Hacker News Reader

Technology has become a sort of paperclip optimizer for engagement. What we want only matters so long as we engage.

People probably don’t want to get into internet fights, but it’s how we’re wired. The machine - its workers, managers, C-levels and algorithms - found that strip mining our attention and fuelling outrage somehow boosts its metrics. So it does that.

TikTok is quieter than LinkedIn. Might be a bit controversial if I phrase it in this way. But for me it's a single player experience. I don't need to "engage" or "react" to anything. Yes, the videos are flashy and noisy, yet it never makes me feel envy, desire, regret as much as LinkedIn and Facebook do.

I think that (one of the) point(s) of the article is that it's not "the masses" that want all this noise, but the attention-craving product managers in appliance companies that want it. (And an Apple or Windows computer is an appliance, hardly at all a General Purpose Turing-Machine Equivalent.)