Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2025
11:32 · 9.1M views · Nov 29, 2023
A Kurzgesagt video arguing that social media's problem is information flooding and tribal polarization. It suggests a return to smaller online communities and more in-person interaction.
HN recommends it in threads about dying forums and social media as a lens on why smaller communities suit us better.
8 comments from Hacker News
I view social media through this lens now. this video It's less that we are in echo chambers and more of being completly flooded with too many opinions. Avacados == liberal Steaks == conservative The point I take is that the only way to prevent this is decrease the amount of information you recieve not increase. If you constantly read extreme opinions everywhere your brain cannot process it and therefore starts dropping everything into really big buckets. The more sides you read the bigger your buckets becomes. Sure you're less informed but I don't think humans were designed to grok the entire world's information either.
I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in "democratisation" of anything, including "publishing content that many other people will see". this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc). of course, that means posting and spreading "worst in people" is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel has nothing to do with the "social" part of these platforms, any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with different extents, but not essentially different). p.s. you might find this interesting if you haven't seen it already: this video
Sure, bring him back or whatever. But don’t pretend it has anything to do with free speech. That’s undermining the importance of the concept free speech. Free speech has never been about forcing all (social or not) media platforms to publish the opinions of all people. The concept of “free speech” that Elon Musk is chasing is noble in a twisted way I suppose. But it’s naive. Especially in the coming era of “AI”, where it will be increasingly easy to generate fake activity if you have the money. I think people will seek platforms that do work like open forums, so you get the opinions and ideas of people outside your immediate network… but people will increasingly value that those opinions and ideas are held to a certain minimum standard. Otherwise the platforms will just be spammed to death by people with a zealous political agenda and state actors trying to amplify political divides. I found the recent Kurzgesagt video on this topic illuminating, and an essential perspective when considering how to go forward with these social platforms this video
Why do you think that being spread out is an issue? Niche forums like HN were exactly how the internet worked before mass social media arrived and ruined everything. Going back to this old format is exactly what we should be doing in my opinion. I find that Kurzgesagt's video on social media touches this subject very well: this video
There is a Kurzgesagt that I can recommend about this! How our puny brains are ready for socializing and it’s been very important for us, but more on an isolated “tribe” level or at the very least without social networks, arguing that returning to special interest bulletin boards online will probably have us feel better. this video