Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about. Today, I know what Spotify is trying to push, but I have no idea if that is what is actually popular. Even if I were to install TikTok I probably wouldn't see the same things they are. I have no idea if the garbage on the front page of reddit is really reflective of how younger people think, or if it just an engagement algorithm feedback loop gone wrong where everyone reasonable has long since checked out.
I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.
I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation.
I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".
The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc.
But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.
It's a for-profit company and they have never tried to hide that.
If you know a way to make money from exclusively showing users content that makes them happier, better informed, better rested, etc., then by all means go ahead -- I sincerely wish you the best. But you won't need my good wishes, because you will soon outcompete YouTube and all the rest with your healthy-yet-still-profitable alternative.
It's almost as though basing our society around profit maximization yields negative outcomes. But I'm sure this is just a blip that the Market will correct for.
Profit-maximizing business is the engine of economic growth. Looking over the past couple hundred years, I’d say the outcomes have been nothing short of spectacular.
Unregulated profit maximising business has killed how many people through the trans atlantic slave trade?
Without regulation, this is what happens - the bank would collect your organs for payment if they could. Buinesses have no ethical standards.
Profit maximing business did not invent antibiotics, did not invent sanitation, did not create public sewers, running water, soap, GPS, and clorination of water.
Without industrialization, you never end slavery anywhere.
Why did you conflate 'profit maximizing business' with 'industrialization'?
Because I'm generally aware of western economic and political history from 1600-1800. I'm not conflating them, they were in fact conflated.
Soviet russian and chinese industrialization was different, but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
Of course. "Industrialization requires profit, except when it doesn't". Got it.
I didn't realize they used steam ships to transport slaves from Africa to Americas, where they made them work in factories to produce industrial goods.
I think you may be fighting some ideological proxy war that I definitely don't care about.
If you don't industrialize, slavery never ends. It was everywhere in human societies until industrialization.
There is no ideological war, it is just an unfounded statement that has no direct line of reasoning. What does slavery have to do with industrialization? There weren't slaves in many pre-industrial societies. And the fact that you switched 'industrialization' for 'profit maximizing businesses' as if no one would notice (then acknowledging that communists did figure out how to do it) makes me wonder if you even thought about for more than a few seconds.
I was under the impression that most pre-industrial societies had slavery. Or at least most societies that were successful.
The Bible has passages on how to be a moral slave owner.
As far as conflating industrialization with capitalism, I'm sorry, I'm actually very far left politically but this is just a fact. It's underappreciated in the west that 5 year plans worked well, but they were following a template 200 years, 2 full centuries, later. 100 years after successful British capitalists banned slavery.
You can be under any impression you want but that doesn't make you not completely wrong. The Bible is not a history book, and if it was, it wouldn't be the only one.
And calling 'industrialization' 'capitalism' and 'profit maximizing business' all the same thing and then shrugging it off after getting called out, you are just showing that you ignorant of what any of it means. And your last two sentences are non-sensical -- I literally cannot figure out what 5 year plans have to do with slavery in the west.
I'm not calling those things the same at all. I actually draw distinctions between them. But there's a historical record of how they happened together after not happening separately for thousands of years.
There's a principle of charity when reading that you may want to consider.
Sorry but you don't get charity when you are asserting a point which is completely unfounded. Please find something which will back up your point besides 'they all happened at once' because that isn't even true. There is no correlation with 'capitalism' 'industry' and 'profit' with 'demise of slavery'. I beg you to look up what was happening in the Congo by Belgium when the automobile was being popularized.
There happens to be a correlation with a bunch of nice things because we happen to live in the modern era, but you can't attribute everything to capitalism because, as we noted it was not the only system in place which did these things.
I would like you to find some scholarly research which can bolster your theory.
Before industrialization, slavery and serfdom are common for thousands of years.
After industrialization, it goes away within 1-200 years every place that industrialized. Probably because it's not economical anymore in the presence of industrial production.
You're saying that this observation is so out of pocket that it doesn't deserve a charitable hearing?
Sure -- it makes sense in the same way that it makes sense industrialization got rid of eunuchs. A barbaric practice has died out in certain parts of the world because we live in the modern age.
To say that wouldn't have happened without industrialization, which wouldn't have happened without profit maximization, which wouldn't have happened without capitalism, is not logical. There is nothing inherent in capitalism which requires profit maximization at the expense of humans, it just requires exploitation of private property (note exploitation here means 'being used' not 'being used in a necessarily harmful manner). There is nothing inherent in industrialization which requires profit maximization, it just requires a cheap source of energy and labor and a market (note that this can be a planned market as in communism, or a market in which the demand is created only for war production and is fed by looting conquered territory, as the fascists did in WWII).
And there is nothing which precludes slavery existing because any of those other things exist. In fact, there were massive amounts of slaves who toiled under Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the modern era, and we only don't have them now because they lost the war.
Sorry, your theory holds no water.
My "theory" is a straightforward recollection of the way things did in fact happen, on this planet and in this universe. Europeans started the industrial ball rolling with for profit companies. Sorry if you don't like it.
But just because things happened a certain way doesn't mean that it was the only way they could have happened. Are you a child?
I never said that in this whole comment thread. Neither did I insult you personally.
Remember what I said about charity?
Frankly I'm disappointed, you should have called me racist for saying only Europeans can invent stuff.
You think industrialization ended slavery? I have news for you...
Just because something has had lots of positive effects, doesn't mean it isn't worth discussing the negative effects.
I think that entirely depends on the outcomes you value. If you value economic growth, then yes -- it's been spectacular. However, it has also come at great cost in terms of other desirable things.
It's a tradeoff. Some things are better, other things are worse. There's nothing wrong, and everything right, with examining those tradeoffs and deciding if they need adjustment.
You're right. I think we should instead base society on theories that pretend that humans are better to each other than we actually really are.
If it turns out that people don't behave as we had hoped, we can always say that the approach that was implemented is not the true approach.
Or we could collectively ask ourselves what we want and do that, instead of leaving the decision to the most selfish of our kind. That was never a good system to begin with.
That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years -- and TTBOMK the system that gets chosen has so far had capitalism as an important component every single time, despite the option to vote for parties that eschew it partly or completely.
Not sure what country you live in but in Canada they just give you a list of 4 or 5 names of people and you choose one, there's no asking of people what they'd like to do in the slightest. In fact, it's even worse: the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
It is fascinating how well done story telling can make people oblivious to what physically occurs.
