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Two screens, more literally than usual
There was a thread a few weeks back about Hasan Piker supposedly using a shock collar on his dog. I didn't think too much of it at the time, not knowing who Hasan Piker even was (I had heard the name, but couldn't tell you anything else). But a little later I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).
In the episode, she describes the shock collar claim as obvious nonsense that anyone watching the video can see for themselves, in addition to her having met Hasan and the dog in person and therefore she is sure the claim is false.
In comparison, in the Culture War thread post I linked above, /u/crushedoranages says
I have not gone down the rabbit hole of analysis of the video, so I'm not going to try to defend Taylor's interpretation. But I was struck by seeing a case where both sides are telling me to watch the exact same video clip since in it is plain to see the events transpired as they claim. The "two screens" concept comes up here a lot, but it's usually about seeing different subsets of a population, often whatever your social media algorithm surfaces, or different interpretations of the same utterance (see: taking Trump literally vs. seriously or, more recently, the Young Republicans group chat). This seems like a whole new level of disagreement about reality.
Taylor's thesis is mainly one of anti-surveillance (a major theme of her work), which is pretty well covered by this quote from the YouTube auto-transcript:
Its worse than just that, since the "he's clearly an animal abuser" crowd then pored over every single hour of footage involving Hasan and any dogs (there's gotta be thousands) to find other bits of evidence scattered about that sort of support the thesis that he is constantly shocking his dog.
People aren't just watching two different screens, they're able to custom-build their post-hoc interpretation of everything from scratch, if they want.
Straight up confirmation bias, rather than trying to find something that was convincingly exonerating/falsify their hypothesis. We know from the "WE DID IT, REDDIT!" days how well this usually goes.
Of course, the guy has gone about defending himself as sketchily as possible.
Applying some epistemic hygiene, I don't think the original video is strong proof of him actually shocking the dog. That said, the specific set of events that the camera did capture requires a more complex coincidence to explain than the pretty dead simple "the dog left its spot, he reached over to hit a button to correct the dog, the dog reacted to the correction" one.
Given what I know of Hasan, given the fact that the dog did have that particular style of collar on, given the aforementioned set of events, given the fact that the dog does seem trained to stay on that little bed for hours on end, I think it is more likely than not (call it 55%) that he shocked the dog on stream. How much weight you give that conclusion probably hinges on how much you care about streamer drama in general.
And I am willing to believe that Hasan is 'abusive' to the animal in that he cares way more for his own image than said dog's comfort and happiness. And I would judge him pretty harshly for that... but it doesn't budge my opinion much, given how low said opinion already is.
Everything about the situation is pretty well explained by the apparent motives of the people involved. There's nothing 'interesting' here its all just precisely what you'd expect from every single person who has touched it.
The Livestreamer world has been in utter shambles lately, if you ask me. If you are paying too much attention to it you're participating in a circus of self-harm, in my absolute honest opinion. There are some 'decent' people in there that you can give attention to but obviously its the nature of the whole platform to elevate some of the worst, most narcissistic, poorly-adjusted personalities to the fore and inflict their behavior on the viewers. And then rewards them for generating outrage, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars, so of course they will follow the incentive gradient.
We're a LONG way from the wholesome days of "Twitch Plays Pokemon." The current state of it reads more as "Gen Z Jerry Springer Show." Not that I want to exonerate Millenials.
The 'good' people who make it big either get pulled into the mire of degeneracy or make their bag and escape. Likewise, you can usually tell the 'good' people as the ones who had their lives in order, solid relationships, and a tendency to avoid drama before they came in, and maintained those while they were active.
Hey, remember that time Ninja caught flack for stating his general refusal to co-stream with females other than his wife?
Given what just came to light with Mizkif (and he's far from the first) this just seemed like a smart move.
If you don't recognize any of these names, congratulations, you are winning at life, please avoid contaminating your brain by gaining awareness of their existence.
I think I said it before, probably YEARS ago, but if Twitch had made a serious effort to stick to its core model of "person records and broadcasts themselves as they play a video game on their computer" they'd be having an easier time avoiding scandal. That would also mean nuking gambling, prostitution ads (I'd literally say the policy should be "if you have any presence on an e-prostitution site where you appear to engage in any sex acts we ban you instantly"), political commentary, most 'real life' type streams, or active drama farming. When in doubt, make the rules more strict rather than less.
Of course, that would have risked them losing out to a competitor, such as Kick, with a more 'anything goes' ethos.
Sorry for the tangent. I really just despise that most of these people exist while having any kind of mainstream sway.
