Cosmos

Do you also sometime think everything is exactly same now.

Cars, phones, clothes, everyone with same beard...

Few months ago I restarted using insta. The main purpose of it is to get in touch with the younger generation. No matter how much I deny, the next gen is on insta and other such platforms.

If I were to reach that generation, I would have to be on the platform that they are.

As you know meta's Policy is to keep you on their platform. It will attempt everything to the do so. Same is the pattern of YouTube.

Honestly meta is worse as after hooking me up, they started serving the triggering content and that too at night when my reasoning powers are very low. But that's topic for another day.

So, Essentially such platforms try to understand things about you and then serve you similar content to keep you watching.

I used to have Instagram about 6 years ago. The reels and short form content was just starting. The posts were mostly images and memes. I loved memes.

One important distinction at that time was the differences of platform and served content. FB served different content that insta and if I wanted to watch videos, YouTube was there. The boundaries were defined.

This time, after using insta for a few weeks, one thing to notice is, all platform serve same things. I would watch same video thrice or twice as I use Facebook rarely now.

Each content creator uses all the platform and all the algorithms are so advanced that they would recognise you, create a a profile on you and then use that to serve (hook) you more.

The profile was different earlier as algos were still developing but now , algos have matured all the profiles are same and the content also looks the same.

Now you can also see this everywhere else. All the cars look the same. Bloated buffalo with squinted eyes, all the mobile phones. If you don't really follow, it would be almost impossible to tell one phone from another, other than maybe pixels.

The convergence, I think now complete. I do see some new fun colors in cars and recently cloths. People are wearing colorful cloths again and trying to be more distinct and intentional. Hopefully the trend continues but I do not think same would happen for social media.

Unfortunately I have to be on them for the moment no matter how much I dislike them.