Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.
I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
FWIW, it changes based on your IP location at the very least.
I like it. Instead of sitting around talking about whatever the big media gatekeepers shoved down our throats we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.
We have fewer cultural touchstones, but they still exist in the form of things like major events (like Covid) or heavily advertised media.
I get similar responses. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on HN who understands how free markets work.
For example, most people would say that hard work leads to success. This is incorrect. It's creating value that leads to success. I very rarely hear the latter, in fact, pretty much never.
When I was a kid, I made some pocket money by mowing lawns. None of my customers ever asked me how I was going to do it, or how hard I worked at it. They did not give a damn. They only cared about was the lawn mowed. Using scissors, a push mower, a gas mower, or a rider mower all came with a huge variance in how hard the work was. None of that had any influence on what I was paid for it.
I don’t think most people would agree with that these days. I know most of the people around me wouldn’t
You are in a minority because of those caveats. 'Sound mind and body' and 'success' are vague enough to lend themselves to many interpretations and act as an escape hatch you can jump out of when someone points out any one of numerous exceptions to that statement.
> t's just that for many people, hard work is the safest, and sometimes the only, way to get there
A lot of people are disappointed because hard work got them nowhere. It's because they weren't working on things that other people valued.
For example, the hardest job I ever had was working for the city maintaining the sidewalks. I was utterly exhausted at the end of each day. The job paid minimum wage, because the work had little value to it.
The jobs I've had since paid a lot more, and the work wasn't hard. It was just that the work was much more valuable.
> most people incapable of realising
I never said they were "incapable". I said they think differently.
> you're neither the only person
Of course there are other people that understand them. It's just that they are rare.
The idea that "legions of HNers" are telling you you're wrong sounds like confirmation bias. I basically see the same old discussion about free markets vs. market regulation every day on HN and it's not as if there was ever a clear-cut consensus. Maybe somewhat expectedly, radical positions such as "markets should be 100% unregulated" or, conversely, ones espousing something close to communism are comparatively rarer than ones in the middle (most people don't tend to have radical views), but that doesn't mean you can't see them often enough here (ok, maybe I haven't seen communist takes here that often, but definitely libertarian ones).
More importantly, even if everybody was disagreeing with you, it could be that they're right and you're wrong. Or that nobody is right or wrong because it's a matter of opinion. I haven't seen you take that option seriously, instead it's just other people who "don't understand" free markets
I know.
> instead it's just other people who "don't understand" free markets
When I see an example of a successful commune or communist society, I'll think about changing my mind.
It may not be obvious, but buying and selling land and resources for personal gain is somewhat novel in the history of humanity.
Basing the entirety of society and law on the notion of a single person being able to own a piece of the earth, which they are allowed to deny others access to if they like, is unique to our particular time and culture.
One could say with a fair amount of certainty that a 'commune' aka a village or tribe is the basis of the vast majority of the human experience.
You have completely failed to understand what I was trying to say, instead quoting something out of context.
I'm assuming the reason why you get so much pushback is not because of your unpopular opinions but because you don't know how to debate properly.
No. You need to also be in a position to capitalize on it. There also has to be no value add involved. You can profit from destroying value ...
That may have been true for you, but it won't be true for everyone. Sometimes we really do value the work that went into something and that will have an influence on what we pay for it. It's why people will pay for an orchestra instead of a laptop and some software. Its why people will pay extra for "handcrafted artisanal" items that could easily be pumped out by slaves in a factory overseas and sold for much much less. The large amount of effort involved is a big part of the charm for a lot of art forms.
Sometimes hard work can result in success. Some people produce a lot of value but never see success. Some people manage success without doing anything of value at all. Some fail upwards and gain success while actually producing negative value. If we could really reduce the formula for success down to a catchy soundbite there'd be a lot more successful people in the world.
Why do you think content that is excluded from the algorithm is more legitimate?
How do you know it was excluded?
What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?
I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Maybe this is true for the US, but in other places of the world, societies aren't yet as polarised (although, sadly, it looks as though we're copying the American model more and more).
Maybe you should make it more precise what you mean by left and right, otherwise it's always easy to call something "right-wing" just because it's more to the right than whichever positions you espouse.
(For the record, I always considered myself to be rather center-left, and I still hold many positions that are broadly left-wing, but recent events have made me realise that there's also a huge part of leftism with which I fundamentally disagree, so I'm not sure if I want to call myself that any more.)
Same with streaming services, I'll skip over whatever their major ads are pushing at me (for example, the large banners at the top of the screen when you sign in, the "featured" category, etc.) and I won't be satisfied with whatever they decide to show you (repeatedly) in whatever random categories the algorithm presents to me that day. I use the search function a lot there too, often just entering "random" strings of 3-4 characters and seeing what comes back as I keep scrolling down.
Like with youtube, you can tell that when they're pushing something hard enough they'll just insert that stuff into the results of any search you enter, but I'm often surprised to find a lot of things I want to see that the streaming service had never shown me before that way. I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.
The more I can eliminate or avoid things being pushed at me and decide for myself what content to consume the more variety I see, but at a certain level you're always left with whatever people are willing to show/sell you which is frustrating. Exploration and recommendations from actual humans are more fun anyway.
For news and other topics I want information on I try to look at stuff from multiple sources and perspectives to avoid the filter bubble problem and to get an idea of what people who'd disagree with me are thinking or understanding about a topic. I find that when I'm reading content from people/perspectives I strongly disagree with I automatically read what they're saying very critically and that practice carries over so that I can't help but do it even when I'm reading things from people/sources I personally trust generally. Terrible arguments, bad facts, and attempts to mislead are pretty common everywhere and this does make me a lot less confident in what I "know", but that's probably a good thing.
I wish Netflix/Comcast/Prime had a ribbon called "randomly selected" that was like shuffle play on my stereo, and have it change daily.
For a couple activist products, Showtime recently ran a miniseries documentary on Reagan, and HBO one on Kennedy. The 6 hour Reagan documentary was about everything that was wrong about Reagan (it even criticized Reagan for recovering rapidly from the assassination attempt), and Reagan did nothing right. The Kennedy documentary was the other way, Kennedy was a god among men and never put a foot wrong.
If you want my political take, I have searched for intelligence and consistency my entire life without realizing it up until the last few years. Ive been through several different sources, from corporate news to noam chomsky, conspiracy grifters to their critics; learning the truth about what happens in the political realm requires a level of diligence that seems to defy what can be presented to another. It would require so much time to understand all the relationships, motives, and the evidence for them, that it would be a several year endeavor. Given the fact that I have other things to do with my life, I have to start with what values I can follow and the heuristics that can be applied out of them; so I have decided on the nonagression principle, arguementative ethics, anarchocapitalism and their related concepts. I have chosen these because I have found them to be logically and morally consistent, and when idle I occupy my brain by trying to poke holes in these ideas, unsuccessfully to date. Values in hand, and having enough life experience to see that values seperate pro-social and anti-social behavior, I have committed myself to placing those values above whatever day-to-day contrivances I have; however much easier it would be for me to violate those values is not my concern, I follow those values because I value them more than any personal problem I have.
Those values now firmly at the center of my thinking, I can apply the heuristics that can be derived from them, and quickly dismiss propaganda that calls me to any kind of political action. I dont vote, I dont intend to start, and if I am listening to anyone saying anything about politics, even someone I like, I am left only to try to poke holes in whatever they say. This leads to me being the most critical of people I like, which is probably a reasonable way to approach these topics.
When I used to be on reddit there was this idea that algorithmic content curation didn't apply to us because of the upvote system. There often seems to be a similar implication (by way of omission) when these discussions come up on HN. I'm not familiar with the workings of the HN feed, I only migrated here last summer, but the reddit feed is absolutely subject to gaming and algorithmic shenanigans.
