This week's best things

The Tiktokification of everything

Designer, Chappel Ellison’s comments about the new Tiktok-inspired design that Spotify has unveiled are worth considering.

Her follow-up tweet says “I used tiktok for a bit, but even in that short time it poisoned my brain and ruined my sleep more than twitter, and that's saying a lot”.

This is something I’ve heard a lot of people report (i.e. that Tiktok, more than any other platform, immediately and tangibly feels like it hijacks and breaks your brain). I am not on Tiktok for exactly this reason.

I’m interested to see how far-reaching Tiktok’s influence ends up being.

Related to Cory Doctorow’s piece that I link to below, I wonder what will cause a reckoning around how these platforms abuse their users, especially as that abuse doesn’t necessarily feel negative in the moment.

But maybe almost two decades of social media dominance show us that nothing will change.

Commentary by Cory Doctorow: Don’t Be Evil

Cory Doctorow always has an interesting perspective (he is the person who coined ‘enshittification’, a term I have used before in this newsletter).

His latest essay is on why all of the major internet platforms and services “became suddenly and irreversibly terrible”.

“Tech has always included people who wanted to make a better internet – one where users enjoyed the technological self-determination to choose from among a wide variety of services, to start their own rival service, or to use plug-ins and mods to alter how a service works. Many’s the mid-2000s blogger who used an ad blocker and expected their readers to have one as well, even as their bosses stamped their feet in frustration at the “lost revenue” these users represented.

Tech has also always included people who wanted to enshittify the internet – to transfer value from the internet’s users to themselves. The wide-open internet, defined by open standards and open protocols, confounded those people. Any gains they stood to make from making a service you loved worse had to be offset against the losses they’d suffer when users went elsewhere.

It follows, then, that as it got harder for users to leave these services, it got easier to abuse users.”

Broken: Rule 2 - Focus on value propositions, not your brand

I’ve linked to the work that Storythings are doing on content discovery before, and this recently published piece on value propositions is well worth a read.

“There is already far too much content out there for any of us to keep up with, so why should anyone give your story their attention? Our favourite line about attention is that we don’t have short attention spans, we have short consideration spans. There is so much content flying at us every minute, we have to make hundreds of decisions a day about what to focus our attention on. So if you want to get attention, you need to be interesting and valuable enough for people to give you their consideration first.”

Let’s Get Real: Using digital to add value

More on value, Culture24’s action research programme, Let’s Get Real, returns.

“This time LGR will focus on the ways that using digital can add value for cultural audiences, communities and organisations, supporting positive internal change and deepening engagement. This hybrid programme will take place in partnership with the new Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester.”

Zoom fatigue is real

I spotted this research at the end of a day when I’d been on 8 hours of video calls and my brain felt like melted cheese.

The tl;dr is that prolonged time on video conferences without breaks is likely to mess with your happiness, stress, fatigue, engagement, and critical thinking.

These findings tally with research Microsoft released a few years ago.

There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t yet met

@charliesbarenniskillen‘There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t yet met’ (W. B. Yeats) 💫 Filming & Editing: @aoifeteague1 #christmasad #christmasadvert #christmasadvert2023 #christmasadvert23 #christmasadvertisement #christmas2023 #northernireland #northernirelandtiktok #northernirelandfyp #irishbar #irishpub #christmaspub

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Reportedly made for £700 and shot on an iPhone, this Christmas ad by a bar in Enniskillen has now been viewed over 15,000,000 times.

If you’ve seen something interesting, stick it in the comments! The algorithms are invading our lives, but the best stuff is still discovered and shared through word of mouth.

Here’s last week’s round-up