Best of honest-broker.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
14 stories from honest-broker.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 3 October 2023, with 42 upvotes and 11 comments in total. The latest was shared on 4 September 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- 10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing
According to the text, technological progress has been reversing since around a decade ago, and it presents ten causes for this. It says tech investment has shifted toward virtual reality and artificial intelligence, producing fakery, scams and disinformation, while platforms profit by manipulating and surveilling users, whose real customers are corporations paying for ads or private data. The text also blames postmodernist academic ideas for spreading contempt for truth, and says the US government has never stopped tech leaders, noting that Mark Zuckerberg cannot be fired by Meta's Board.
- Why I Don't Read Reddit
The author explains why they stopped using Reddit, citing heavy-handed moderation, poor discourse, and an informant's critique that upvoting rewards confident misinformation. They then analyze Reddit's public S-1 filing, which reports an average of over 60,000 daily active moderators in December 2023 against about 2,000 employees, a $717 million accumulated deficit, and 2023 revenue that grew 21% to $804 million. The author also flags the company's AI training data licensing and its dependence on Google for search traffic, and says they would not buy shares or return to the platform.
- How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture
The author argues that dopamine-driven tech design is harming people's lives and that individuals can counter it through offline activities and immersive experiences. Tech companies are described as deliberately creating addictive, closure-avoiding interfaces, with the essay claiming that half of the 10 largest companies in the world are pursuing this addictive relationship. Suggested remedies include learning practical skills like Boy Scout merit badges, listening to immersive music tracks of 40 to 50 minutes or longer, and building rituals of mindful repetition, drawing on Kierkegaard and E.M. Forster.
- The State of the Culture, 2024 - by Ted Gioia
Ted Gioia argues that entertainment is being replaced by a dopamine-driven culture of distraction and addiction, which he calls the most important change in the creative economy in 2024. He points to struggling entertainment companies, including Disney, Paramount, which laid off 800 employees, and Sony's $1.2 billion investment in Michael Jackson's song catalog. He cites the World Happiness Report, which surveyed 150,000 people in 26 countries and found a massive happiness decline in prosperous, technologically advanced societies. He also quotes Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, who recommends a one-month "dopamine fast" for patients.
- Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture?
Large digital platforms and AI companies are portrayed as parasites that create little while profiting from others' creative work. Examples include TikTok, where one creator earned $1.85 over five months from 713,000 followers and 11 million views, and Facebook, which relies on 3 billion users to create its content. Court filings and leaked documents show that Suno and Nvidia ingested vast amounts of music and video to train AI systems that could replace human artists. Proposed remedies include mandatory AI disclosures, a Creators Bill of Rights, opt-out as the default for AI training, and enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
- What Happened to My Search Engine?
The author argues that technology has become worse rather than better, and uses the history of Yahoo and Google as a case study. The piece says early web ventures such as Yahoo began as a free, fun community: David Filo and Jerry Yang built a list of websites for fun, and Mike Moritz later invested after Yahoo's founders sold 25% of the company for $1 million. The author lists practices that early search engines lacked, including surveillance, selling user data, and selling ads. The author says Google can restore its earlier principles and that it refuses to offer a paid, ad-free, no-tracking option.
- The New Culture War Is Real Vs. Bogus
A new culture war pits the real against the bogus, with AI-generated content spreading across search and news. Google search results now prioritize goofy AI images of famous people over real portraits, and real news photos of Hurricane Helene have been replaced by AI fantasies. The London Standard published an AI-generated review by Brian Sewell, who died in 2015 at age 84, and its CEO called this part of a plan to be "bold and disruptive." The paper had recently cut 150 employees, including 70 editorial staff.
- Is the Bubble Bursting?
- My Secret Life as a Social Media Coach
The author, a writer who previously worked as a paid social media coach for about two years, argues that social media rewards whatever users put into it, so the core lesson is what they call a "KARMA philosophy." Clients were told to keep self-promotion to no more than 20% of a freelancer's online activity, with the rest being enjoyable content, and to avoid hostile behavior such as trolling, mocking, and score-settling. The author cites the Stanford prisoner's dilemma tournament, where tit-for-tat won, as evidence that people return the treatment they give.
- Google Thinks Beethoven Looks Like Mr. Bean
Google's image search results for composers such as Beethoven show digital constructs that look nothing like surviving portraits, according to a column that was shared on Reddit. The author says Google's Beethoven resembles Mr. Bean on a bad day, and that Google's Chopin resembles Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, while Karl Marx looks more like Hagrid or Jack Black. The author argues that these fakes signal a broader risk from AI-generated content polluting the web, and predicts that things will hit a wall within the next 12 months.
- The Death of the Magazine
The article argues that magazines, unlike comparable companies, have steadily shrunk, and that the magazine as a business is in terminal decline. It contrasts 1960, when the five largest Fortune 500 companies grew and the top magazines were Reader's Digest, Life, Ladies Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post and McCall's, with today's outcomes. National Geographic, which lost 13% of its headcount in recent layoffs, is cited as a case study: its staff writers were all fired in June of last year, and its US newsstand sales were terminated. The author also says readers are increasingly loyal to individual writers rather than periodicals, and that legacy media's reluctance to pay for good writing is the biggest warning sign of its decline.
- How to Know If You're Living in a Doom Loop
Cultural doom loops arise when individuals, companies and societies keep repeating proven patterns from the past, and playing it safe ends up causing decline. Generation loss, the term for data degrading with each repetition, serves as the central metaphor: a photo reposted 90 times became an unrecognizable blur in one experiment, and a 2012 game of Telephone with 237 people turned "Life must be lived by play" into "He bites snails." Universal Music's stock price collapsed despite rising revenues, and Sears, Xerox, Kodak and Blockbuster are cited as companies that collapsed by avoiding newness.
- The Rise of the Anonymous Music Star
Swedish composer Johan Röhr has generated about 15 billion Spotify streams under 656 different pseudonyms while remaining largely unknown, and the article argues that this kind of anonymity is spreading through streaming culture. The writer says Röhr's tracks appeared on 144 official playlists with 62 million followers in aggregate, and that in some cases he accounts for 40% or more of a single playlist. The article also cites Spotify's Music Economics Report, which said more than a thousand musicians earned a million dollars in royalties last year without a track reaching the platform's global top 50. It further argues that AI could accelerate the trend, citing a listener, Adam Faze, who found nearly identical 41-second tracks credited to different artists.
- How I became the Honest Broker
This essay recounts how the author, a music critic who previously did high-stakes overseas consulting work, adopted the idea of the "Honest Broker" as a guiding principle for criticism. During a stressful project in China, a drunk Australian whose name the author cannot recall told him to find the Honest Broker, an intermediary whose reputation for straight dealing makes them the key to getting things done. The author later applies this model to music criticism, which he describes as a field marked by critics who take freebies, recycle press releases, and trade coverage for access.