The comparison would be thinking our government is completely free from corruption and undue influence because we all have the right to vote.
It's really scary how effective it is on me. I completely understand how it's designed to work and what it's trying to do and yet it's extremely effective.
That's the theory, yes, but what I've been seeing is people increasingly just staying in their own little world and not talking about those things with each other much at all.
I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".
I agree, though, it is very easy to isolate nowadays. And fewer and fewer third spaces exist if one were looking to interact.
It also is like a restaurant where everyone is required to be silent and not use phones...
The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc.
But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.
If you know a way to make money from exclusively showing users content that makes them happier, better informed, better rested, etc., then by all means go ahead -- I sincerely wish you the best. But you won't need my good wishes, because you will soon outcompete YouTube and all the rest with your healthy-yet-still-profitable alternative.
If it turns out that people don't behave as we had hoped, we can always say that the approach that was implemented is not the true approach.
That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years -- and TTBOMK the system that gets chosen has so far had capitalism as an important component every single time, despite the option to vote for parties that eschew it partly or completely.
I think the counterargument that I would mount is that what people want, or think what they want, isn't necessarily what is good for them. This is obviously a very dangerous line of thought - because it can justify all sorts of oppression - but I think it's nevertheless true.
>That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years
Not sure what country you live in but in Canada they just give you a list of 4 or 5 names of people and you choose one, there's no asking of people what they'd like to do in the slightest. In fact, it's even worse: the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
It is fascinating how well done story telling can make people oblivious to what physically occurs.
If the answer is no, then the fact that no one currently on the ballot represents such a party is just evidence that Canadians, today, have almost no interest in these political approaches.
>the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
I agree this is a serious problem with existing democratic systems, but I don't know what to do about it. In theory people punish politicians who fail to deliver by voting them out, but in practice, a lot happens between elections, and people's attention wanders.
I am curious why you can "know" all the other things you allege, yet not also "know" this? Is there something different about the proposition?
I find solace in knowing that I don't have a say in it. Because regardless of what the idea was, whenever someone tried to force everyone to go along with it and base a society on it, it turned out disastrously.
The only thing we can all do it be open minded, honest, and set a good example for the next generation who will take over and hopefully improve on what we did, while making their own mistakes.
Without regulation, this is what happens - the bank would collect your organs for payment if they could. Buinesses have no ethical standards.
Profit maximing business did not invent antibiotics, did not invent sanitation, did not create public sewers, running water, soap, GPS, and clorination of water.
Soviet russian and chinese industrialization was different, but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
Of course. "Industrialization requires profit, except when it doesn't". Got it.
> but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
I didn't realize they used steam ships to transport slaves from Africa to Americas, where they made them work in factories to produce industrial goods.
If you don't industrialize, slavery never ends. It was everywhere in human societies until industrialization.
The Bible has passages on how to be a moral slave owner.
As far as conflating industrialization with capitalism, I'm sorry, I'm actually very far left politically but this is just a fact. It's underappreciated in the west that 5 year plans worked well, but they were following a template 200 years, 2 full centuries, later. 100 years after successful British capitalists banned slavery.
And calling 'industrialization' 'capitalism' and 'profit maximizing business' all the same thing and then shrugging it off after getting called out, you are just showing that you ignorant of what any of it means. And your last two sentences are non-sensical -- I literally cannot figure out what 5 year plans have to do with slavery in the west.
There's a principle of charity when reading that you may want to consider.
There happens to be a correlation with a bunch of nice things because we happen to live in the modern era, but you can't attribute everything to capitalism because, as we noted it was not the only system in place which did these things.
I would like you to find some scholarly research which can bolster your theory.
After industrialization, it goes away within 1-200 years every place that industrialized. Probably because it's not economical anymore in the presence of industrial production.
You're saying that this observation is so out of pocket that it doesn't deserve a charitable hearing?
To say that wouldn't have happened without industrialization, which wouldn't have happened without profit maximization, which wouldn't have happened without capitalism, is not logical. There is nothing inherent in capitalism which requires profit maximization at the expense of humans, it just requires exploitation of private property (note exploitation here means 'being used' not 'being used in a necessarily harmful manner). There is nothing inherent in industrialization which requires profit maximization, it just requires a cheap source of energy and labor and a market (note that this can be a planned market as in communism, or a market in which the demand is created only for war production and is fed by looting conquered territory, as the fascists did in WWII).
And there is nothing which precludes slavery existing because any of those other things exist. In fact, there were massive amounts of slaves who toiled under Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the modern era, and we only don't have them now because they lost the war.
Sorry, your theory holds no water.
Remember what I said about charity?
Frankly I'm disappointed, you should have called me racist for saying only Europeans can invent stuff.
It's a tradeoff. Some things are better, other things are worse. There's nothing wrong, and everything right, with examining those tradeoffs and deciding if they need adjustment.
That has not been my experience unless you like a random selection of the latest big-budget movies mixed with weird artsy films.
> and if we are talking about watching on a phone quality doesn't matter (if anything plane screen is bigger).
Physically bigger (compared to a phone) but almost guaranteed to be lower resolution, have worse colors and contrast and the touch controls are barely working. You can also bring a tablet or laptop if you prefer a larger screen.
It's probably just because my interests are obscure but my assumption has always been I live in my own bubble. Even my friends don't consume anything like the same media I do, going back to the early aughts.
About once a month I'll be watching a YouTube Short and my wife will yell out "Hey, I saw that on Tiktok"
You think, that's just a joke?
Just wait until you're married...
It’s fascinating how they’ve affected culture to the point where people don’t even see them anymore.
Personalization is profoundly powerful technology at scale. Do not underestimate their influence. What you talk about is the ever present concern of people who know you will talk, and almost everyone talks.
Cow hoof trimming (a Scottish guy Hoof GP and a US one someone the hoof guy), painting restoration (complicated name Beaumsometing), cooking (an Aussie guy Andy, and a British one who dances at the end of the preparation) and science (Veritaserum, Numberphile etc.)
I skipped the French channels about cooking (grolandiers) and science.
I now realize that I am really bad with the names of the channels :)
Could be that.
Metaphorically...Both of you were offered "the same meal at the cafeteria" so to speak. Based on what "others" who visited that particular cafeteria had eaten in the past.
This happens all the time to me when I visit friends. I realize the reason I have a suggestion on my youtube was because that was what the person who I was just visiting would want to watch.
Linkedin does this too with suggested contacts. I would imagine spotify and others do as well.
I said one day to a friend of mine how it was "getting creepy" and his response was "Isn't this what we have been asking for though?"
Unimaginable today.
I suppose the FDR had better writers, and was better at sticking to his scripts.
But there were a lot of people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" rather than use his name. And Edmund Wilson quoted somebody at a dinner party in the 1930s, where someone denouncing Hitler was answered with "That's going too far. You're talking about him as if he was Roosevelt."
Subcultures created first and foremost for likes and shares to sell clothes and feed the algorithm.
That's what will come out of this, in my opinion.
Partly, monetization is synonymous with release; a part of the consumption platform itself. You launch on Spotify and YouTube, monetization is already there or just a click away.
Another factor seems to be the survivorship bias. The ones that stick around are the ones with enough monetization to pay out and continue working with consistency.
It does seem like creators generally have more control though, if they don't sign away rights for an infusion of capital. This is replaced with a percentage of sales paid to some service (hosting the content and providing advertisers, printing tshirts as a service, etc...), if product isn't bought in bulk and inventoried
You think those servers are free and those subcultures aren't going to get commercialized by companies that need $$$ to live?
