I think you need to be more explicit on the specifics of revenue mechanism to be helpful. Anyone can host a buzzword laden web page for sure, but what would the specific funnel and revenue generation mechanism be?
I have a hard time with tutoring as it is because most students (at least where I'm getting them) just want the work done for them and typically come to you last moment.
And you want to earn money for rent. You don’t need to move the needle of academic achievement for a generation.
If they come to you with money in hand and are just a little intellectually lazy or have worse time management than you’d like, you can still make a mutually beneficial trade.
Only offering tutoring to the most motivated students with the best time management skills is a self-limiting market.
1) Figure out the type of person who caused the trauma
2) Learn their psychology/world view (there are books on abusive personalities)
3) Learn to recognise them quickly
4) Have a plan to deal with them
5) Profit (you'll always have the upper hand)
By doing this you take away their ability to do anything. For some types this riles them up, which can be advantageous in eliminating the threat but also dangerous. You can plan for this.
FWIW nicotine in cigarettes is only as addictive as it is because tobacco also contains short acting MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors - harmane and harmaline, the same ones combined with DMT) and other additives that relax the airways and increase nicotine absorption.
Smoking a cigarette is like taking a fast acting but short duration antidepressant along with a mild/moderate stimulant simultaneously, which has been specifically engineered to go from lungs to brain in the shortest time possible.
Switching to vaping from smoking has a transition period ranging from a few days to just over a week while the brain adjusts to receiving the nicotine much more slowly. Vaping relieves nicotine cravings, but at normal doses in an ex-smoker barely scratches the surface of the instant relief/rush delivered by a cigarette.
Nicotine itself and on its own is relatively harmless to an ex-smoker. But should still be avoided by non-smokers.
Most of the harm caused by cigarettes are related to the tobacco-specific nitrosamines found naturally in tobacco which are carcinogenic, combined with additional carcinogens and harmful compounds created when tobacco combusts.
That said many of the flavourings used in e-cigarettes are harmful to health, especially when heated. Most notably sucralose, which itself partially decomposes into carcinogenic compounds when heated to temperatures reached by vaping. But that's another problem, my main point is that nicotine is only about as harmful as caffeine when consumed alone outside the context of a cigarette.
>Nicotine itself and on its own is relatively harmless to an ex-smoker.
Why is this meme so popular on HN? There's nothing 'harmless' about it, and a few minutes of Googling makes that incredibly clear. Even in the absence of tobacco compounds, nicotine unquestionably wreaks havoc on pulmonary and cardiovascular function, and promotes vascular calcification and arteriosclerosis. It's also implicated as a cause with a plethora of other horrible medical issues.
However for nicotine addicts the e-cigarette is certainly a better method of delivery than the cigarette, as you're not getting exposure to known carcinogens like benzo[a]pyrene etc.
> "Benzo[a]pyrene is a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon and the result of incomplete combustion of organic matter at temperatures between 300 °C (572 °F) and 600 °C (1,112 °F). The ubiquitous compound can be found in coal tar, tobacco smoke and many foods, especially grilled meats. The substance with the formula C20H12 is one of the benzopyrenes, formed by a benzene ring fused to pyrene. Its diol epoxide metabolites (more commonly known as BPDE) react with and bind to DNA, resulting in mutations and eventually cancer."
> Smoking a cigarette is like taking a fast acting but short duration antidepressant along with a mild/moderate stimulant simultaneously, which has been specifically engineered to go from lungs to brain in the shortest time possible.
Chewing tobacco is about just as fast without I assume engineering or maoi.
Update: So I discovered numerous services were sending data directly to Facebook, using some form of hashed identifier, presumably a hash of my contact info.
The two big ones being Amazon and Uber.
Anyway I've decided to switch to a dumb phone in the near future and just stop using the internet once I've found offline replacements for everything I currently use the internet for.
Other platforms only look for similar content to what you've already seen. They don't take novelty into account.
If you like one picture of a dog on Instagram it'll just show you more dogs and you get bored. Watch a few YouTube videos about one topic and the algorithm gets fixated on it.
YouTube is so bad now that if you use it to listen to music the autoplay gets into an infinite loop of songs that sound near identical, it's torture if you don't already know what you want to see/hear.
In short the usual algorithms are tailored to find similar content only, rather than finding novel content several degrees of separation away from what the user has expressed interest in.
It also seems very easy to take recommendation into your own hands on TikTok with long press -> “not interested”, which is very accessible. Once I started to get quite a bit of political / cultural war crap in my feed; I “not interested” a few of them, the feed improved markedly almost immediately. With YouTube I guess you can sort of influence your recommendations by digging into your watch history and deleting a bunch of stuff, but it’s tedious and ineffective. “Not interested” on YouTube front page seems useless, I still get pushed the same repetitive stuff, maybe from another set of channels.
IIRC it’s among the first things they onboard you about. It’s also in the share menu, you should have seen it if you ever tried to download or share a video, or create a duet, or something. Long press is just an easy way to bring it up. Given the percentage of people commenting on TikTok threads who’ve never used it, “first time I heard about it” doesn’t mean much.
YouTube recommendations used to be quite good for a brief amount of time when google brain originally took over it I think? Now it’s a mess but it’s clearly due to exec meddling. like their absolutely product destroying migration towards videos 8 minutes or longer; most original content is now fully shit because they are filling it up with garbage to pad the time and release in a cadence. All stupid rules imposed by YouTube, which just takes creativity out of people.
It’s also possible any recommendation system can only stay pure for a few years until everyone from both sides is gaming them so badly for money it just cannot work anymore.
