> "Consider TikTok....Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East....Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend....Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips...aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man."
so the normies finally won.
i think it makes sense that virality now is totally controlled by algorithms. there's revenues to be made. such a thing can't be left to chance, that was a blip of early internet history.
to me its all become boring, too much content and all of it seems the same, bland and unoriginal. i know there's good stuff but it's not easy to find among the noise.
>> makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man
> so the normies finally won.
I think I get your general point and I think I agree with it; but I have to point out that when I compare "food ASMR" and "a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man," to what was broadcast back when we only had three channels, it makes me think the "normies," have either most definitely not won, or that I'm way, way out of touch on what "normal," is now.
I'm beginning to like the revenue driven algorithms. I rarely get the BigCo ads anymore, it's usually small scrappy startups building niche products for the niche activities I enjoy. "Sponsored athletes" are now "influencers" and they're getting paid even more money to push the boundaries of the sports/lifestyles that I dream of, and now I get to experience them both viscerally during the week, and now the barriers to entry are lowered during the weekend now that the ecosystems are growing.
The pace at which hobbies like paragliding, base jumping, foil boarding, mountain biking, hiking, etc are growing is incredible to watch. Engineering talent dedicated towards "fun stuff" (aka top of Maslow's hierarchy and not influential on human survival (in my case the sports are very against raising the rates of survival lol))gets rewarded at paces never before seen.
> According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.
Maybe better to wait for an independent actor to verify that (if thats even possible). It would not be in tiktoks best interests for instance to have in that list, people reading out Osama Bin Ladens letter and exclaiming him to be correct.
I'd mostly agree. But we can verify that particular instance's popularity by proxy through political content popularity. I would make the bet that it was not anywhere nearly as effective as Crunchy Cat Luna at getting views.
that comparison offers no insight whatsoever. statistic requires comprehensive sets of numbers and random selection, not two random aggregates from a single time period.
Only if you have the data available, I believe no one does outside of TikTok, and I also believe they would not release that information unless requested through legal means.
Proxy estimation is absolutely a statistical construct, its the underlying of many branches of statistics, and in this particular case it would be a causal inference.
And I don't think terrorism or terrorist apologia is so far off from general political content that I would deem random+independent from each other.
so the normies finally won.
i think it makes sense that virality now is totally controlled by algorithms. there's revenues to be made. such a thing can't be left to chance, that was a blip of early internet history.
to me its all become boring, too much content and all of it seems the same, bland and unoriginal. i know there's good stuff but it's not easy to find among the noise.