Is there a law in Canada that prohibits people from forming political parties opposed to capitalism, or other prohibitive hurdles (e.g., a large registration fee) that prevent most people from doing so in practice?
If the answer is no, then the fact that no one currently on the ballot represents such a party is just evidence that Canadians, today, have almost no interest in these political approaches.
I agree this is a serious problem with existing democratic systems, but I don't know what to do about it. In theory people punish politicians who fail to deliver by voting them out, but in practice, a lot happens between elections, and people's attention wanders.
I am curious why you can "know" all the other things you allege, yet not also "know" this? Is there something different about the proposition?
This is ignoring a lot of history where people democratically chose something different just to be "invaded" by those that chose capitalism.
Maybe, but nobody has invaded the US or Western Europe for a while now.
I think the counterargument that I would mount is that what people want, or think what they want, isn't necessarily what is good for them. This is obviously a very dangerous line of thought - because it can justify all sorts of oppression - but I think it's nevertheless true.
The 'capitalism' of FDR looks very much like socialism these days. Maybe our definitions are just fluid.
Because there are only ever two options...
I find solace in knowing that I don't have a say in it. Because regardless of what the idea was, whenever someone tried to force everyone to go along with it and base a society on it, it turned out disastrously.
The only thing we can all do it be open minded, honest, and set a good example for the next generation who will take over and hopefully improve on what we did, while making their own mistakes.
It's an entity permitted by society under the premise that allowing such entities is a net benefit. We can and should continuously re-evaluate that benefit and adjust what we allow accordingly.
I’m surprised people preferred watching the plane movie over whatever they had saved on Netflix on their phone.
Who ever watches Netflix on the phone?
People who want to watch something on the plane where you have no/limited choice of quality movies and/or the screen is way too bright and warm. It's the best you've got, not the best in general.
Usually planes have a decent catalogue (remember this was a bugged entertainment system on one flight) and if we are talking about watching on a phone quality doesn't matter (if anything plane screen is bigger).
They sometimes do. Whether that's usually really depends on what flights you take.
That has not been my experience unless you like a random selection of the latest big-budget movies mixed with weird artsy films.
Physically bigger (compared to a phone) but almost guaranteed to be lower resolution, have worse colors and contrast and the touch controls are barely working. You can also bring a tablet or laptop if you prefer a larger screen.
A surprising amount of (generally young) people on public transport.
that wasn't save brah, thats just crushing mobile data
Or read whatever books they have saved on their phones (which is what I would do since I don’t have any kind of videos saved).
Same, except without Netflix. I'm constantly surprised people use these streaming services.
You mean .. like going to the cinema?
No one goes to those anymore because people rotate their streaming platforms, eventually they'll get any movie for free that way.
A very back of the napkin math - so far, 2023's domestic box office total is 75% of 2019th (pre-covid). Although the number of releases in 2023 is 60% of 2019th number of releases as well. I definitely wouldn't say nobody is going to the movies. I would even say, I went to see some this year as many times as I probably went in 2019.
I see more movies than ever in theaters, because I have an Alamo subscription. It just becomes like going out to a restaurant, and you see a movie you might not have otherwise.
It also is like a restaurant where everyone is required to be silent and not use phones...
Maybe a bit more like walking into a multiplex to discover there’s only one screen and that they’ve locked the doors behind you for the next few hours, but yes.
Absorb the irony of that comment. Yea, exactly like going to the cinema. But that’s their point about hyperpersonalization being weirdly isolating.
Well, people go to the cinema for the movie. Whereas people get on an airplane for the food.
I was honestly kind of shocked to find out a coworker watched a couple of the same YouTubers I do.
It's probably just because my interests are obscure but my assumption has always been I live in my own bubble. Even my friends don't consume anything like the same media I do, going back to the early aughts.
About once a month I'll be watching a YouTube Short and my wife will yell out "Hey, I saw that on Tiktok"
You'll be even more shocked when you find out you're coworkers because an HR AI calculated you were a good team fit because of the same preferences.
You think, that's just a joke?
Just wait until you're married...
Relevant: Maneki Neko, a short story by Bruce Sterling.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-neko/
This story was amazing last time I read it and holds up amazingly well considering the age. This could be a Black Mirror episode.
Media makes you feel isolated and utterly unique. This is personalization deployed at scale. I worked on the first personalization systems and been involved in their implantation for decades.
It’s fascinating how they’ve affected culture to the point where people don’t even see them anymore.
Personalization is profoundly powerful technology at scale. Do not underestimate their influence. What you talk about is the ever present concern of people who know you will talk, and almost everyone talks.
If you share internet wifi you will get similar recommendations based on what others on the network have watched...not just based on "your" suggestions.
Could be that.
Metaphorically...Both of you were offered "the same meal at the cafeteria" so to speak. Based on what "others" who visited that particular cafeteria had eaten in the past.
This happens all the time to me when I visit friends. I realize the reason I have a suggestion on my youtube was because that was what the person who I was just visiting would want to watch.
Linkedin does this too with suggested contacts. I would imagine spotify and others do as well.
I said one day to a friend of mine how it was "getting creepy" and his response was "Isn't this what we have been asking for though?"
Same here. I recently discussed YouTube with a friend and I was really surprised we had lots of channels in common. I honestly thought that what I casually watch wild be more or less unique (as a set)
Cow hoof trimming (a Scottish guy Hoof GP and a US one someone the hoof guy), painting restoration (complicated name Beaumsometing), cooking (an Aussie guy Andy, and a British one who dances at the end of the preparation) and science (Veritaserum, Numberphile etc.)
I skipped the French channels about cooking (grolandiers) and science.
I now realize that I am really bad with the names of the channels :)
Contrast that with the account I read about the 1930s-40s: The major media was radio, and on summer afternoons when President Franklin Roosevelt was speaking, you could apparently walk down the street and not miss a word of the speech, because every radio in every house was tuned to the same broadcast.
Unimaginable today.
Imagine a nation that had a direct dialogue with their president like that? Nowadays, it's too polarizing.
Dialogue?
I suppose the FDR had better writers, and was better at sticking to his scripts.
But there were a lot of people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" rather than use his name. And Edmund Wilson quoted somebody at a dinner party in the 1930s, where someone denouncing Hitler was answered with "That's going too far. You're talking about him as if he was Roosevelt."
