[skeezyboy]

"sophisticated behavioural machines built to capture attention"...

It just looks like a video website to me. Is this your first time on a computer? When HAVENT websites tried to catch your attention? This stinks to me like a 50+ person who first discovered the internet in the last 10 years.

[danaris]

See, this type of attitude is genuinely part of the problem.

People look at websites/apps/etc that are engineered for maximum "engagement" through dark patterns and they don't think it looks like something nefariously designed to catch and milk your attention, so it must be just fine, right?

And part of this is because they're so used to the dopamine-drip-inducing style that they think that sort of thing is just "normal;" part of it is because many websites, and before them newspapers, magazines, and TV shows/ads, do try to catch your attention, just in less ruthlessly-optimized ways, and part of it is because that ruthless optimization doesn't actually have to look like anything particular. It's not always Candy Crush Saga with obvious sparkly rewards and microtransactions.

And so the...whatever the Internet design equivalent of the Overton window is, drifts ever farther toward that end of things.

[skeezyboy]

>something nefariously designed to catch and milk your attention

I noticed you had to add "nefariously" in there. You think its nefarious. You also act like its a mind control ray beam when its not.

- Videos are not a new form of media, even short form videos. They existed before people started calling it "social media"

- People have been "engineering for maxmimum engagement" long before people started calling videos "social media". Books, print media, paintings, sculptures, hell even religions all do this.

- they said the same about.... books, TV and video games - yet I bet the person reading this engages in all 3. And to top it off, theyre on social media right now in order to read this message. So decrying social media whilst happily using social media

[danaris]

...Yep, that's all true. (Except for me acting like it's a "mind control ray beam".)

And none of it refutes what I said.

It's perfectly possible to take a bunch of old things, use them in a new way, and make something new out of them that's more than the sum of its parts.

[skeezyboy]

>And none of it refutes what I said.

if you want to ignore the points im making sure.

>It's perfectly possible to take a bunch of old things, use them in a new way, and make something new out of them that's more than the sum of its parts.

not the case here though is it

[danaris]

So you're just claiming that the "attention economy" that's come into being since ~2010 is exactly the same as the way things have been for the past few hundred years? That nothing new is happening with microtransactions, and social media deliberately engineered to keep you scrolling, and hypertargeted advertising?

It's all exactly the same as print ads in a magazine that are selected because they're reasonably likely to be something the people who read that magazine would be interested in?

Because if that's your contention, then frankly, I'd say it doesn't make a lick of sense.

[SirFatty]

"50+ person"

The 50ish person was 20 when the web started happening.

[skeezyboy]

can anyone confirm this?