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ymeskhout  10mo ago (text post)   2247 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E032: Information Goons

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.

In this episode, we discuss information addiction.

Participants: Yassine, Jason, Neophos, Shakesneer. Credit to Internaut for the inspiration.

Links:

None. Go outside.

Recorded 2023-05-08 | Uploaded 2023-06-03

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liked this one a lot

Forgot to comment in a timely fashion and now the podcast details are fuzzy... one thing that stuck with me is that you guys didn't consider content consumption and creation as obviously very different things. Maybe consumption and "getting likes" does scratch the same itch but surely the act of invention (and implied interaction with the wider world) should elevate creation out of the gooning category?

What kind of creation? Most "content" is goons making faces for the camera, even if it's not the figurative soy. Five takes of molding your lobster ice cream pizza bagel so it looks good in the edit, or else, a lot of staging and arrangement so it works in one take. Content isn't candid, it only looks that way, because creators carefully arrange everything to look candid. This all changes the way they relate to themselves and their audience.

I concede I was thinking more of this podcast and less of some perfectly-satisfying video when I talked about creation. But I think I'll double down here.

Even if the act of creation is producing something that is essentially crack cocaine in meme form there is still something to trying different things, refining your craft, optimizing your message for your target audience. Whether the end result has cultural etc value is largely irrelevant to the experience of the creator.

This one reminded me of @Primaprimaprima 's post on internet addiction a while ago. I think I'm still of the same opinion.

I listened to most of this so far. Good stuff, though I'd like to see more discussion of the types and evolution of news feeds. I see two basic types, though I guess you could also call it a spectrum - the "simple" type which contains only posts by people you have explicitly followed in strictly chronological order, and the "algorithm" type where an algorithm shows you an endless series of posts based on what it thinks you'd like, which may or may not have any connection to accounts you follow, posts you react to, etc. In the beginning, everything was simple feeds, which IMO are much less likely to lead to that kind of behavior. But nowadays it seems like pretty much everything is moving to algorithmic feeds.

I tackled that with the Facebook feed evolution which used to be plain vanilla chronology for a brief moment IIRC. But pretty much everyone (Twitter, FB, IG, Reddit, etc.) fully embraced algorithm feeds and it has been the de facto standard for a long time now. The only simple feeds that are still popular are podcasts, which are by far the most enduring RSS implementation. I guess email newsletters are another example of a successful simple feed (and somehow key to Substack's success) but I do not understand them and I'm horrified by the thought of cluttering my inbox with hot takes.

This episode was too good. I need to remember it now that I've listened to it; I've been info-gooning for two hours.

RSS forever!

You can still get RSS out of Reddit and The Old Reader pretty much perfectly captures the feel of Google Reader.

Not that this meaningfully reduces my inclination to doomscroll the reddit app...

It's been awhile! Adding to the queue of running/cooking mouth garble noise media.

Please make more of these, I’m a Bailey suppOORTER

Fuck Sam Harris, all my homies listen to the Bailey.

On a more serious note; why like random archaeology videos about how to make stone tools? Predictive coding -> the system optimizes for (besides good predictions) for interesting stuff (ie. unpredictable). Otherwise, you could stare at paint drying (or the sky as the case may be for our ancestors) until hunger/thirst/horny strikes.

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