I think "we have no clue what's going on online" is never been more true as actions like cancel culture have moved huge swaths of people off of the big guys and created other areas like Rumble - and the smaller alternatives. but to think that these smaller more diverse cultures aren't being commercialized and monetized - except for a few rare cases - just seems, to me, silly.
just my opinion mind you.
My opinion is that the communities I've found the most fulfillment/happiness in have are not funded primarily as a commercial operation. Sometimes they are related to commercial things (fandoms, user groups), but the community itself is not trying to sell itself, its users, its data, etc. My opinion is that it would be better for all internet-based communities if there were lower-friction ways to start an online community without giving yourself up to commercialization of a platform. Through the many layers of tech that would require changing/tweaking to fix this. All the way down from network layer DDoS mitigation to application layer maintenance and hosting.
I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan:
>Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.
https://betonit.substack.com/p/leave-anger-behind
In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class.
Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)
It was very much by the modern playbook, though it looked slightly different. Something offended some sensitivities, though it was a benign as an unexpected break up. My previous friend made a great effort to convince others of how immoral and cruel our other friend was, and some people kind of bought into the drama I guess.
It was a matter of reputation assassination based around some collective sense of what’s proper and what’s not. The path from reality to the conceived reasons for the cancellation was long, grey, and blurry, but they pushed hard on it.
One very common thread was how often I would think “wow, I could so easily get put in the same bucket. We all could. None of us are much better, we all make mistakes like this”. It seems true then and it’s true now. I say the wrong things sometimes. I’m accidentally insensitive. I don’t know as much as I could in order to navigate some social situations better.
What caused the dissolving of the friendship eventually was when I asked my friend why I’m any different from the person he was targeting. His response was totally irrational, unkind, and seemed almost pathological. I realized I had a very unhealthy friend who was harming my other friends and social circle. And that eventually I could be his target, too. I just had to upset him in such a way that I would be dead to him. What a precarious and unsettling way to be friends.
Anyway, all that is to say it seems familiar going back most of my life now. The only difference now is that it seems to be very identity-oriented and politically driven. It’s not as personal. That is a very eerie thing to me.
(That's what makes the current meltdown/full-scale civil war on the left over Israel and Hamas—involving at least four of the above six factions—so hilarious to watch.)
This is definitely one of the more interesting fantasies the right enjoys portraying, for sure. Part of standard playbook at this point it's becoming hard to treat these type of comments as organic.
Bud Light got cancelled for giving one can of beer to one trans influencer for a social media spot.
I’m old enough to remember the Dixie Chicks getting cancelled for opposing Bush and the Iraq War.
The issue and fear is as it has always been for left leaning movements: the tendency to splinter into little factions of slightly differing values and goals, and the purity testing and infighting that follows and keeps the majority of movements from doing anything remotely useful.
Time and time again, the leftist vanguard eventually find themselves on the wrong end of ideological purity. Remember that Lenin was on the outs with Stalin at the time of his death, and Trotsky met an unfortunate end.
"like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children", Jacques Mallet du Pan said of the French Revolution.
I dont know anyone who does. I think most of the 'online' is bots talking to each-other
For a time after Ukraine war began, everyone was accised of being a russian bot, and I was like 'do you think noone else has bots? Lobbyists, think tanks, dictators, secret services?
Russian bots were just low quality, and so they were obvious. The good ones would not be
You mean non-conforming opinions on totem topics of the (US) left. aka "purity spiral", groupthink, echo chamber.
Also true of the US right, to less extent.
This was written by a socialist (George Orwell) in 1945.
I saw a good description (on /r/4chan, no less) of leftist NPCs: People who constantly check in on each other to see what the latest things are to embrace/avoid. What a miserable way to live.
Caplan's quote sums up the logical conclusion of such living, and the consequent omnipresent fear of one day being on the outs from an errant word, thought, or deed.
The next time you are about to post something online, or say something to friends, or patronize a business, do you first ask yourself "What would it do to my public image if other people I knew saw me doing this?", and let that affect your behavior? Not me.
PS - I can also say that I have never up/downvoted a comment anywhere simply because I disagreed with it. I have upvoted many comments critical of me, or something I believe in/agree with, because of their eloquence or wit. I downvote very, very, very few comments, and only because they are completely useless (say, off topic), or ridiculously foul-mouthed in an inappropriate context (by the same token, I have upvoted such if funny enough). Even if few others seemingly believe in the original rationale for up/downvoting, I still do.
I'm old, but feel the same reluctance (it slips sometimes; I am only human). Not because I fear any particular reprisal, but because I cannot comprehend that that someone else gives a rat's ass about whatever random firing of neurons happens to be going on in my mind. I certainly couldn't care less about theirs.
You are saying that not all Democrats are leftists, that is true of course. But almost every leftist is a Dem.
I recently bought my nephew a box of Pokémon cards. I don't play Pokémon, I have no interest in it and frankly it seems kind of dumb. But I would never say that because all I wanted at age 12 were boxes of comic book cards and Magic the Gathering cards. Equally dumb, at least! So I 'get' it, unlike my mother who, though sometimes obliging, thought all of these hobbies were incomprehensible nonsense.
This doesn't seem to be a passing phenomenon. Once you've established a perspective that respects and expects change, there's no law of nature that will magically revert that. That doesn't mean it will be frictionless. And it does require some conscious effort to keep up. I have TikTok on my phone. I rarely use it, but I'm familiar with it and it's not foreign to me. I see it as my task to refuse to let changes in technology or culture become foreign to me. And that task seems vastly easier today compared to the pre-internet era of scarce information, overwhelming monoculture and insular, defensive subcultures.
Maybe I was just playing the wrong games.
Rarely for Xbox, Playstation, and PC, but frequently for Nintendo. Mario Kart with friends is a certified hoot.
I've had the reverse epiphany: That if I view aspects of my real life that seem difficult to make progress on as being more like a computer game, I can increase my motivation to tackle them.
I think for most people it’s like interactive light television watching. Not great to do it obsessively but it can be relaxing and/or mentally stimulating.
On the other hand you have games which are designed almost like an art piece or a one-and-done thing where you experience what the designer intended and then you're done. For instance it's an old game but take Battle Chess for instance, you buy it, you play it for like an hour and it's chess with extra cool animation and art. Great, now when you want to play chess, you crack open Battle Chess, and when you don't want to play chess anymore you close it. A lot of indie games and adventure games still have this philosophy where it's more about delivering a high quality good experience that is finite, not stretching everything out to infinity.
There's also many different genres of video games like there are movies and each genre scratches a different itch. The itch you're describing is sort of a "leveling up" goal oriented genre.
That's not the only genre. For example what's the purpose of VR? How does it help with "leveling up" or getting to the next "campaign"? The whole point of VR is immersion.
Too many people view gaming from a biased corner from their own little niche interest without realizing how big the industry is.
That's a broad brush you're painting with, amigo. As a 49yo father w/ two teen daughters (17 and 15), I've been surprised and delighted at the strong bonds I have w/ each of them (esp. my 17yo). We "hang out", and seek each others' company, to our mutual enjoyment -- it's absolutely nothing like my relationship w/ my own parents at their age.
Edit: PS I think I agree w/ your main point; it was this one bit I wanted to counter.
This is not the norm though. I wonder why people think countering something with an individual experience that's clearly distinct from the norm is a counter? It's not. His generalization is correct, your counter isn't evidence against it.
Part of the reason for the generational gap isn't just because of different culture. But it's also because where kids and adults are all day. Adults are at work, kids are at school. So the social connections, hierarchy and the dynamics are all completely different universes.
