you’d have to wait infinite time for it to be done, so it’s not really efficient when time is a finite resource.
Even movies won’t capture the nuances of a somewhat decent novels. I have no hope to see something really complex like “The Malazan Book of the Fallen” in any other form.
I don’t see how it’s is a statistical fact. There’s nothing I’ve seen on YouTube that compares even slightly to a high quality movie or TV series (unless it’s an unauthorised copy of a movie or TV series…).
that's a funny example, because something like Cobra Kai literally began on YouTube, there are others like Hazbin Hotel.
anyway, as for the statistics, for the case of YouTube since there are is no forced directive to which all videos must follow (creatively), you can treat all videos as random attempts. then it's just stats to show that such a distribution will have outliers that match or exceed in subjective quality the gate kept works (traditional tvs or literature).
Well, you’ll never see an erotic film on YouTube, or a war documentary using real combat footage for example, so there are many categories where it’s simply not capable of competing. And even without straight-up banned content, ‘advertiser-unfriendly’ content is aggressively buried by the algorithm, which discourages people from making it, so the ‘quantity’ part might not be true. Some content might be so heavily punished by the algorithm that almost nobody thinks to make it. This is a problem for your position, as it’s not enough for YouTube to win in some categories; it has to win in every category.
sure, but my point wasn't exclusive to them (hence the etc in the first comment). it was just related to any mass media platform, all of them collectively will win. you are right about YouTube in particular though, good point.
The feedstock has to come from somewhere, right? I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.
> I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.
Many farmers don't have the financial means to redesign their entire pipeline to move from birds to fungus. "farming" is in the name but I also suspect there is nothing in common between raising chicken in cages and mushrooms in sterile containers in term of know-how, maintenance, &c.
Factory farms consume far more feed than they can grow on site though, so the real power isn’t in the chicken farmers, it’s the ones growing chicken feed, and they’re probably used to switching crops to suit market demands.
And the farmers who do grow their own feed are probably smaller operations targeting higher quality meat than factory-farmed chicken, so they’re not the ones that vat-grown meat-substitutes would be competing with.
I would personally simply heavily tax ad revenue rather than banning social media, as while a blanket ban is ironically less of an infringement on free speech than banning it for children, it’s still something of an infringement.
There’s a bunch of benefits to an ad-tax too, beyond revenue generation: Users won’t be encouraged to use VPNs (and most VPN users probably also use ad blockers anyway). It’s difficult to evade, since an advertising business kind-of has to operate in the open; if nobody knows you’re running an ad business, your ad business has failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do. Advertisers are also purely profit-motivated, and so won’t hesitate to rat out their competitors if they’re using some loophole to gain a competitive advantage. It’s also very difficult for them to hide which country they’re targeting, since that information has to be available to their customers, so the taxmen can get it by subpoenaing customers or posing as them. And there’s not that many big ad-tech companies, so you don’t really mind if a few small-fries slip through the net.
The problem with just taxing them more is that they'll make the algorithms doing all the personal and societal damage even more agressive to compensate.
Of course a poll that asks a leading question can get 70% in favour. It’s not a conspiracy by TLAs (the people they’re interested in won’t be fazed by these paper-thin measures) or big tech (this hurts their bottom line). It’s legacy media, who have lost a lot of ground to the Internet, and stand to lose nothing by making it worse, and coincidentally also have a captive audience of voters who wouldn’t know one end of a USB cable from another who simply don’t understand any of the downsides.