I think that's the point though, isn't it? Some people will like the speeches, some won't, but they had all heard the same speech and were all more or less on the same page about what was being discussed.
A one-way radio broadcast is not a dialogue; in fact, we have much closer to realtime dualogue with leaders today, despite greater scale (yes, its still moderated by intermediaries, but its much more rapid and much less wrapped up in the ability to tell different stories to different audiences without information rapidly flowing between them—politicians still try this, sometimes, but it tends to fail, and increasingly to fail very quickly.)
I'm not sure the official name for that is but I call it the "shared experience." Obviously something that pulls us together, but recently with less and less of it we're becoming islands in a sea of nothingness.
If it was an airplane movie the better phrase might be "trauma bonding" :)
I agree, though, it is very easy to isolate nowadays. And fewer and fewer third spaces exist if one were looking to interact.
Shares at least some overlap with a "ritual of common knowledge": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1116212.Rational_Ritual
The old Scheme programmer in me calls it a closure!
Collective effervescence?
Planes used to be like this, and I'm noticing more and more they're expecting you to bring your own device, so it wouldn't shock me if they went back to having no inflight entertainment.
In-flight entertainment is one thing that I wouldn't mind being unbundled because at this point it really is just a crappier version of what you can bring yourself - both the content and the usually outdated and overloaded tech.
That comraderie used to be everyday life. The atomization that capitalism makes inevitable is the most agonizing pain for a reason.
I like it. Instead of sitting around talking about whatever the big media gatekeepers shoved down our throats we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.
We have fewer cultural touchstones, but they still exist in the form of things like major events (like Covid) or heavily advertised media.
I think that's a little too cynical about culture in the past decades and also underestimating how much curated stuff is being shoved down our throats now. It's not really discovering, it's consuming what ever some ml model from one of the few big tech companies decides you should see.
I have become immunized to algorithmic content curation, I dont know exactly why that happened, but understanding how it works at a surface level I think helped. Im curious if thats a widespread phenomena or not, I suspect it is.
Or, you became aware of the most aggressive aspects of algorithmic curation, feel you are immune now, while not knowing the more subtle ways it has influenced your internalized thinking the past 5 years.
Since I'm way out of step with what most people think, I'm not too concerned about that.
I'm curious how you know what most people think?
Sort of like my dad, a professor of finance, who had a student remark to him "I didn't know there even was a case for free markets!"
I get similar responses. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on HN who understands how free markets work.
For example, most people would say that hard work leads to success. This is incorrect. It's creating value that leads to success. I very rarely hear the latter, in fact, pretty much never.
When I was a kid, I made some pocket money by mowing lawns. None of my customers ever asked me how I was going to do it, or how hard I worked at it. They did not give a damn. They only cared about was the lawn mowed. Using scissors, a push mower, a gas mower, or a rider mower all came with a huge variance in how hard the work was. None of that had any influence on what I was paid for it.
I don’t think most people would agree with that these days. I know most of the people around me wouldn’t
Indeed, a lot of people in America believe that there is no path to success. It's a very popular notion on HN. Another thing I'm in a small minority of is pointing out that adults of sound mind and body in America are capable of success.
You are in a minority because of those caveats. 'Sound mind and body' and 'success' are vague enough to lend themselves to many interpretations and act as an escape hatch you can jump out of when someone points out any one of numerous exceptions to that statement.
You and I both know what these conventionally mean, and the overwhelming bulk of American adults are of sound mind and body, and you know that, too.
I don't know what it means; that's the whole point. I want a specific definition. I'll start with a question: Is a pregnant woman of 'able body'? Is a person who speaks english as a second language 'of sound mind'? Is a person who grew up in a place with very poor schools and who had to drop in high school to take care of their aged mother 'of sound mind and body'? Expound on the reasons please.
Sorry, I'm not interested in semantic arguments.
Have you considered that your 'different' ways of thinking may be flawed if they can't stand up to a little bit of dissection?
I can guarantee you that you're neither the only person, on HN or elsewhere, that "understands how free markets work" (if anyone can every truly fully understand a complex emergent system), nor are most people incapable of realising that hard work only pays off when you create value - it's just that for many people, hard work is the safest, and sometimes the only, way to get there.
So why am I the only one on HN pointing these things out, and legions of HNers telling me I'm wrong?
A lot of people are disappointed because hard work got them nowhere. It's because they weren't working on things that other people valued.
For example, the hardest job I ever had was working for the city maintaining the sidewalks. I was utterly exhausted at the end of each day. The job paid minimum wage, because the work had little value to it.
The jobs I've had since paid a lot more, and the work wasn't hard. It was just that the work was much more valuable.
I never said they were "incapable". I said they think differently.
Of course there are other people that understand them. It's just that they are rare.
I'll give you some unsolicited advice: You come off as rather arrogant and I would suggest reflecting on it.
The idea that "legions of HNers" are telling you you're wrong sounds like confirmation bias. I basically see the same old discussion about free markets vs. market regulation every day on HN and it's not as if there was ever a clear-cut consensus. Maybe somewhat expectedly, radical positions such as "markets should be 100% unregulated" or, conversely, ones espousing something close to communism are comparatively rarer than ones in the middle (most people don't tend to have radical views), but that doesn't mean you can't see them often enough here (ok, maybe I haven't seen communist takes here that often, but definitely libertarian ones).
More importantly, even if everybody was disagreeing with you, it could be that they're right and you're wrong. Or that nobody is right or wrong because it's a matter of opinion. I haven't seen you take that option seriously, instead it's just other people who "don't understand" free markets
I know.
When I see an example of a successful commune or communist society, I'll think about changing my mind.
You have completely failed to understand what I was trying to say, instead quoting something out of context.
I'm assuming the reason why you get so much pushback is not because of your unpopular opinions but because you don't know how to debate properly.
It may not be obvious, but buying and selling land and resources for personal gain is somewhat novel in the history of humanity.
Basing the entirety of society and law on the notion of a single person being able to own a piece of the earth, which they are allowed to deny others access to if they like, is unique to our particular time and culture.
One could say with a fair amount of certainty that a 'commune' aka a village or tribe is the basis of the vast majority of the human experience.
No. You need to also be in a position to capitalize on it. There also has to be no value add involved. You can profit from destroying value ...
You see, you think very differently from me, and your opinion on this is mainstream.
