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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28060 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Luckily I've managed to resist TikTok, Twitter and Instagram so far. It's not worth it to me to delve in just to keep up with slang I guess. Alas.

Yeah, it's not worth it at all. It's really amazing how vapid most of the content is. Atleast with TV shows you consume some "culture" or learn a thing or two here and there, similarly with Youtube but to a lesser extent. Short-form videos are just pure stupidity all around.

And the algorithm doesn't help with that either.

similarly with Youtube but to a lesser extent

With YouTube it really really depends on how careful you are in what you watch. I've learned a little new physics, a little new engineering and mathematics (my own fields, embarrassingly!), a lot of history, a ton of music theory ... but even for those mostly-dry subjects the Dreaded Algorithm tries to push clickbait (including some obvious-to-even-an-amateur nonsense in the case of engineering news!), and I fear to even hate-click or morbid-curiosity-click on the thumbnails of anything that looks like it might be clickbait, lest some machine learning conclude that I'm really interested in "Why Starship Is Going Nuclear" level garbage after all and crowd out new channels I might actually benefit from. A raw search on a new subject, presumably less filtered by whatever "stop recommending nonsense" I've trained into their algorithms, rarely comes up with anything as useful as I could find by searching web pages and forums instead and coming across YouTube links elsewhere.

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