A lot of kids don't give a shit about grades because often that's not part of the social hierarchy at school. Money isn't even that huge either. It's when they get out of school all the rules change. That's why there's always this younger generational gap between teens and adults but less of a gap between say 20s and 30s.
You should mention this in your reply because it seems like an attempt at refutation. Like the generality is obviously wrong. It's not. The broad brush is correct. Your experience is the anomaly.
"Fun". Well if you have a family you need to support, I think it becomes a lot more obvious why "fun" is something that should often be dropped. There are other things that need to be done and they are definitely not "fun". You will, however, be rewarded in other ways that entertainment simply cannot.
Distills the cesspool of the algorithmic feeds to present up-to-date trends, popular memes, etc. as well as a general commentary of the sad state of the modern Internet and our engagement-driven AI-training future.
I don't have a desire to join all the 'socials' myself, but it is nice to try and view at arm's length what 'the new generation' is seeing and thinks is popular.
I subscribe the the "Garbage Day" substack by author Ryan Broadrick.
Through this I recently discovered what many consider the first major Gen-Alpha meme: Skibidi toilet
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KrlkXOxlvCk
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet#Reception_and_i...
[3]:https://garbageday.email/about
He also had an event in NYC recently and I went in terrified that i'd be the only millennial in the room (vs Gen Z) but it turns out the majority of the people there were millennial which was a surprise. Thinking back on it,I guess millennials were unique in that they saw the "old internet" before capital took over and they remember a time when computers weren't just walled gardens serving up what others want you to see. As a result, events that talk about the internet, what it was like and where its going appeals to that generation I guess?
It was even more balkanized in the days before the Internet. It's much easier now for a meme to go viral (for good or for bad) because everyone on the Internet is potentially connected to everyone else. You didn't know how many kids were actually listening to that loud radio station in the past, any more than you know how many people are actually listening to what's trending on Spotify. But Spotify gives you access to the work of many, many more people than you could possibly get access to in the past.
Mosaication? Atomication?
Sorry to say, but this is the akin to the “We are all different” meme. The quintessence of the internet and social apps is to organize individual and hence form large quantities. This is called a bubble.
Honestly, we all still get up in the morning, eat, drink, sleep and nowadays you have to draw distinctions by what kind of apps the kids use, what values they share.
>> I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
You may be tricked by the phenomenon called media. Only because it is shown on TV doesn’t necessarily mean changes in behavior. Same goes for apps nowadays. Perceived importance vs actual is an old phenomenon.
In Germany for example at the height of the so called student revolution in 1968 a maximum of 10% was actively engaging in protest activities. Imagine that. These “revolutionary people” tried to engage with media and organize accordingly.
I am curious to find out how many people voted and correlate them with protestors.
(I have no idea what the slang word “bet” actually means, but I choose to believe it is the appropriate response here.)
I agree in some ways but also just look at music festival lineups and associated set lists ?
In the case of youtube, you can just open the front page in an incognito tab. There's also the trending category which isn't catered to you specifically but to what's popular in your country/area around you.
me: "Hey, nephew! Scooby doo Ohio rizz!"
nephew: "Holy shit uncle Sam."
Even Reddit was never really the front page of the Internet. That's a marketing slogan. I was pretty heavily online from at least 2003 to 2010 or so and never visited Reddit at all. I have no idea if any of my friends and other acquaintances did, but it was nothing they ever talked about to the point that I felt like I was missing out, and that includes friends I only knew from the Internet.
Go back before film and television existed and then what? You think there was any kind of meaningful cultural similarities between young people in Russia and young people in Argentina in 1890?
Where I think the disconnect you feel is very much real is that communities that cut across generations have largely disappeared. In the past, they may have been hyperlocalized, but they were real. 80 year-olds and 16 year-olds regularly interacted with each other, whether that be at church, service jobs, multigenerational housing, or simply that people visited each other in-person more often, if only because those visits were often only around the block. An old person in 1780 may not have had any clue what anyone was up to in another country or even another subnational district, but they probably felt like they knew their own grandchildren. I certainly spent quite a bit more time in the 80s hanging out with and talking to my aunts and uncles than I currently spend with any of my nephews and nieces.
The "pretty distinct cultural trends and identity" you're thinking of are what happened to get recorded by historians and/or make it into a popular Hollywood movie. It's very far from everything. As just a simply example I can think of from my own childhood, it became huge for a few years in the late 80s for kids to pull the magnets out of large speakers and use them to sift iron from sandboxes at playgrounds and schools. The idea was to trade in the metal to hobby shops for cash. Talk about it to any kid from my school district in 1989 and I guarantee they'd know what you were talking about. This wasn't obscure middle of nowhere. I lived 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Yet I have never seen this depicted in extant media, can find no evidence on the Internet it ever happened, and have never talked to anyone I didn't grow up with that would know what I'm talking about if I mentioned it.
Part of it is economics/incentives leading journalists to have to churn out a lot of content. Part of it is laziness as it's a lot easier than going out into the field and actually talking to people.
From this part:
Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case.
Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism.
The opinions you encounter as typical there tend to be the very fringe single digit percents of each political faction. Viewing the world through it exclusively is perilous.
I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
Gregory F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), is a retired[1] American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, best known for frequently being quoted as a "man on the street" in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts from 1995 to the present. He has been quoted in hundreds of articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a "man on the street" rather than a newsmaker or expert). Although he always gives his real name, he has admitted to making things up to get into the paper.
Publisher of NYTimes is on the record in a few interviews basically saying that yes, his journalists are putting in less work into their pieces (because they are forced to produce more pieces per day).
I remember coming to the realization when reading a fluff piece that the author had basically interviewed their mates and made it a story. I think the specific article was about marrying later, and they'd just interviewed a bunch of uni-educated people of a certain socio-economic wealth. No stats, no experts, just 'gut' feeling about what was happening. And once you saw it, you realized a significant chunk of the non-news stories were like that. This was in the 90s/00s.
I think a lot of lifestyle articles have been that way for a long time, pre-internet, it's just that the lifestyle articles are more prominent now.
1. Make few accounts on twitter
2. Post some bullshit
3. Quote it
[0] https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...
Two that really stuck out to me was-
Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”
Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”.
Yes, I know libertarians call themselves “classical liberals” and the left uses “neoliberal” as a similar epithet for anyone more centrist than themselves, but that was the connotation of the word.
The upper crust of Manhattan is filled with left of center people who think taxes on the rich are too low, but they themselves aren't rich (because Manhattan is expensive and they spend/save all their income) and that Trump is bad because he raised their taxes when he capped SALT.
I have friends here who semi-jokingly call me a republican for being more center-left than them & not wanting to watch John Oliver, while they own $10M of rental properties & don't think they are rich. The kind of upper class folks who have laid off numerous people in their career without a hint of remorse, but also think the social safety net is too weak. People who vote for AOC but plan to move to FL for tax purposes. Etc.
Basically the Loro Piana $500 ballcap demographic.
This is your NYT reader.
Robotbeat, I'm thinking more like 60 years ago.
Not quite death, but certainly agree about news outlets no longer seeing it as okay to say that “The internet is freaking out about X”
https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitte...
>Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and his official purchase of the platform, just over one year on from his taking of the reins.
For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent,
while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period.
While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets
still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this
data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely.
Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86
per cent.The overall usage stat does line up with X's own claims about traffic though. i.e. X is saying that traffic is higher than it has ever been and this source suggests the same as well.
Is this the growth?
Bots gonna bot. So far they’ve not caught any of mine I setup this last year.
Each bot sticks to a context, simulates some time wasting doom scrolling at random to look human, posts affiliate links otherwise with AI generating the message payload in response to a Tweet by its mark.
I love how easy the internet made it to fleece potato brains
I have many questions
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/26/x-twitter-usage-statistics-...