That may have been true for you, but it won't be true for everyone. Sometimes we really do value the work that went into something and that will have an influence on what we pay for it. It's why people will pay for an orchestra instead of a laptop and some software. Its why people will pay extra for "handcrafted artisanal" items that could easily be pumped out by slaves in a factory overseas and sold for much much less. The large amount of effort involved is a big part of the charm for a lot of art forms.
Sometimes hard work can result in success. Some people produce a lot of value but never see success. Some people manage success without doing anything of value at all. Some fail upwards and gain success while actually producing negative value. If we could really reduce the formula for success down to a catchy soundbite there'd be a lot more successful people in the world.
Yea, maybe. Though you can put me on youtube and ill scoll for maybe 15 secondsbefore leaving or searching for the specific content I want. Twitter, facebook, instagram, whatever it is I dont have the interest.
I’m pretty skeptical that it’s possible to be immune to algorithmic content curation. It seems more than a little bit like the people who say “hey, mainstream media is all biased, but that’s not a problem for me because I’ve found the sources that are actually true”. How do you choose which content to watch and how does that process exclude algorithmic curation?
I don’t think it’s a matter of choosing content that is served up by algorithm but by finding the content that the algorithm omits. I find I then have to listen for what are truth statements, for verifiable truth statements, and sift out the emotional language. In fact, the more emotional the tone, the more intention I attribute to the engineering of it being shown to me. This has resulted in me looking at and reading what I think is garbage sometimes, but I typically find some nugget of truth in it that helps me reason about why someone would think that way. Kind of erases the left versus right thing in politics.
How do you know when you found that truth nugget?
Why do you think content that is excluded from the algorithm is more legitimate?
How do you know it was excluded?
What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?
I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Maybe this is true for the US, but in other places of the world, societies aren't yet as polarised (although, sadly, it looks as though we're copying the American model more and more).
Maybe you should make it more precise what you mean by left and right, otherwise it's always easy to call something "right-wing" just because it's more to the right than whichever positions you espouse.
(For the record, I always considered myself to be rather center-left, and I still hold many positions that are broadly left-wing, but recent events have made me realise that there's also a huge part of leftism with which I fundamentally disagree, so I'm not sure if I want to call myself that any more.)
I've read many books by activists, and by serious historians. After a while, you notice that the style of writing is different. The activist writers use noticeably more emotional language, draw sweeping conclusions based on flimsy evidence, have fewer cites, and no counterexamples are ever mentioned.
For a couple activist products, Showtime recently ran a miniseries documentary on Reagan, and HBO one on Kennedy. The 6 hour Reagan documentary was about everything that was wrong about Reagan (it even criticized Reagan for recovering rapidly from the assassination attempt), and Reagan did nothing right. The Kennedy documentary was the other way, Kennedy was a god among men and never put a foot wrong.
Do you think that is because the producers had some kind of agenda, or were they pandering to modern sentiments on those figures, or were they illustrating their own biases, or something else?
Probably all of the above, but that's just speculation. What's pretty certain is the relentless one-sided approach was no accident.
One thing I try to do is increase the amount of content I view because I explicitly requested it instead of what was being suggested to me. "Pull" instead of "Push". I don't ever log into youtube. I also have their related/recommended videos disabled, and I never see their homepage/trending stuff. They'll still put whatever random stuff they want you see in search results (usually pretty far down at least) and ultimately an algorithm determines what kinds of videos are included in any set of search results, but I do think it helps both to avoid being fed most of what they're pushing on people and (to some extent) limit the amount of time spent just mindlessly viewing youtube.
Same with streaming services, I'll skip over whatever their major ads are pushing at me (for example, the large banners at the top of the screen when you sign in, the "featured" category, etc.) and I won't be satisfied with whatever they decide to show you (repeatedly) in whatever random categories the algorithm presents to me that day. I use the search function a lot there too, often just entering "random" strings of 3-4 characters and seeing what comes back as I keep scrolling down.
Like with youtube, you can tell that when they're pushing something hard enough they'll just insert that stuff into the results of any search you enter, but I'm often surprised to find a lot of things I want to see that the streaming service had never shown me before that way. I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.
The more I can eliminate or avoid things being pushed at me and decide for myself what content to consume the more variety I see, but at a certain level you're always left with whatever people are willing to show/sell you which is frustrating. Exploration and recommendations from actual humans are more fun anyway.
For news and other topics I want information on I try to look at stuff from multiple sources and perspectives to avoid the filter bubble problem and to get an idea of what people who'd disagree with me are thinking or understanding about a topic. I find that when I'm reading content from people/perspectives I strongly disagree with I automatically read what they're saying very critically and that practice carries over so that I can't help but do it even when I'm reading things from people/sources I personally trust generally. Terrible arguments, bad facts, and attempts to mislead are pretty common everywhere and this does make me a lot less confident in what I "know", but that's probably a good thing.
I wish Netflix/Comcast/Prime had a ribbon called "randomly selected" that was like shuffle play on my stereo, and have it change daily.
It's the social media era equivalent to "advertising doesn't work on me, I can see right through these stupid commercials."
When I used to be on reddit there was this idea that algorithmic content curation didn't apply to us because of the upvote system. There often seems to be a similar implication (by way of omission) when these discussions come up on HN. I'm not familiar with the workings of the HN feed, I only migrated here last summer, but the reddit feed is absolutely subject to gaming and algorithmic shenanigans.
The comparison would be thinking our government is completely free from corruption and undue influence because we all have the right to vote.
I have people I like watching, and find other stuff I like through that persons own recommendations.
If you want my political take, I have searched for intelligence and consistency my entire life without realizing it up until the last few years. Ive been through several different sources, from corporate news to noam chomsky, conspiracy grifters to their critics; learning the truth about what happens in the political realm requires a level of diligence that seems to defy what can be presented to another. It would require so much time to understand all the relationships, motives, and the evidence for them, that it would be a several year endeavor. Given the fact that I have other things to do with my life, I have to start with what values I can follow and the heuristics that can be applied out of them; so I have decided on the nonagression principle, arguementative ethics, anarchocapitalism and their related concepts. I have chosen these because I have found them to be logically and morally consistent, and when idle I occupy my brain by trying to poke holes in these ideas, unsuccessfully to date. Values in hand, and having enough life experience to see that values seperate pro-social and anti-social behavior, I have committed myself to placing those values above whatever day-to-day contrivances I have; however much easier it would be for me to violate those values is not my concern, I follow those values because I value them more than any personal problem I have.