Seems to be a core problem of the internet. Reddit also had an opportunity to become the default discussion forum / comment section for everything on the internet. But they instead wanted to chase instagram and tiktok and came out with a UI that both destroyed their old model and failed to bring anything new to the doomscroll model. They've chased every internet fad and failed every time. Now a gaming chat service (discord) is stuck being one of the default discussion and comment sections for the internet. Which its bad at, but at least it isn't fighting that role like reddit has been since its inception.
The fact that almost every site tends to converge towards the exact same general use modes has soured me on the idea of internet as innovation engine. i.e. "forced" competition with other sites for users would in theory lead to differentiation in features and, one would expect, aiming for different audiences and cultivating that niche.
But no, instead they all try to appeal as broadly as possible, discard the factors that made them unique and appealing, and constantly copy each other when they see anything that looks like it 'works' to draw and retain viewership.
Innovation seems to be driven by some other force somewhat external to the web, and the internet just enables rapid copying of a new, winning formula. Something something Zero to One is way harder than One to One Thousand.
Elon bought Twitter and made some quick, semi-drastic changes to how things work and lo-and-behold virtually every site made very similar changes in short order. They could have done this stuff all along but something made them reluctant to step out in that direction.
Same thing happened with dating apps. Anything that might set one apart and drive people to it disappears, they all converge on the doomswiping model.
Similar trend seems to be arising with LLMs, honestly.
I admit I expected Discord to pass by the wayside for something new by now. I've been around for Ventrilo, teamspeak, Mumble, AIM, Skype, others. Discord is kind of bad at its function insofar as its a bloated piece of poorly-optimized software that has features 90% of users won't need or use. I just want an app that gives me voice and text support, a friends list, and a decently attractive and intuitive UI. Livestreaming/screen-sharing is neat too, I guess.
I wouldn't have called Discord as the one people land on and stay with, but as you say its now the default "forum" software too.
There are of course like 50 different messaging apps that people use.
Wake me up when (Eternal) September ends.
This is true of all free apps and sites, because the only way to monetize them is ad revenue, meaning doom-scrolling is always optimal. Incentives will out.
There are still variety and innovation to be found in paid services, as well as some that are funded by donations or the like. Whether that's subscription-model newsletters/sites that provide unique analysis, paid dating services that provide 'expert' matchmaking, or hell just look at video games - every free game has the same garbage time sink model, meanwhile indies that cost $5 can still be fantastic.
"If you didn't pay for a product, you are the product" applies universally. If something is important to you and provides value, go pay for the real thing. The 'internet' only sucks because it's free.
Yeah. And despite the fact that this is very clearly not making users happier, and is corrosive to attention spans. Then add in a gambling mechanic and you've got your user in a perfect little skinner box.
For me, it makes the choice easy. The only winning move is not to play. I will not install the gamified narcissism slop app. Any of them.
Anyone looking to be a tech innovator should try and invent a monetization method that provably enriches the users' life, or at least doesn't grind their attention span to dust for no gain.
But oh no, they don't want to solve actual hard problems when the easy solution of building a better Skinner Box to siphon money to yourself is right there. They want the status of being a hard-problem solver, though.
I only push back insofar as there's a common 'predatory' model that starts out making the thing free or reduced cost and very carefully implying that this will remain the case, but retain the right to alter the deal at any time. Then alter the deal once you sense that they've gotten invested enough that it'll be too painful to leave vs. shelling out money.
And even if you pay for the thing, they can and will shove ads into it anyway. Netflix did it.
This feels to me like a distinctly unfair practice, only maintained because its usually not worth complaining that a thing you were getting for free went away, since its not like it cost you much. But it kind of did. It cost all the time I could have put into another outlet, and it relied on one's general good faith belief that the free option would stick around unless the entire site/app went kaput.
Like, I've put a whole hell of a lot of time and thought into my Motte posts. I don't believe that I "own" the words on the site, but I would be pretty cheesed off if they started restricting my access to my own content and then stuck a paywall up if I wanted to access comments from longer than a month ago.
AND THEN said "hey its fine if you don't want to pay, we'll just start injecting ads into your comments and slapping a gambling mechanic on the Friday Fun thread unless you pony up.
I would immediately drop the site and never look back. But I WOULD put up some money to keep the site functional at the current level simply because I actually do value the community here at significantly greater than $0, which is something I can't say about many other forums.
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I'm somewhat tempted to blame venture capital.
Many of these web companies grew into what they are while catering to the whims of VC funds. Which usually meant massive and rapid growth to get as many users as possible. Which is not a bad strategy when you have less than millions of users. But at some point in the millions of users you need to convert to monetization of those user's. But that is typically when the firm goes public and loses all guidance from the VC. Or worst of all is stuck with founding leadership that was optimized for the "acquire users at all costs" schtick.