[1] https://mediaengagement.org/research/can-journalists-also-be... [2] https://archives.cjr.org/editorial/the_right_debate.php
I know he’s owned the domain for a while but still now X is becoming his. Side note; I only started understanding Twitter after musk bought it. Can’t say my life is for the better but I can see some of the use of it. - Z
Elon Musk took away a bunch of people's status, people who thought they were important somebodies because some nerds in an office met them in person and/or they paid some money to get a verification mark.
That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it.
Well same fucking thing about Twitter / X. A bunch of journalists - a profession generally and historically associated with the lower and middle class - have been / are being absorbed into the elite social classes of America, and they had a special widdle mark that gave them abilities the rest of the hoi polloi didn't have... and Elon Musk came around and he didn't just take it away from them - he did something worse. Same for the academics. Same for the so-called "thought leaders".
He gave it to the common people. He put the elites and the commoners on equal footing... and they freaked the fuck out about it.
X is not dying. It just isn't lorded over by the elites any longer. And they can't fucking stand it.
Good.
The Internet was supposed to be The Great Leveler anyway. We weren't supposed to have gigantic centralized platforms where only approved speech from the Party is allowed. The sooner the rest of these enormous social media platforms either die or radically change, the better.
X didn't die, isn't dying, and won't die. The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it.
And yes, the "you" in the above refers to me too... a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.
But maybe he was joking. Sure didn’t seem to be, but who knows. Or he’s wrong.
Consider a wealthy, business-owning tradesman and a broke ivy league post-doc. Who sounds more "elite" in their mannerisms?
"Professional/managerial class conformist" might be more precise but it's pretty clunky.
Given the nonsensical things I've seen declared "elite" and "nonelite", I'm certain that "elite" is just used as a synonym for "whoever I currently hate".
They really do have people brainwashed to think they're on their side...
The reality is much more benign. Musk isn’t the savior of free speech, he inserts rules against it constantly, like throttling nyt or saying they’ll comply with authoritarian states. He’s complains about spam and bots (despite claiming it’s an easy problem to solve) then changes verification in a way the makes it difficult know who is actually who.
Separately, you seem very bitter toward people who have left twitter after Elon changed it. Perhaps because with the voices of the elite (a politically loaded term you’re using to describe experts or people at the top of their fields) departing, the platform is less valuable and interesting.
The sad thing is, I think Elon could have been a good steward for the platform, but instead he’d rather antagonize advertisers and a subset of his users. That’s not being the great leveler though—if people select out, it’s no longer a common/shared space for everyone.
What's __silly__ about the NYTimes being throttled on Twitter is how Musk champions his platform as a bastion of "free speech", while silencing those he disagrees with (NYTimes) or can't be bothered to defend (enemies of authoritarian governments).
What __concerning__ is how many people claim to believe that Musk is actually a free-speech champion. Are they just trolling the rest of us, or do they actually believe it? Either one is worrisome.
Elon wants it both ways - when u ask him, why is there messed up shit on twitter, he sats free spedch. When u ask him, why can't X post on twitter, its because he editorialized it.
He wants all the benefits and none of the accountability.
It's not as Twitter was a common space for everyone before Musk took over. I do like X Spaces. Great conversations with different point of views. Far superior format to cable tv talk shows. It seems like X is pivoting it's model away from advertisers. Given the out of touch "corporate friendly" message brought to you by ... it's refreshing to hear more realistic conversations. Not perfect, but they are up against Cable news & some of the corporate sponsored YouTube channels...which seem so...fake.
That's a weird take. The people whose posts you wanted to read no longer post on X, but also nothing has changed? It would seem you're describing a personally significant change right there.
He is saying that there was no meaningful change to the Twitter software that would diminish previous value found in posting on Twitter. You post your dumb quip and it shows up in other people's feeds just as it did before Musk.
Social networks are more about the people in the community than the technical specifics. I didn't join twitter because they had an amazing way to input 140 characters, I joined because there were people I liked there.
What's with all the replying without reading going on around here lately? Another Reddit boycott going on?
The comment: "The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it."
> What's with all the replying without reading going on around here lately?
I dunno, you tell me.
> I dunno, you tell me.
I am afraid I don't know enough about you to even begin to understand your behaviour. I'll assume from this you don't know yourself all that well either.
Again, just anecdotes but I feel like that's more evidence than you're sharing in this comment.
Oh, a login screen.
Yeah they're dead.
And guess how billionaires become billionaires? By screwing over poorer people as much they can.
They just fell for the trap, that's all.
Some people get it. From before the 2016 election:
<http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...>
<http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...> (so, so prophetic in why the Rust Belt broke for Trump)
and after:
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugne...>
The New York Times pointed out after Trump's election stunned the press that <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump...>
>Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.
In other words, it isn't just a question of The New York Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.
Not quite. I used to get work through Twitter until Elon made it so you need a subscription to DM people. I used to get about one DM per week, but I haven't had any for about 3 months.
Twitter (or any social media) moderating people's posts isn't wrong, for instance. Nobody's rights are being infringed when they do this. You might disagree with their moderation policies, but that's a different thing altogether.
Legally speaking in the US, it's only censorship when the government is doing it.
You gotta admit, the kind of shenanigans Musk pulls are hilarious. The definition of F-U money.
https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/the-censorship-industria...
https://public.substack.com/p/censorship-leaders-accuse-us-o...
No it is not.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbc-host-mehdi-hasan-makes-m...
He, and Shellenberger and the other writers at "Public" are slowly revealing the outlines of something disturbing. Namely that social media companies take the direction of state surveillance and espionage actors -- including those of foreign (Israeli and Ukrainian secret services) governments, currently considered allies. This is being revealed to be effected through a sinister network of supposed "civil society" NGOs and 501c3s. That's a worrying idea to anyone that considers themself a democrat or a republican (in the non-partisan sense).
If you had followed up on this you would have noticed that although Taibbi rapidly admitted conflating CISA and CIS a further look suggests that the CIS is deeply inter-twined with the DHS and that Taibbi was correct about the CISA's involvement with the EIP. Taibbi is good at admitting his errors and correcting them publicly and rapidly: https://www.racket.news/p/lee-fang-vs-mehdi-hasan-round-2
With regard to the 22 million versus 3000 , Taibbi's co-author Michael Shellenberger notes that:
https://public.substack.com/p/attack-of-the-censorship-karen...
“Stamos & EIP worked to get entire NARRATIVES banned outright,” explained Mike Benz, the State Department official-turned-whistleblower. “Those narratives, by EIP’s own math, had millions of associated posts.”
Taibbi pointed out that the 3,000 number was chosen to hide the full extent of the censorship. “They're playing games with terms like ‘unique original URL,’” tweeted Taibbi, “where more than 1000 tweets can be "collapsed" into one ‘incident.’”
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how many posts they censored. No amount is acceptable.
Again, as stated in my original response to this: yes, the full dump would be ideal, but it is definitely worth considering what Taibbi says. If he's right this needs to be stopped now, if he's wrong then trying to safeguard against the massive abuses and manipulation will not cause harm.
I don't care if Twitter succeeds or fails, but I think that if the media and other entities stop using Twitter as their sole method of communication, that can only be a great thing for everybody.
If people stopped using Twitter as a source for reporting, that would also be a great thing. Twitter is a unique world, not representative of the larger world.
Twitter for a brief moment used to work like a Global Broadcast Radio, where everyone could hang out to get a sense of What Is Going On, even if results skewed towards the interests of terminally online people.
Current siloed content feels more like hyper-personalized newspaper. The content is there, but there is limited opportunity or common ground to share and discuss it with friends.