Those values now firmly at the center of my thinking, I can apply the heuristics that can be derived from them, and quickly dismiss propaganda that calls me to any kind of political action. I dont vote, I dont intend to start, and if I am listening to anyone saying anything about politics, even someone I like, I am left only to try to poke holes in whatever they say. This leads to me being the most critical of people I like, which is probably a reasonable way to approach these topics.
I wish I was immunized to it. By avoiding it for years I have basically 0 immunity. Hand me a phone with stock YouTube on some short and 5 minutes later I've scrolled through people dancing, some cats, shitty DIY tips, crazy sport moments, someone talking about how traveling is great etc. Luckily I'm easily distracted so any little thing is enough to snap me back to reality and have me questioning my life on why I just scrolled and watched that garbage.
It's really scary how effective it is on me. I completely understand how it's designed to work and what it's trying to do and yet it's extremely effective.
The bonds between people are diminishing while the bonds between people and the institutions / technology is strengthening. The normal course of technological progress. This will and is already leading to widespread unhappiness and mental illness, as bonding with others is a biological need.
Concomitant is the erosion of spirituality and its replacement with other forms of tribalism. Atheists now donate to politicians at incredible rates—more than any other group.
The older I get, the more I realize that I didnt so much have a problem with the 'gatekeeping' as the 'gatekeepers'
That's the theory, yes, but what I've been seeing is people increasingly just staying in their own little world and not talking about those things with each other much at all.
I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names. This was a bit of a surprise to me, because she volunteers for the Democrats and is openly lesbian, so I would have thought her opinions are generally a great match for the current cultural milieu.
I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan:
https://betonit.substack.com/p/leave-anger-behind
In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class.
Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)
Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.
Isn't that so-called cancel culture has been around forever? Doesn't every group do it?
It’s anecdotal, but I had a friendship dissolve over one friend kind of “canceling” another for a prolonged period.
It was very much by the modern playbook, though it looked slightly different. Something offended some sensitivities, though it was a benign as an unexpected break up. My previous friend made a great effort to convince others of how immoral and cruel our other friend was, and some people kind of bought into the drama I guess.
It was a matter of reputation assassination based around some collective sense of what’s proper and what’s not. The path from reality to the conceived reasons for the cancellation was long, grey, and blurry, but they pushed hard on it.
One very common thread was how often I would think “wow, I could so easily get put in the same bucket. We all could. None of us are much better, we all make mistakes like this”. It seems true then and it’s true now. I say the wrong things sometimes. I’m accidentally insensitive. I don’t know as much as I could in order to navigate some social situations better.
What caused the dissolving of the friendship eventually was when I asked my friend why I’m any different from the person he was targeting. His response was totally irrational, unkind, and seemed almost pathological. I realized I had a very unhealthy friend who was harming my other friends and social circle. And that eventually I could be his target, too. I just had to upset him in such a way that I would be dead to him. What a precarious and unsettling way to be friends.
Anyway, all that is to say it seems familiar going back most of my life now. The only difference now is that it seems to be very identity-oriented and politically driven. It’s not as personal. That is a very eerie thing to me.
These problems seem to be limited to people who are chronically online. People who live on Facebook and Twitter. I know this is a bold claim but I’m immune to cancellation since I simply don’t have accounts on social media, and don’t use it. I live in meatspace and all of my friends and acquaintances are in meatspace, so good luck taking me down. There could be someone on Twitter right now trash talking me and telling everyone how horrible I am and how I should be fired and look! it’s not affecting my life in the slightest. Quitting these online-outrage tools is the first step.
The anecdote I'm describing wasn't a social media-driven thing at all. I agree though, social media makes it far worse. I should have clarified in the story though because I meant to indicate that these things occurred even before social media was such a major influence on this kind of behaviour.
I love the term meatspace! I feel the same way. I do have Instagram and even Facebook but I don't use either much (post travel photos on insta, use market place on Facebook). I generally feel like my friends are very much "meatspacers" first and foremost and any social media is additional and incidental.
But things are a little trickier if they start targeting your employer
Quitting could be individually rational for you, but collectively it leaves us with a public square dominated by bullies.
The pendulum swings. Back in the early '00s I remember The Onion having a piece on Marilyn Manson trying to offend people and not being able to.
Perhaps, but the left has the top universities, news media, popular media/Hollywood, much of Silicon Valley, the largest investors (Blackrock, Vanguard), and NGOs on its side.
(That's what makes the current meltdown/full-scale civil war on the left over Israel and Hamas—involving at least four of the above six factions—so hilarious to watch.)
Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.
This is definitely one of the more interesting fantasies the right enjoys portraying, for sure. Part of standard playbook at this point it's becoming hard to treat these type of comments as organic.
The fantasy is that “cancel culture” is a thing unique to the left, or that it’s somehow new.
Bud Light got cancelled for giving one can of beer to one trans influencer for a social media spot.
I’m old enough to remember the Dixie Chicks getting cancelled for opposing Bush and the Iraq War.
They were rightly cancelled, but for the wrong reason. Really, the cancellation should have been for lauding his incredibly misogynistic and offensive portrayal of women.
I’m old enough to remember leftists defending the spirit of freedom of speech, with respect to the Dixie chicks
Internet mobs have been mainstream since Kony 2012 made slacktivism a thing. Assigning cancel culture to one part of the political spectrum is not intellectually sound.
While, as other comments have said, this is the common target these days, its a red herring.
The issue and fear is as it has always been for left leaning movements: the tendency to splinter into little factions of slightly differing values and goals, and the purity testing and infighting that follows and keeps the majority of movements from doing anything remotely useful.
> she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online
I'm old, but feel the same reluctance (it slips sometimes; I am only human). Not because I fear any particular reprisal, but because I cannot comprehend that that someone else gives a rat's ass about whatever random firing of neurons happens to be going on in my mind. I certainly couldn't care less about theirs.
As a child of the older internet, I have an inbuilt aversion to openly posting under my own name. Screen names all the way, baby.
I am okay with using my name when the post is for other people (i.e. work or occasional charity – otherwise I'm not working for you for free!). If the post is for me, then most definitely a screen name. It saves the confusion of someone who might come back to me thinking that I gave them free labour.
I saw a good description (on /r/4chan, no less) of leftist NPCs: People who constantly check in on each other to see what the latest things are to embrace/avoid. What a miserable way to live.
