Shorts are coming to Inleo!
It'll be interesting to see how it works out — all I can hope for is that the content discovery system is a good one. Few things annoy me more than Tiktok/Youtube "recommending" something to me that is completely and utterly irrelevant.
This seems to be the future of almost everything in our world.
Make it shorter and shorter and shorter.
Aside from being trendy and to some degree new, I always end up back at the root question of how useful anything is. Does it help the overall web experience for any given user, or is it merely a way to accumulate "more datapoints" by jamming an ever greater number of "things" into any given minute; any given hour.
It could be that I'm just getting old, but I have always been more oriented towards the quality of my life (and the content IN it) than the quantity of it.
Maybe I'm not reading the room right, but sometimes it strikes me that the entire world is becoming more and more "ADHD-like" in the way is presents information/content to us.
Whereas I acknowledge that a lot of the information snippets I get are ultimately a sidetrack from a sidetrack from a sidetrack, I'm not convinced this is actually a good thing, strictly from a functional and tangible perspective.
If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I am not!) I might be tempted to think that it's all a ploy by "them" to keep us from learning and understanding anything in depth, instead, we are just presented with what lies near the surface in just small enough nuggets that we can have emotional knee-jerk reactions to the information, rather than making conscious informed decisions based on actual research.
Yes, that's a gross generalization... but even when something holds true about 60% of the time, it's statistically significant enough to shape a broader outcome.
Earlier today, I have having a heck of a time finding an actual political interview because the landscape seemed totally dominated by "reels" in which people had taken one sentence from a 45-minute program, peeled it out of context and "blown it up" with a sensationalist clickbait headline that actually wasn't an accurate reflection of anything.
"Handling a question badly" is not the same thing as "having a total meltdown!!!!!!"
But I guess that's world we live in, this "attention economy."
As the information stream gets more and more saturated, it becomes harder and harder to gain anyone's attention... and ultimately we seem to be heading down a road on which everything in front of us becomes an ocean of "noise," with very little actual "signal" remaining.
Small wonder some people choose to just get off the crazy train and move to an isolated cabin in the mountain, off-grid!
All that aside, I do hope that the "Shorts" initiative is a success, because goodness knows we need something to be a success in this ecosystem.
Sometimes is feels a bit like everyone is so busy "feeding themselves" that they have completely forgotten that in order to eat, you have to plant the seeds first!
=..=
Curator Cat, August 1st, 2024