That siloing, along with Instagram's discouragement of user generated content, appears to suggest that Big Tech don't want to deal with opposing users (or any user at all) interacting with each other. IMHO.
I feel very lucky I was already out of university by the time algo-feeds became mainstream, otherwise it would be hard to chat about "latest episode of Game of Thrones". Or just generally chit-chat about "some stuff that everyone saw online".
I think Sportsball news is the last vestige of “shared culture” you can talk about over beer after work and be reasonably confident 30% or so of your mates can follow along. It’s so weird. 10 people who work together, around the same age, same social and economic class, and nobody can think of a topic that more than one of them know anything about, until someone says “How about those Warriors?”
I was so glad to be missing out.
Sure, it's just an anecdote, no perhaps I was unlucky, but I want to show that it's not always a positive thing to have this "shared culture" that you speak of.
This reminds me of how me and my friends once upon a time started browsing 4chan and jbzd (Polish nsfw meme site) for "spicy memes". We found some gems, but I couldn't stand negativity of these places. Few years later some folks developed genuine strong dislike for women and people of color. They are decent people otherwise.
Hence I cannot stand "silly"/conspiracy stuff like this, even if people say it's just for fun. Sadly, it sells well, so this is what you get exposed to when you start watching TV or online memes. And since it is simplistic, it is easier to have a discussion in a group about "why Muslims are bad" or "do you also believe that Vatican is hiding UFO incidents" than about e.g. politics of The North in Game of Thrones.
However, my argument was about “having common topics for discussion in real life”. As of now, you don’t really need to meet up with people to go down the conspiracy guy rabbithole. As you mentioned, you can be siloed and find your people online.
But yeah, I guess we’ll see where the whole “media curated for one person only” tactic takes us with all the implementations of recommendations algos.
This is exactly it.
Consider a scenario that's likely fairly common given experiments I've done in the last several years. Say a site people still use to talk to/keep in touch with friends sometimes like IG/FB decides a user is "toxic" and either shadowbans them, or starts hiding their posts from friends. Maybe it isn't even because of a bad interaction, maybe the algorithm just decided their "content" wasn't suitable to be towards the top of this user's followers' feeds.
What would that look like to this user? It'd look like their friends were ignoring them, weren't interested in them, etc., possibly leading to depression (which has been proven pretty undeniably that high levels of social media use in teens results in higher levels of anxiety and depression).
The fact that people en masse are not pointing out how ridiculous this is, that a social media site can have such enormous influence on one's perception of "reality" is staggering and it should die and die quickly.
This way it's not malicious at all! /s
You say this as if humanity has not been fighting over the long-distance communication of information for literally the entire history of human civilization since the invention of language. Even before written language, storytellers decided what oral traditions they would or would not pass on, changing it each time they told it. Replace "social media" with "broadcast networks" or "newspapers" or "scientific journals" and it is the same issue.
You don't have a world in which 8 billion people are connected (or even 1 billion, or even 1 million, or even 1000) without a few intermediaries whose purpose is to distribute some but not all descriptions of reality to a public audience, and who gain immense power through that.
This is not the same thing. Pre-social media/pre-Internet I was not clueless about whether my communications with my "friends" were being received because almost every channel I had available to me was synchronous and there was much less noise.
Now, social media presents a broadcast interface and many people assume that their posts are being displayed to their friends. This is not actually the case. When your friends don't respond, you don't know if it's because your friends have stopped caring about you, they're just not interested in what you said, or some algorithm decided to hide you from them---and most people probably do not seriously consider the latter most of the time.
Whether we need intermediaries or not is one question, but whether we need feedback in our communication is settled: we do, and we leave it to the whims of algorithms optimized for engagement to our peril.
Socrates was canceled for wrongthink.
Even today, books teaching witchcraft and other pagan lore are banned from children's libraries.
The oxymoronic style of this sentence reflects why I now ignore reading the Atlantic. Clearly it cannot be true, yet they claim it is to continue their narrative. Their next sentence, a citation of "one person posted" is also unpalatable.
Not going to try to convince you to read The Atlantic, but the issue here is entirely on your end. They are not literally claiming that nobody has heard of the show. They are employing hyperbole.
So its not an issue entirely on one end, its a deliberate action designed to make people feel one way, but falls apart under analysis.
If before the top show was seen by 90% of all customers, and now each of 20 shows is watched by 5%, it will be comparatively very hard to find someone who has watched the most-viewed show of today despite it being the most watched.
You panned someone for understanding basic math.
Unless the population rises to a trillion, it seems hard to imagine there will ever again be so much cultural consciousness directed towards a single show. I do not even know what is on broadcast TV any more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_televisio...
I reckon a thing that happens to 50% of the population is as culturally widespread as if it had happened to 100% of it. Because it means one talking to another about it means you hear about it everywhere, since a conversation requires 2 people.
The kids engaged most with lessons about privacy and least with lessons about social media addiction and influence.
If my friends seemed to be ignoring my tweets, I'd certainly ask them what's up with that through a different mechanism (in person, through texting, whatever). If the only interaction I have with a person is through Twitter, then it's a real stretch to call them "friends" in the first place.
I'd say most folks who are not actually earning cash from being an 'influencer' seek some form of validation, but most will deny it, and most of those will actually believe their words. We humans are sometimes a bit weird, aren't we.
People are starting to understand that engagement for the sake of it isn't necessarily desirable. The virality of something doesn't indicate its importance, just that it went viral. In some cases, it's a negative signal.
Over the last 1.5 years, I've intentionally reduced my interaction with social media significantly. I've become less and less aware of the viral trends of the week. I've stopped going to most of the content aggregators (HN is one of the last holdouts), and I've spent more time reading books and doing things in person.
My life is much better for it, and as someone who found tremendous value in Internet communities and credit them for helping me navigate a tumultuous childhood in the 90s, it now feels like the time to leave it mostly behind.
Not just because the Internet has changed, but because it is changing the people who use it. For all the good in the beginning, it was changing me in ways that I did not like. I was becoming more reactionary, less tolerant, and more pessimistic about other humans.
It seems to me that we're just not mentally equipped (or at least I'm not) to handle the Internet in its current form in the long run. It's fine for awhile, but degrades rapidly. I hope the next generation of web technology and communities will find ways to solve this, but I'm starting to think that part of the solution is to stop using it for the important stuff.
It turns out to be very possible, and very pleasant.
I skipped IRC but I was all over Direct Connect and attended hub LAN parties.
I loved digg, but that ended.
I was on facebook for 3 months when it came out before deciding it was toxic trash and deleting it.
I had a twitter but never understood it, never used it, seemed toxic too so deleted that.
Reddit became a hub of underhanded advertising and bad faith arguments by toxic actors, not to mention the restrictions that were applied to make it corporate friendly so that went in the bin too.
Like you, HN is one of the last places I visit, and discord is still scratching my Direct Connect itch with a few technology focused servers and people on the otherside of the world I've never met that I call friends.
The people in real life that I am close with can be found either in Signal, Telegram or over plain old SMS.
Recently my partners friend was visiting and she was on Tiktok the entire time. Sometimes spending time in her room on Tiktok rather than hanging out. She complained about Israels bombing runs, but had zero knowledge of the Oct 7 atrocities.
I really enjoy not being Algoritmically Assimilated like I see and hear many people are. Touching grass is good for us.