Caplan's quote sums up the logical conclusion of such living, and the consequent omnipresent fear of one day being on the outs from an errant word, thought, or deed.
Ironic that a good chunk of your comment history is evaluating this or that news story, conspiracy, or talking point from this or that social media outlet. What a miserable way to live.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but unlike the leftist NPCs I mentioned I don't care what others think. I was never afraid to speak up during my time at an Ivy League university where the most common political posters were for the "world socialism" movement. In more than a decade on Reddit (or here) I have never once complained about being downvoted, and the first time I mentioned the concept of being up/downvoted at all was many years into my tenure there in response to some question/discussion not dissimilar to this.
The next time you are about to post something online, or say something to friends, or patronize a business, do you first ask yourself "What would it do to my public image if other people I knew saw me doing this?", and let that affect your behavior? Not me.
PS - I can also say that I have never up/downvoted a comment anywhere simply because I disagreed with it. I have upvoted many comments critical of me, or something I believe in/agree with, because of their eloquence or wit. I downvote very, very, very few comments, and only because they are completely useless (say, off topic), or ridiculously foul-mouthed in an inappropriate context (by the same token, I have upvoted such if funny enough). Even if few others seemingly believe in the original rationale for up/downvoting, I still do.
From a non American perspective describing the Dem. as left or leftists is hilarious.
That's not what they did. In the US, if you're a leftist, you'd almost certainly be a Democrat, that being one of only two choices.
You are saying that not all Democrats are leftists, that is true of course. But almost every leftist is a Dem.
Being openly lesbian means being target of right wing in quite a lot of instances.
You mean non-conforming opinions on totem topics of the (US) left. aka "purity spiral", groupthink, echo chamber.
Also true of the US right, to less extent.
I can’t imagine communists were too comfortable around other committed communists, being sent to the gulag was always a latent possibility if you were determined to be an ideological enemy.
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
This was written by a socialist (George Orwell) in 1945.
Suggest to her that she voices an anti-Israeli genocide position and see how she reacts to the trucks driving around with her face on them after she's doxxed. That'll make her feel better about your fear of the left.
Interesting anecdote, and entirely rational.
Time and time again, the leftist vanguard eventually find themselves on the wrong end of ideological purity. Remember that Lenin was on the outs with Stalin at the time of his death, and Trotsky met an unfortunate end.
"like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children", Jacques Mallet du Pan said of the French Revolution.
I dont know anyone who does. I think most of the 'online' is bots talking to each-other
For a time after Ukraine war began, everyone was accised of being a russian bot, and I was like 'do you think noone else has bots? Lobbyists, think tanks, dictators, secret services?
Russian bots were just low quality, and so they were obvious. The good ones would not be
In my early-40's, I've found that the massive gap between youth culture and adult culture has, thankfully, shrunk. While it's still the case that no 16-year-olds are going to want to hang out with us, their language and activities and perspectives don't feel as foreign as Boomers purported to feel about, well, everything. Because unlike previous generations, who fetishized leaving behind childish things and creating stark barriers between kid world and adult world, many of us have continued to do what we like as we've grown older. And it turns out, the reason kids like to do things like play video games or obsess over anime or take drugs is because these things are fun. And because we're still "in the game", so to speak, we don't balk and criticize and feign outrage like previous generations. That leaves a tremendous amount of space for connections, because we all play games and have niche interests and like our weird TV shows, even if the specifics vary greatly (and more than ever before).
I recently bought my nephew a box of Pokémon cards. I don't play Pokémon, I have no interest in it and frankly it seems kind of dumb. But I would never say that because all I wanted at age 12 were boxes of comic book cards and Magic the Gathering cards. Equally dumb, at least! So I 'get' it, unlike my mother who, though sometimes obliging, thought all of these hobbies were incomprehensible nonsense.
This doesn't seem to be a passing phenomenon. Once you've established a perspective that respects and expects change, there's no law of nature that will magically revert that. That doesn't mean it will be frictionless. And it does require some conscious effort to keep up. I have TikTok on my phone. I rarely use it, but I'm familiar with it and it's not foreign to me. I see it as my task to refuse to let changes in technology or culture become foreign to me. And that task seems vastly easier today compared to the pre-internet era of scarce information, overwhelming monoculture and insular, defensive subcultures.
Are video games actually fun? I used to spend a lot of time playing, until I had an epiphany and realized that it was more like working an unpaid part-time job. I was playing because I sort of felt obligated to reach the next level or finish the campaign or whatever, but I wasn't actually enjoying it and no one else cared about my achievements. So, I just quit and never looked back.
Maybe I was just playing the wrong games.
Rarely for Xbox, Playstation, and PC, but frequently for Nintendo. Mario Kart with friends is a certified hoot.
As someone who played on a Switch for a significant time (mostly Zelda and Mario games) and then transitioned back to PC games, I'm going to guess that by "video games for Xbox, Playstation and PC", you mean the big tentpole titles. Just within that frame of reference, I would agree. However, most of my playtime on PC is in indies, and those are just as fun as Nintendo games if you know where to look. For recommendations, look at the winners and nominees of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. (Wikipedia has the list.) Most of the PC games that I had the most fun with (and also the most significant emotional response) happen to be on that list.
Thanks. I'd never heard of that prize. I've played a few games on that list (Superhot, Tunic) and am going to give Spiritfarer a try.
Definitely playing the wrong games, imho. I've been an avid gamer in one form or another since the late 1980's and a game design trend that's really been put on steroids in the last 10-20 years is designers getting a lot more sophisticated about creating feedback loops that drive you to put in that one more hour (or ten more dollars) for that incremental hit of dopamine. There is a type of game that is very specifically engineered to get you to play as much as possible for increasingly incremental rewards. World of Warcraft was my own first exposure to this philosophy of game design and they had me hook, line and sinker.
On the other hand you have games which are designed almost like an art piece or a one-and-done thing where you experience what the designer intended and then you're done. For instance it's an old game but take Battle Chess for instance, you buy it, you play it for like an hour and it's chess with extra cool animation and art. Great, now when you want to play chess, you crack open Battle Chess, and when you don't want to play chess anymore you close it. A lot of indie games and adventure games still have this philosophy where it's more about delivering a high quality good experience that is finite, not stretching everything out to infinity.
Many videogames are fun for me personally, and I think that’s about the most complete answer anyone can give!
