Hacker News Reader

The author doesn't mean that the technologies weren't inevitable in the absolute sense. They mean that it was not inevitable that anyone should use those technologies. It's not inevitable that they will use Tiktok, and it is not inevitable for anyone, I've never used Tiktok, so the author is right in that regard.

If you disavow short form video as a medium altogether, something I'm strongly considering, then you can. It does mean you have to make sacrifices, for example Youtube doesn't let you disable their short form video feature so it is inevitable for people who choose they don't want to drop Youtube. That is still a choice though, so it is not truly inevitable.

The larger point is that there are always people pushing some sort of future, sketching it as inevitable. But the reality is that there always remains a choice, even if that choice means you have to make sacrifices.

The author is annoyed at people throwing the towel in the ring and declaring AI is inevitable, when the author apparently still sees a path to not tolerating AI. Unfortunately the author doesn't really constructively show that path, so the whole article is basically a luddite complaint.

Has that ever worked at scale in history? This strikes me as the same as people who take a stand by not ordering from Amazon or not using whichever service, they make their life somewhat harder and the world doesn't notice. Even worse, the people taking a stand signal to others that they do it, but most others think that the cost outweighs the benefit, and don't like being judged. Groups in which everyone signals and judges like that suck and devolve into purity spiraling, so few people sustain it, and the people taking a stand get bitter.

Co-ordination problems are the hardest problems.

Yeah it has on occasion, you're right in that it usually doesn't have much of an effect but every once in a while it does. If there's enough of the self-sacrificing users they'll together save a business or a way of doing things. Like running Linux on consumer hardware, or using cash in retail stores.

They don't necessarily have to coordinate, they can use a thousand different linux distro's and literally never talk to each other, and still cause PC manufacturers to keep to a standardized boot process and largely documented hardware so that Linux remains viable.

Re Tiktok, what is definitely not inevitable is the monetization of human attention. It's only a matter of policy. Without it the incentives to make Tiktok would have been greatly reduced, if even economically possible at all.

> what is definitely not inevitable is the monetization of human attention. It's only a matter of policy. Without it the incentives to make Tiktok would have been greatly reduced, if even economically possible at all.

This is not a new thing. TV monetizes human attention. Tiktok is just an evolution of TV. And Tiktok comes from China which has a very different society. If short-form algo slop video can thrive in both liberal democracies and a heavily censored society like China, than it's probably somewhat inevitable.

The monetization of attention was a side effect of TV, not the primary purpose.

TikTok and other current efforts have that monetization as their primary purpose.

The profit-first-everything-else-never approach typical in late-stage capitalism was not inevitable. It is very possible to see the specific turns that led us to this point, and they did not have to happen.

Radio was already well monetized before TV came along. How was monetization a side-effect?

Radio broadcasting and newspapers monetized it even before TV. China is hyper-capitalist too, what is restricted is mainly political speech so that doesn't make much difference. If anything the EU is probably where advertisement is the most regulated. We can easily envision having way more constrains on advertisement and influencing, that would reduce drastically the value of human attention. Not sure many would get in the streets to protest against that.

This appears to be overthinking it: sure it's inevitable that when zero trust systems are shown to be practicable, they will be explored. But, like a million other ideas that nobody needed to spend time on, selling NFTs should've been relegated to obscurity far earlier than what actually happened.

> Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable

It kind of was though. All the tech pieces were in place by 2009, between Chaum's ecash, Haber+Stornetta's merkle trees and real-world document blockchains (secured by the NY Times sunday classifieds no less!), and Back's hashcash. b-money and bit gold already had the idea and motivation. It was just waiting for a Nakamoto to make it all fault-tolerant. Someone would have figured it out eventually.

It was all inevitable, by definition, as we live in a deterministic universe (shock, I know!)

But further, the human condition has been developing for tens of thousands of years, and efforts to exploit the human condition for a couple of thousand (at least) and so we expect that a technology around for a fraction of that would escape all of the inevitable 'abuses' of it?

What we need to focus on is mitigation, not lament that people do what people do.

> Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable.

I doubt that. There is a reason the videos get longer again.

So people could have ignored the short form from the beginning. And wasn’t the matching algorithm the teal killer feature that amazed people, not the length of the videos?

Even if that's true, that sub-minute videos are not the apex content, that only goes to prove inevitability. Every idea will be tested and measured; the best-performing ones will survive. There can't be any coordination or consensus like "we shouldn't have that" - the only signal is, "is this still the most performant medium + algorithm mix?"

I feel that the argument here hinges on “performant”

The regulatory, cultural, social, even educational factors surrounding these ideas are what could have made these not inevitable. But changes weren’t made, as there was no power strong enough to enact something meaningful.