What's out then? What's out is all the opinion bloggeries and microbloggings, the whole feuilletonistic/debate spectrum, everything by "journalists", the reddits and chans, the economic or political or culture/zeitgeist doom or boom spectrums. Anything "news" that isn't specific-niche-or-thing news. It was only ever the lure of entertainment, spice, novelty, tickling-of-intellect in there anyway, but yeah it can leave unwanted engravements in mind over prolonged exposure. And for entertainment, spice, and novelty, there's a dozen thousand movies and a million games I and everyone else hasn't yet given play time for that hour-or-two a day of wind-down and the occasional "slow-mo day", from the past 60 years alone, let alone new stuff. They somehow seem oddly, innocently harmless in comparison, are self-contained and obviously not hellbent on "changing your path".
Of course that's what the article is alarmed about, but this way "the web" is a friendly, generously you-serving infrastructure offering of modernity and if you don't need it to be any more than that, there's just no such complication of "we aren't evolved/equipped for what we made" here..
This works especially finely nowadays vs. say 2016-2022 as "mostly-utilitarian"/non-blathery contents and discussions (whether thats a distro forum or a fandom wiki or a gaming channel or Github Issues, you get my drift) have healed from over-politization that did quite permeate them for that timeframe.
So maybe it's just really the old classic navigating-modern-mass-media skill building in yet another screamier more-blown-up iteration here.
so the normies finally won.
i think it makes sense that virality now is totally controlled by algorithms. there's revenues to be made. such a thing can't be left to chance, that was a blip of early internet history.
to me its all become boring, too much content and all of it seems the same, bland and unoriginal. i know there's good stuff but it's not easy to find among the noise.
The pace at which hobbies like paragliding, base jumping, foil boarding, mountain biking, hiking, etc are growing is incredible to watch. Engineering talent dedicated towards "fun stuff" (aka top of Maslow's hierarchy and not influential on human survival (in my case the sports are very against raising the rates of survival lol))gets rewarded at paces never before seen.
> so the normies finally won.
I think I get your general point and I think I agree with it; but I have to point out that when I compare "food ASMR" and "a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man," to what was broadcast back when we only had three channels, it makes me think the "normies," have either most definitely not won, or that I'm way, way out of touch on what "normal," is now.
I'm not sure if that effects your point or not, but thought it was worth pointing out.
Maybe better to wait for an independent actor to verify that (if thats even possible). It would not be in tiktoks best interests for instance to have in that list, people reading out Osama Bin Ladens letter and exclaiming him to be correct.
Proxy estimation is absolutely a statistical construct, its the underlying of many branches of statistics, and in this particular case it would be a causal inference.
And I don't think terrorism or terrorist apologia is so far off from general political content that I would deem random+independent from each other.
I've long been trying to communicate this trend to anyone who will listen, once needs are saturated the trend becomes building specialization that produces the most hedonism/value for the individual (per unit of inputs). Taken to the limit the outcome is a product perfectly attuned to your feel good chemical receptors in your body and brain.
Given a download of your brain, the future looks like generated content that is attuned to you alone, and is suboptimal for everyone else (relative to their own generated content). There will be a minor amount of novelty added to stimulate those circuits (and check the gradient for optima), but will mostly be a remix of what you already respond to.
So instead of Nike choosing to produce 10, err 100, colors of shoes, they will simply make exactly the color you want, just for you (and whoever collides).
Part of this will be an explosion in creativity because as an individual you will be able to express what you want and create it without the years/decades of training required to learn Script writing, or film, or the guitar, or how to sew etc.
Will it be good for us or society? That's a moral argument I'm not making here. Just an observation and extrapolation of what seems to be happening.
The reasons those stories are told over and over is because we're highly susceptible to things that use our pleasure centers in ways that lead to maladaptive outcomes. You could reframe this to say we've collectively warned ourselves about this for decades, and we're still plunging headlong towards this future despite realizing how badly it can turn out in a worst case.
That’s an outdated and primitive view. People who are rich aren’t fat simply because they have easier access to food. Non-illicit addictions (like smoking) don’t happen to people uniformly simply because nicotine is at the same supermarket that everyone goes to. If people are about to “amuse themselves to death” then that is because they are leading an unbalanced life in some way, like being overworked or not having their needs met (like “social needs”, which I hear is a thing (cannot confirm or disconfirm)).
And if a lot of people have those problems? Yeah, then it becomes a societal problem.
But to talk about that you would have to look beyond the symptoms. But I guess worrying about Zappaesque sex robots is more fun.
This is essentially the point I’m making, i.e. “we're highly susceptible to things…”.
It’s not clear to me what aspect you consider to be outdated and primitive vs. what you seem to be restating. I suspect we’re in agreement and that you may have misunderstood my comment, which was not trying to claim that people have problems just because they have access. Clearly there are systemic factors that make access more or less of an issue.
It would be the end of society. Society requires a common understanding of reality, and the things you're talking about are deliberately destroying a common understanding of reality.
Responding to your comment directly: I would argue that the opposite is happening. Things are becoming more samey. An individuals interests may be an unique amalgamation, but the pieces that make up the whole definitely are not unique.
> Will it be good for us or society?
I would say that it would be mundane or not as impactful. Not everything in life is going to be a pivotal moment for humanity. I would even argue that too many things in life are treated as if they are.
I don’t participate in much social media. Facebook’s entire purpose to me is classified ads for furniture and bike parts. Instagram exists purely as an augmentation to Pinterest. Both of which exist simply to keep me and my partner from arguing endlessly about entirely imaginary design & decorating details. I don’t get the appeal of TikTok, and Twitter is mostly a place to make #dadjokes that I don’t want to subject my actual family to.
There was no positive value in being too online and participating in platforms and venues of the be all things to everybody variety.
The prevailing zeitgeist narrative about any given era is all at once revisionist, simplistic, and projected onto it after the fact.
One could assign some characteristic to the preset era like the dominance of influencers and gurus or something of that sort. It will be easy 15 years from now to look back at how everything from makeup to IT infrastructure culture became hitched to “influencers”.
I'm not missing out on anything by being out of the loop on the outrage of the day or meme of the week. I still kill time online but it's less mindless and aligns more with my interests.
Looking back, the mind shift was gradual but quite profound. It feels like I've reclaimed control over what I deem important, and my opinions actually feel like my own rather than being swayed by algorithmic feeds and comments.
The more time I spend detached from the internet hive mind, the more it looks like a zeitgeist of compounded absurdity.
Dat boi (early 2016) was the first time I missed out on the meme zeitgeist and it’s been slipping further from my grasp ever since.
I suspect I am also getting old.
I think the internet - and just life in general - has always been what this article is fretting about. Stuff happens, some people see it, some don't. Nothing to see here.
We now have maybe millions of content creators jostling for views, rather than three letter TV stations showing the same templates shows. What gets you an audience isn’t uniformity, but being different in an interesting way.
[1] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
Reviews for the show (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Agent) suggest that it's mediocre and forgettable. You've very likely heard of, and watched, the most popular shows on netflix when defined as the shows most people consider to be the best on the platform.
As long as I'm able to find out about the good shows on netflix, it really doesn't matter to me if some random netflix original disappointed more people within a specific time span.
But no, it was The Night Manager. Sigh.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tik...
IMHO this video was hard to watch.
There is no "loneliness epidemic" [1] *, and blaming every listener's anxiety+depression on X (the oldest snake oil tactic), where X is YouTube's personalization algorithm, is cringeworthy. The rest of this video was full of loose correlations. It reminded me of watching the "pizza gate" conspiracy video.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/loneliness-epidemic
* Or rather, there was none before 2020. Obviously, in 2020+, the COVID quarantine was a massive drive of loneliness poll results, and we must assume that effect might still linger a few years later. The only way to rule this out is to look at pre-2020 polls.
I wonder if that actually works... It still tracks location, obviously Cookies (which you probably delete for this) and possibly a lot of other things. Maybe YouTube even maps your IP address to previous logins and uses that information "just slightly" in order to not throw you off...