Couldn’t that argument be used with a lot of hobbies?
I think for most people it’s like interactive light television watching. Not great to do it obsessively but it can be relaxing and/or mentally stimulating.
I also had this realization. Part of it was that after a point, games stop being novel. I used to like playing with legos, but building a set just feels like a chore. These days, I'm doing a lot of ice skating, and what I like is the feeling of learning something new.
Video games make way more money then Hollywood. I mean not to be insulting but it's like asking the question are movies actually entertaining?
There's also many different genres of video games like there are movies and each genre scratches a different itch. The itch you're describing is sort of a "leveling up" goal oriented genre.
That's not the only genre. For example what's the purpose of VR? How does it help with "leveling up" or getting to the next "campaign"? The whole point of VR is immersion.
Too many people view gaming from a biased corner from their own little niche interest without realizing how big the industry is.
Some games focus on intrinsic rewards more than extrinsic rewards.
I've had the reverse epiphany: That if I view aspects of my real life that seem difficult to make progress on as being more like a computer game, I can increase my motivation to tackle them.
"it's still the case that no 16-year-olds are going to want to hang out with us"
That's a broad brush you're painting with, amigo. As a 49yo father w/ two teen daughters (17 and 15), I've been surprised and delighted at the strong bonds I have w/ each of them (esp. my 17yo). We "hang out", and seek each others' company, to our mutual enjoyment -- it's absolutely nothing like my relationship w/ my own parents at their age.
Edit: PS I think I agree w/ your main point; it was this one bit I wanted to counter.
This is not the norm though. I wonder why people think countering something with an individual experience that's clearly distinct from the norm is a counter? It's not. His generalization is correct, your counter isn't evidence against it.
Part of the reason for the generational gap isn't just because of different culture. But it's also because where kids and adults are all day. Adults are at work, kids are at school. So the social connections, hierarchy and the dynamics are all completely different universes.
A lot of kids don't give a shit about grades because often that's not part of the social hierarchy at school. Money isn't even that huge either. It's when they get out of school all the rules change. That's why there's always this younger generational gap between teens and adults but less of a gap between say 20s and 30s.
OP said "no 16 year-olds..." (ie, zero). A single example to the contrary does serve as a counter. But my point wasn't to be pedantic, rather it was taking an oppty to share a positive example about a rare connection I'm fortunate to have. IME it's often interesting to read counterexamples to broad generalizations, for a more complete perspective.
Yeah but he obviously didn't mean zero.
You should mention this in your reply because it seems like an attempt at refutation. Like the generality is obviously wrong. It's not. The broad brush is correct. Your experience is the anomaly.
I too enjoy video games but I also think they are a massive waste of time. If I could rewire my brain to have the endurance required to constantly try to learn new things, that would be my preferred mode of existence. Unfortunately, I often seem to need to "turn off" at the end of the day, watching something lame on netflix, switching on a game, reading a forgettable piece of fiction. It is actually pretty frustrating but I have done it my entire life so I don't see this ever changing.
"Fun". Well if you have a family you need to support, I think it becomes a lot more obvious why "fun" is something that should often be dropped. There are other things that need to be done and they are definitely not "fun". You will, however, be rewarded in other ways that entertainment simply cannot.
Feels like a move in the right direction. For a long while now, subcultures a have been getting publicized and subsequently commercialized so quickly that the subcultures die before they mature. Maybe something interesting will come out of this, who knows.
sure but... commercialized? Where do you think these hyperconnected subcultures live? Online... if not inside of TikTok, Youtube, Instagram or other large entity then they'll exist on someone else's servers.
You think those servers are free and those subcultures aren't going to get commercialized by companies that need $$$ to live?
But those "someone else's servers" aren't always commercial. Communities run on sweat/passion and donations feel a lot different than those that make their money more commercially. It's not always so black and white either, more of a spectrum.
Eh... the issue I have with that is a few dozen communities run on Patreon or what have you won't offset the gorillas in the room (Youtube, TikTok, discord, etc).
I think "we have no clue what's going on online" is never been more true as actions like cancel culture have moved huge swaths of people off of the big guys and created other areas like Rumble - and the smaller alternatives. but to think that these smaller more diverse cultures aren't being commercialized and monetized - except for a few rare cases - just seems, to me, silly.
just my opinion mind you.
I think it's true they won't offset the large platforms, but I also don't think those communities are rare. I too use Discord and YouTube (begrudgingly), but I also use IRC, wikis, and old school forums. There's also Matrix, mastodon, lemmy, mailing lists, heck even usenet. But what's rare probably stems from us being in different communities?
My opinion is that the communities I've found the most fulfillment/happiness in have are not funded primarily as a commercial operation. Sometimes they are related to commercial things (fandoms, user groups), but the community itself is not trying to sell itself, its users, its data, etc. My opinion is that it would be better for all internet-based communities if there were lower-friction ways to start an online community without giving yourself up to commercialization of a platform. Through the many layers of tech that would require changing/tweaking to fix this. All the way down from network layer DDoS mitigation to application layer maintenance and hosting.
Even faster monetization. Hyper-commercialization at a level never experienced.
Subcultures created first and foremost for likes and shares to sell clothes and feed the algorithm.
That's what will come out of this, in my opinion.
I feel with some niches this already happens. The art and monetization happen in lockstep.
Partly, monetization is synonymous with release; a part of the consumption platform itself. You launch on Spotify and YouTube, monetization is already there or just a click away.
Another factor seems to be the survivorship bias. The ones that stick around are the ones with enough monetization to pay out and continue working with consistency.
It does seem like creators generally have more control though, if they don't sign away rights for an infusion of capital. This is replaced with a percentage of sales paid to some service (hosting the content and providing advertisers, printing tshirts as a service, etc...), if product isn't bought in bulk and inventoried
Reddit has a "front page"?
Reddit IS the front page!
Who's on page 3? (British joke, nod to Abbot and Costello).
He means the default things you see if you don't log in and just hit reddit.com in the browser.
FWIW, it changes based on your IP location at the very least.
Up until about 2016 it was pretty good and a popular reddit destination.
Sorry to say, but this is the akin to the “We are all different” meme. The quintessence of the internet and social apps is to organize individual and hence form large quantities. This is called a bubble.
Honestly, we all still get up in the morning, eat, drink, sleep and nowadays you have to draw distinctions by what kind of apps the kids use, what values they share.