I was trying to show a friend some features of a keyboard I just bought that I’m pretty excited about. It’s still in the mail, so we pull up YouTube on the nearest screen and type in the name of the board. The first and most popular video that came up was 14 minutes long, but looked high quality. As we skim through it, we realize that it’s mostly this guy speaking ad nauseam about himself with very few significant shots of the keyboard. We had to go back to search and go all the way to the long tail keyword-wise to find a video that gave us what we wanted. Yeah, YouTube search isn’t what it used to be, and my experience tracks with your suggestion that it’s executive meddling.
If that’s what YouTube wants to be now, that’s fine. My question is now where do I go to find what YouTube used to be (TikTok, maybe)? It’s ironic too, because it’s like they don’t realize that as a millennial I was drawn to YouTube because it _wasn’t_ TV.
On the other hand, if I ever fall alseep in front of YouTube with the autoplay on, I will more often than not wake up in front of either Tom Scott's unedited video about sending garlic bread to space[1] or Micheal from Vsauce reciting primes for 3 hours[2] (which tends to result in some pretty interesting dreams tho)
Same reason why I am absolutely terrified of playing any instrumental music on Spotify. I let one track run till the end and my next 2-3 discover weeklies will be filled only by instrumental music.
i used to instinctively turn on private mode every time i opened the spotify app (on desktop at least, since it was easy enough to get at)
with youtube i usually open a video in a incognito tab anytime im watching something random, otherwise it takes weeks of clicking "not interested" just to get rid of some recommendations. sad times
I have the same experience with vocal music on YouTube Music, funnily enough. I greatly prefer instrumental music but you listen to one vocal album and suddenly all they recommend is singing.
You can use this behavior to your advantage though. I have my browsers set up to delete cookies when they are closed and from the surface this works for Youtube recommendations. If I open the site I only get very generic popular/pushed content.
So after I watch that instrumental music video, there will be a mass recommendation for other instrumental music. And that's nice, because I apparently was in a mood for that. And the next day, I open my browser again and they are all gone! I can dive into the music for the mood of that moment right away.
Huh... I guess I never really noticed, but you're right. I used to listen to entire genres on YouTube and let the recommendation engine pick the next video. I discovered some cool songs that way.
Now, maybe I'll type in a song title, listen to the song, and the next video is a live performance of the same song... Followed by a lyric video of the same song.
It's interesting that these companies go into these different product directions, while i assume they're both looking at similar metrics, and optimizing for the same outcome: engagement and number of users.
Somehow YouTube is seeing more engagement by showing more of the same, and TikTok is seeing even more engagement from showing fresh content.
Maybe the risk of an upward trend in outcomes, that blurs the fact that you could see even better trends by done things differently.
For me, YouTube is literally the same - I get the same videos thrown into my feed in repeat. Apparently this converts well for YT and the result is that my feed is maybe 10% genuine discovery. The rest is shit.
YouTube also does this weird thing for me where, for example, I watch a couple of videos of an android related YouTube channel about new phones, and then it’ll recommend me videos from 2008 about phones being released then. Lol
Yes. How do you deal with hill climbing in product management? How do you know that a 10% improvement in outcomes is bad, and a different approach could have given you 50% or 100%? More experimentation, more 'how might we'? Google is known for trying different approaches (many shades of blue for a link), but somehow none of their experiments indicated fresh content is important? Or is it just a matter of product management 'playing it safe' at Google, where they know 10% outcome improvement is good enough to keep their job?
My guess is limited time frames within some standard A/B testing protocol. Give people very similar content over a 1-2 week period, and they'll watch more of it. Give people very similar content over a 6 month period, and they'll get bored and leave. If your testing protocol doesn't look for long term effects, you'll never see the longer effect in any of your tests.
Reddit made a change recently (in the last week or so) along these lines, to start injecting new subreddits in to your feed. They've picked up on this too.
I've been a long-term subscriber to Google Play Music, now YouTube Music, and the change introduced and reinforced what you say. Each time I open the app it's to meet the same recommendations and automatic playlists; barely anything new. About time I got serious about transferring to Spotify.
Defining interesting is an exercise that's left up to the reader ;)
I personally think it's fascinating to talk to people who are unlike myself, but your approach is definitely valid (if a bit "draw the rest of the f**ing owl") for a given interest.
We go for skills and manufacturing capacity & capability.
China has advanced so dramatically and the population so vast that they've essentially overtaken the West in nearly every category.
I think it was Tim Cook who said, when asked why the iPhone is made in China, that for every one American with the necessary engineering skills you could fill an entire football stadium with Chinese engineers.
We barely make anything ourselves in the West. At this point we're just shells of our former selves, totally dependent on China and to a lesser extent other countries.
Virtually everything has "Made in China" written on it, from your iPhone to that not-so-great random gadget you bought on Amazon.
Meanwhile we're perpetually distracted by inane nonsense fads/infighting and dimwitted celebrity bullshit.
The World is Made in China, we're just along for the ride.
Tim Cook and many CEO types are great at selling their reasons to outsource. Since most advanced tech is designed in the US it looks like stadiums with chinese engineers can be replaced by factories with robots and highly trained operators - i think we arent doing it simply because its easier to hire loads of cheap engineers without rights and demands. The alternative is to sit and wait until Xi is replaced by a maniac like putin, but with actual monetary resources, know how and self-sufficiency. Maybe this should be a turning point. I am happy that china is developing but our reliance on them puts us at great risk.
Some suckers will throw money at that if you give it a colourful website with plenty of vague promises that you never have to deliver.