I've got a hypothesis that the reason short-form video like TikTok became dominant is because of the decline in reading instruction (eg. usage of whole-word instruction over phonics) that started in 1998-2000. The timing largely lines up: the rise of video content started around 2013, just as these kids were entering their teenage years. Media has significant economies of scale and network effects (i.e. it is much more profitable to target the lowest common denominator than any niche group), and so if you get a large number of teenagers who have difficulty with reading, media will adjust to provide them content that they can consume effortlessly.

Anecdotally, I hear lots of people talking about the short attention span of Zoomers and Gen Alpha (which they define as 2012+; I'd actually shift the generation boundary to 2017+ for the reasons I'm about to mention). I don't see that with my kid's 2nd-grade classmates: many of them walk around with their nose in a book and will finish whole novels. They're the first class after phonics was reintroduced in the 2023-2024 kindergarten year; every single kid knew how to read by the end of kindergarten. Basic fluency in skills like reading and math matters.

My counter argument is that did not happen in the Austrian school system and people consume short form video just the same

The short-form video craze started in the U.S. though, right? And with firms like Vine and SnapChat rather than TikTok. Like I said, media (particularly social media) has strong network effects, so if you get a critical mass of early users you can take over the rest of the population even if the initial spark that attracted them doesn't apply to the rest of the world. Same as how Facebook started out at the most prestigious dorm in the most prestigious college of the U.S. - by the time it got to senior citizens they don't care about college prestige, but they got on because their grandchildren were sharing their photos on it, and the reason the grandchildren got on was because they wanted to be cooler.

That’s ridiculously US-centric. TikTok is a global phenomenon initiated by a Chinese company. Nothing would be different in the grand scale if there were zero American TikTok users.

I recognize this is very anecdotal (your observation and mine), but my gen alpha daughter approaching the teenage phase always has her head in a book. She also has a very short attention span.

I think the timing is coincidental.

That was also roughly the time period where mobile phones and their networks started to become reliably able to stream video at scale. That seems like a more plausible proximate cause for the timing of the rise of TikTok.

Have you seen YouTube's front-page? It's pretty much 20-40min videos full of fluff.

I don't know if you wrote it as a form of satire, but obviously thete is no such thing as "YouTube's front-page". Everyone gets recommended different videos, based on various signals, even when not authenticated.

Shorts are everywhere because it is the most addictive form of media, easy to consume, no effort required to follow through.

More generally I think the problems we got into were inevitable. They are the result of platforms optimizing for their own interests at the expense of both creatives and users, and that is what any company would do.

All the platforms enshittified, they exploit their users first, by ranking addictive content higher, then they also influence creatives by making it clear only those who fit the Algorithm will see top rankings. This happens on Google, YT, Meta, Amazon, Play Store, App Store - it's everywhere. The ranking algorithm is "prompting" humans to make slop. Creatives also optimize for their self interest and spam the platforms.

The point is that regulation could have made Bitcoin and NFTs never cause the harm they have inflicted and will inflict, but the political will is not there.

> the political will is not there

The SEC was decently anti-crypto for quite a while, basically until Trump 2. It was following an established strategy of going after the worst actors to establish case law to underpin rulemaking that would therefore be less vulnerable in court once made. In finance you can assume defendants will be well-funded so it's not the dumbest strategy.

It of course made nobody happy -- the anti-crypto crowd thought it was nowhere near aggressive enough, while everyone in crypto was crying a river about the "unfair" and "corrupt" SEC "doing Wall Street's bidding" by making things hard for pump-and-dumpers.

Meanwhile, in marked contrast, Bitcoin itself was more or less given a clean bill of health as long ago as 2012, when FINCEN ruled that miners were not money-transmitters. Say what you want about bitcoin, but it's not transparently a security like pretty much every NFT and most leading altcoins.

Anyway that's all ancient history now since Trump 2, although Gensler had already more or less lost once the Bitcoin ETF was approved. Tradfi seems to love crypto now, what could possibly go wrong?

> Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable.

Just objectively false and assumes that the path humans took to allow this is the only path that unfolded.

Much of this tech could have been regulated early on, preventing garbage like short-form slop, from existing.

So in short, none of what you are describing is "inevitable". Someone might come up with it, and others can group together and say: "We aren't doing that, that is awful".

Which is exactly what happened though? I never engaged with most of what the author laments - one thing i found hard was to exist in society without a smartphone, but thats more down to current personal circumstances than inevatibility.

My personal experience is that most people dont mind these things, for example short form content: most of my friends genuinely like that sort of content and i can to some extent also understand why. Just like heroin or smoking it will take some generations to regulate it (and tbf we still have problems with those two even though they are arguably much worse)

You're taking the meaning of the word "inevitable" too literally.

Something might be "inevitable" in the sense that someone is going to create it at some point whether we like it or not.