You may be tricked by the phenomenon called media. Only because it is shown on TV doesn’t necessarily mean changes in behavior. Same goes for apps nowadays. Perceived importance vs actual is an old phenomenon.
In Germany for example at the height of the so called student revolution in 1968 a maximum of 10% was actively engaging in protest activities. Imagine that. These “revolutionary people” tried to engage with media and organize accordingly.
10% of population engaging in revolutionary activities is a lot.
Yeah I've seen article or study that said that 13% activist population means guaranteed coup
Are you very young?
I am curious to find out how many people voted and correlate them with protestors.
Do what I do: have someone else spend their day surfing the web and then have them tell you about it.
I subscribe the the "Garbage Day" substack by author Ryan Broadrick.
Through this I recently discovered what many consider the first major Gen-Alpha meme: Skibidi toilet
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KrlkXOxlvCk
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet#Reception_and_i...
[3]:https://garbageday.email/about
He also had an event in NYC recently and I went in terrified that i'd be the only millennial in the room (vs Gen Z) but it turns out the majority of the people there were millennial which was a surprise. Thinking back on it,I guess millennials were unique in that they saw the "old internet" before capital took over and they remember a time when computers weren't just walled gardens serving up what others want you to see. As a result, events that talk about the internet, what it was like and where its going appeals to that generation I guess?
That almost feels like the reaction channels or the tv shows that are summaries of some people watching other shows.
Garbage Day is great, BTW
> now it's all balkanized
It was even more balkanized in the days before the Internet. It's much easier now for a meme to go viral (for good or for bad) because everyone on the Internet is potentially connected to everyone else. You didn't know how many kids were actually listening to that loud radio station in the past, any more than you know how many people are actually listening to what's trending on Spotify. But Spotify gives you access to the work of many, many more people than you could possibly get access to in the past.
Balkanized is the wrong analogy. It would imply some sort of common "sub-culture" in the context of a common culture.
Mosaication? Atomication?
It may have been easier in the past, but most things aren't as obvious as music or fashion. Many trends often start out literally underground. How would you have found out kids were playing dungeons and dragons in their basement?
Why in church of course! When the pastor would condemn the practice and warn of eternal damnation. /s
I really enjoy the Garbage Day email newsletter. (disclaimer, I am a paid subscriber.)
Distills the cesspool of the algorithmic feeds to present up-to-date trends, popular memes, etc. as well as a general commentary of the sad state of the modern Internet and our engagement-driven AI-training future.
I don't have a desire to join all the 'socials' myself, but it is nice to try and view at arm's length what 'the new generation' is seeing and thinks is popular.
Hell Yeah! Fellow Garbage Day subscriber!! Ironically this was "recommended" to me by substack in the same manner that other internet sites dictate what you should see lol
Bet
(I have no idea what the slang word “bet” actually means, but I choose to believe it is the appropriate response here.)
Funnily enough, I had to spend a few minutes reading up on it yesterday. I think it’s akin to “you bet” or “of course”
AI probably already makes it possible to create a whole separate reality (in an online web form) for each of us. A trial version of it have been the facebook feed.
This seems like a persistent illusion to me. As access to the Internet and telecommunications reach has expanded, and language barriers or at least translation barriers decreased, any culture whatsoever, including whatever you might call "youth culture," is broader reaching and more uniform than ever. Hell, I'm not that old, last being a minor in 1997, but even then I barely knew what kids in the next school district were into. Radio was not national. I grew up in California and my wife in New Jersey and what was popular to us was often quite regional to the point I had never even heard of bands that were huge to her and vice versa. Television was more national but even that is only "national." Whatever got broadcast in the US was not broadcast in any other country that I'm aware of. Hollywood films were exported but not to the extent they are today. A few very popular, usually English-speaking bands became international hits, but again, that was exceedingly rare. The vast majority of what got popular in Germany or India I'd have never been aware existed.
Even Reddit was never really the front page of the Internet. That's a marketing slogan. I was pretty heavily online from at least 2003 to 2010 or so and never visited Reddit at all. I have no idea if any of my friends and other acquaintances did, but it was nothing they ever talked about to the point that I felt like I was missing out, and that includes friends I only knew from the Internet.
Go back before film and television existed and then what? You think there was any kind of meaningful cultural similarities between young people in Russia and young people in Argentina in 1890?
Where I think the disconnect you feel is very much real is that communities that cut across generations have largely disappeared. In the past, they may have been hyperlocalized, but they were real. 80 year-olds and 16 year-olds regularly interacted with each other, whether that be at church, service jobs, multigenerational housing, or simply that people visited each other in-person more often, if only because those visits were often only around the block. An old person in 1780 may not have had any clue what anyone was up to in another country or even another subnational district, but they probably felt like they knew their own grandchildren. I certainly spent quite a bit more time in the 80s hanging out with and talking to my aunts and uncles than I currently spend with any of my nephews and nieces.
The "pretty distinct cultural trends and identity" you're thinking of are what happened to get recorded by historians and/or make it into a popular Hollywood movie. It's very far from everything. As just a simply example I can think of from my own childhood, it became huge for a few years in the late 80s for kids to pull the magnets out of large speakers and use them to sift iron from sandboxes at playgrounds and schools. The idea was to trade in the metal to hobby shops for cash. Talk about it to any kid from my school district in 1989 and I guarantee they'd know what you were talking about. This wasn't obscure middle of nowhere. I lived 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Yet I have never seen this depicted in extant media, can find no evidence on the Internet it ever happened, and have never talked to anyone I didn't grow up with that would know what I'm talking about if I mentioned it.
I have given up in the fight for relevance. Now I am grandpa even at age 29. My nephews think it's hilarious, at least. I know a couple of their slang terms, and I abuse them.
me: "Hey, nephew! Scooby doo Ohio rizz!"
nephew: "Holy shit uncle Sam."
Welcome to the atomized mode! https://meaningness.com/atomized-mode
In the case of youtube, you can just open the front page in an incognito tab. There's also the trending category which isn't catered to you specifically but to what's popular in your country/area around you.
In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about.
I agree in some ways but also just look at music festival lineups and associated set lists ?
I mean, I can literally see with younger peopler are doing in my country and my environment. I'm not really participating in it, so if I'm searching for good and fun date spots I'll TikTok, watching motorsports on Facebook, cool highlights on Instagram and more.