I'm now wondering if it's a software investment problem in general. AAA games seem to follow a similar dumb logic. Endless cloning and copying of the hatest hit, barely any differentiation among the top products.
Someone want to give the expected IRR hurdle for high usage low conversion platform aggregators? The optimistic discount rates given to investors at pitch rarely map onto actual as use statistics or patterns, and oftentimes the VCs are number crunchers looking at TAM conversions instead of understanding how ginned up stats are disguising other more usable metrics. Oftentimes platforms have to find a defensible USP to slather on top of the blitzscaling machine they've built and hope the narrative of the USP holds when the blitzscaling is creaking under fake incentives, and that just becomes a bagholder escape exercise.
Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Discord are famous examples of high use platforms unable to convert their userbases into monetizable assets without significant curation and often full on self destruction once the USP got exposed to scrutiny. A more quantifiable example of platform aggregation failure is the facebook pivot-to-video where autoplay vids got counted as full engagement and caused many platforms to both invest in video architecture as well as creation, when in reality no one was actually watching that much video (that came later on with tiktok and COVID doomscrolling cemented that operational modus). Facebooks shift to video specifically meant plenty of VCs were investing in esports specifically, which had to be written off in later years and which clearly showed changes in term sheets post 2020 after the charade was exposed.
Its also true that we are likely still in the overhang of ZIRP, with an irrational exuberance in market strength due to Trump and rapid capital shifting during this economic chaos. We still are in the window for a lagged interest rate stressor, and mortgages are peaking above 07 rates though that means nothing in this differentiated environment. In any case this ZIRP overhang still sees capital sloshing around looking for someplace, ANYPLACE to put money into to get alpha, and the demand for a story outweighs the demand for a technically sound assessment. No ones going to listen to the sysadmin saying the usage stats for AI wrapper chatbots don't make sense and will collapse when regex parsers are shown to be as useless as BPO outsourcing consultancies, VC Principals listen to the confident guy that promises he will change how humans work thanks to their Scarlett Johanssen sexvoice AI assistant reminding grandma to take her meds.
I kinda wish we had a tipping function on this site (no, that's not actually a feature request) because this encapsulated the rant I would have made about VC much more concisely and with even sharper barbs than I would have used.
I'd just add on the "the demand for a story outweighs the demand for a technically sound assessment" point.
I hate how most modern Founders take the position that they're solving some pressing and very difficult problem facing the world. But if you point out that their proposed solution has some bad second order effects and might make things even worse you get a justification that boils down to "Well a real solution is to too hard to produce all at once so we expect to iterate towards that over time, meanwhile if we don't do this thing someone else will."
And I'm thinking "that sounds like the actual problem that needs solving, how to coordinate enough to mitigate second order effects while working towards a long term solution. Why aren't you working on THAT?"
Specifically thinking of Cluely right now. "We'll let you cheat your way through ANYTHING!"
"Okay, neat GPT wrapper. Can you see how this might cause some serious trust problems for both your customers and the people they interact with if you're encouraging them to be dishonest and hide their use of your product?"
"Not our issue."
"...Okay. I will immediately invest in any company which persuasively promises to render your company nonviable. That's the problem I want solved."
Like, the story is "VCs and Founders work together to coordinate capital towards creating a better world."
It really seems in practice "VCs throw money at any Founders who seem smart enough to turn that money into a viable product and capture a 10-100X ROI even if it makes the world worse in some less-tangible way." Any benefits to the consumer/society are a byproduct of this process. (Which may be enough of a justification, mind).
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Oh man I could do a rant on the current state of VC too, although it'd be from a position of ignorance as to the on-the-ground-realities.
I remember Juicero.
I think that your point rings true, though. Founders these days apparently want to exit as big as possible as quickly as possible. Your initial product, your initial audience is really just there to springboard you to mainstream attention, where you grab as many new users as you can, crow about your growth metrics to you can bring in more investors, at which point you're either going to make it to an IPO or blow up b/c the stats were straight up faked or simply not maintainable.
Or get bought by one of the big players who sees you as potential competition, which still gives you a major payday.
Its weird that I've grown some grudging respect for Mark Zuckerberg. Despite hating what FB has become compared to what it was... he sticks around and owns his decisions, remains the face of the company, and makes BIG plays like paying a BILLION FACKING DOLLARS to poach top AI researchers. Also he seems to really love his wife and has stuck with her, no whiff of scandal, for over a decade now.
Indie games seem to be a counterargument to my point, the internet allows them to find and cultivate audiences and while some of them elevate to smash hits, they all thrive on being unique and playing to their specific strengths, and while you still see tons of copycatting, most of the time the ones that 'win' are truly imaginative.
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