Something is also not "inevitable" in the sense that we will be forced to use it or you will not be able to function in society. <-- this is what the author is talking about

We do not need to tolerate being abused by the elites or use their terrible products because they say so. We can just say no.

But you can just say no?

What i dont like about this sort of article is that it fails to come up with _any_ meaningful ideas on how to convince others to "just say no"

> Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultural influence was less inevitable, massive scam and hype was also not inevitable... but to be fair, likely.

The only way I can get to the "crypto is inevitable" take relies on the scams and fraud as the fundamental drivers. These things don't have any utility otherwise and no reason to exist outside of those.

Scams and fraud are such potent drivers that perhaps it was inevitable, but one could imagine a more competent regulatory regime that nipped this stuff in the bud.

nb: avoiding financial regulations and money laundering are forms of fraud

> The only way I can get to the "crypto is inevitable" take relies on the scams and fraud as the fundamental drivers.

The idea of a cheap, universal, anonymous digital currency itself is old (e.g. eCash and Neuromancer in the '80s, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon in the '90s).

It was inevitable that someone would try implementing it once the internet was widespread - especially as long as most banks are rent-seeking actors exploiting those relying on currency exchanges, as long as many national currencies are directly tied to failing political and economic systems, and as long as the un-banking and financially persecution of undesirables was a threat.

Doing it so extremely decentralized and with a the whole proof-of-work shtick tacked on top was not inevitable and arguably not a good way to do it, nor the cancer that has grown on top of it all...

I think you could say it's inevitable because of the size of both the good AND bad opportunities. Agree with you and the original point of the article that there COULD be a better way. We are reaping tons of bad outcomes across social media, crypto, AI, due to poor leadership(from every side really).

Imagine new coordination technology X. We can remove any specific tech reference to remove prior biases. Say it is a neutral technology that could enable new types of positive coordination as well as negative.

3 camps exist.

A: The grifters. They see the opportunity to exploit and individually gain.

B: The haters. They see the grifters and denigrate the technology entirely. Leaving no nuance or possibility for understanding the positive potential.

C: The believers. They see the grift and the positive opportunity. They try and steer the technology towards the positive and away from the negative.

The basic formula for where the technology ends up is -2(A)-(B) +C. It's a bit of a broad strokes brush but you can probably guess where to bin our current political parties into these negative categories. We need leadership which can identify and understand the positive outcomes and push us towards those directions. I see very little strength anywhere from the tech leaders to politicians to the social media mob to get us there. For that, we all suffer.

> These things don't have any utility otherwise and no reason to exist outside of those.

Lol. Permissionless payments certainly have utility. Making it harder for governments to freeeze/seize your assets has utility. Buying stuff the government disallows, often illegitimately, has value. Currency that can't be inflated has value.

Any outside of pure utility, they have tons of ideological reason to exist outside scams and fraud. Your inability to imagine or dismissal of those is telling as to your close-mindedness.

But without regulation they clearly devolve into scam and fraud vehicles. Crypto just isn't worth the time or effort for regular folks. I'm not sure what's going to happen first -- abandonment or bank run, but crypto like all unregulated banking systems, are destined to fail. I guess it could end up being regulated but at this point, with such pervasive scam/fraud use, that will probably just accelerate the bank run.

Shouldn't you have already moved on to AI hype? The fact that you're still worshipping crypto is telling as to your close-mindedness.

What have I said that indicates worship? I am simply pointing out that what you claimed was objectively false, and in response you moved the goalposts.

Your statements of faith included:

> Currency that can't be inflated... [seriously? the fact that you didn't even recognize that as a statement of faith, well...]

> Outside of pure utility, they have tons of ideological reason to exist

I mean, maybe you're in a repressive regime and really need a way to fight the system. But I'm guessing you just have faith in crypto ideology. Either way, have a great day!

Lmao

Please explain how bitcoin can be inflated

And recognizing a movement has ideological reasons while making no claim as to the strength or rationality of those reasons has nothing to do with faith

> Please explain how bitcoin can be inflated

Make up a stable coin and pretend it has real money behind it while refusing to submit to an independent audit.

Any other requests, buddy?

that wouldn't be bitcoin, idiot?

You asked how to inflate Bitcoin. I told you how to inflate all cryptocurrency. That includes Bitcoin. I didn't think the "buy Bitcoin with fake currency that is scammed to be the same as real currency" needed to be explicitly stated. But, I guess I should have known I wasn't dealing with someone who could put together simple inferences on their own. Have a nice life, I won't be bothering with you again.

> Making it harder for governments to freeeze/seize your assets has utility

Yes, doing crimes is indeed a valid use case.

Ah yes, the government famously never gets it wrong or seizes the assets of innocents