But I’m sure YouTube slowly but surely starts building a profile while in incognito to try and capture your eye balls.
Wanting it or not the actual important news will reach you, and we’re already overloaded with information like never before, so accepting that most of what’s happening has no value to you (especially considering the toxic nature of online news and comments) is maybe the healthiest approach.
Relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
> The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity.[1][2][3][4] Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers.[5]
This is not a new thing. SEO types have been running 'spinner' tools for a long time. A spinner is a tool/technique to make copied content look fresh and new, and non-verbatim. Then we have the advent of LLMs which I have no doubt is being leveraged right now to spam the web with synthetic content.
I find it distasteful that this article frames it as a fringe (conspiracy) theory of the present, rather than simply a theory of the future.
Is the Internet dead now? I mean no, that's pretty fringe.
Will it become so in the future? It's a very reasonable and thought-provoking hypothesis.
IMO the article should be reframed to take this into account, or a new term should be coined.
> “One reason why there’s so much consternation is that if you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t rig the game anymore,” he said.
Exactly. This is part of it, but the other part is that it's become extremely expensive to rig the game on a regular basis because of how fragmented and distributed everything is.
I can't remember where I read it, but something I read made the claim that this is the reason why TV and Hollywood seem to be stuck in a cycle of remakes, spin offs, and extending already loved franchises for the last 5 or so years. The fact that there is no longer a monoculture means it's harder and harder to guess what media will be popular across a broad spectrum of people. You can make small budget things for a single niche, but it doesn't make sense to spend $100 million on a niche movie. It's riskier than ever to do something novel because our culture is so fragmented, so they're falling back on things that succeeded when we did have more of a monoculture, since they know that has broad appeal (or at least it did at one point).
What happens to the human monkey-brain when the rate of technological achievements happen faster and faster?
I am at the airport writing this, on my way home. Everyone who's here alone is on their phone(except me - I'm on my laptop).
A question to you, who is a bit older than me. What did you do when you were alone but in a social setting? Like an airport bar?
Believe that something trending is significant? Fake News because it is overblown and was only chuckled at for five seconds by two million people—most of whom housewives in New England—and then promptly forgotten. Don’t believe that something trending is significant? Same deal.
The “people are saying” headlines are already a thing. The ones where you find out that it’s three tweets with a cumulative like (or retweets? idk) of 57. Of course now they can justify them since it might be hundreds of thousands.
> A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable monoculture may feel, especially to those who’ve been continuously plugged into trending topics and viral culture, like a relief. But this new era of the internet is also one that entrenches tech giants and any forthcoming emergent platforms as the sole gatekeepers when it comes to tracking the way that information travels. We already know them to be unreliable narrators and poor stewards, but on a fragmented internet, where recommendation algorithms beat out the older follower model, we rely on these corporations to give us a sense of scale. This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.
No self-aware closing joke about how a media writer pines for a time when they had a clear role as a meta-commentator? Ugh, too sincere.
I'm part of a small group who does. We would like to get in touch with others.
Or current approach: https://social-protocols.org/social-network/
> The only assumptions are that 1) a vote reflects a users intent to give a post more/less attention (see The Law of Attention) and 2) this intent is caused by underlying beliefs that we cannot observe
The assumption #1 is unlikely to hold. People are generally biased. They will not think twice when casting a vote, will act on impulse and if presented with the opportunity, cast a downvote on things they merely dislike, without having read the article they are voting on.
I doubt this will ever change.
I left the whole Facebook ecosystem years ago, Twitter last year, never used Reddit nor TikTok.
The amount of time and cpu cycles I can rather put towards my own interests and going deep on them, rather than chasing what the mass is interested in, is quite big.
Sure, at times I will sound like the guy who has been living in a forest and doesn't know about the latest happening trends. But most of the time I have deeper and better researched knowledge on the subject matters that are always relevant (rather than the fleeting trends of social media).
I don't know "what's going on online" and I probably never have. I only know what's happening in the little corners I visit. I think I like it better that way.
I keep hoping the Fediverse will win. After what's happened to Twitter and Reddit and Facebook, it seems self-evident that our main means of public discourse needs to be something decentralized.
But the Fediverse is struggling. UX is a disaster, every instance admin is holding on by their fingernails to stay solvent and sane, product development is comparatively slow, and bad actors have only barely gotten started attacking them.
> the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, t
I'm just stating reality: reputable news sources used to have free access to their articles on their websites. Now they do not.
The difference with the old web is (was) that it consisted mostly of blogs - public pages - available to everyone, in a way that if a piece became trendy, it would be for a broader set of people.
I miss that.
This very article about the phenomenon is unreadable by the majorly of Earth because it’s behind a paywall.
> "We old-timers," Arthur C. Clarke remarked recently, "were able to accomplish something unique. We were the last generation able to read everything in the science-fiction field. No one will ever be able to do that again."
I get offered content on X and I don’t get where it’s coming from or why and I’m not sure if it’s actually something I should be concerned about. It’s all gotten a bit “weird” if you ask me.
A student recently introduced me to BLP Kosher. That was... an experience.
> A student recently introduced me to BLP Kosher. That was... an experience.
A lot to unpack here, but it sounds to me like you don’t like or appreciate rap music, which says more about your own individual music taste than the quality of BLP Kosher’s music or this particular track.
I think the production is on point and the track low-key slaps, but that’s just my opinion.
I like rap. In my opinion, rap music embodies the last vestiges of individuality and creativity that rock and roll pioneered. Rock is now just a snake eating its own tail. All the soul is gone.
I find Kosher to be odd. That's all.
What about him strikes you as odd compared to rap artists you’re a fan of, or odd in what respect? I’d be inclined to agree, as I don't typically assume Jews are big in rap, but there’s definitely a huge precedent in Beastie Boys.
A supposedly Jewish rapper talking about killing people and embracing that lifestyle seems weird to me. The fact that he looks awkward and uncomfortable when he tries to somewhat dance to the beat strikes me. And the way he speaks also seems very much like a put on. Like he's intentionally trying to speak in a stereotypically black manner but it doesn't come natural to him.
Generally, I get the impression that he's a white skater kid with a shtick. And being Jewish feels like part of that shtick to me.
Happy to be wrong, and I don't hate the guy. I'm not going to go around knocking people for liking him. But it does feel like something you like in middle school and then grow out of, only to go back and wonder why you enjoyed it.
Just my two cents and my opinion in worthless.
Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers (...) Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, (...) “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows - legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.
That was my feel exactly. How is it possible that I'm even on the same platform and have never even heard of it?
And for those I am closer with, who I do share hobbies and interests with, we obviously have things to talk about as we're following the same topics.
In comparison, those holding the most data know more than ever. That is how they built the AI tools to begin with. And in the chaos they will dictate what we get out of the internet.
There appears to be a resignation that the "news" will now print whatever tiktok puts in front of them(!) and a cynical confession that drumming up clicks for random nonsense was, actually, the previous strategy.
Those of us who never took it seriously can't wait for it to keep unraveling.
>the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one
Lol.
- paywalls like in this website
- e-commerce searches (i.e. amazon) increasingly omitting some brands and some other filters
- google, youtube, facebook (i.e. events) searches being crippled
The knowledge is being limited for the sake of advertisers and marketing
Huh? X traffic is up 22% year over year:
I am assuming I was paywalled in the exact same spot as you and it's baffling from that small snippet that you came up with this claim. This is the exact quote and the only mention of that clown:
> the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk,
Arguably, Twitter collapsed into... X?... and X's value has tanked in the last 12 months. That less than 10 word phrase is not the focus of the intro - It's the overall collapse of the centralized-on-social-media internet.
One aspect no touched is how it seems on TikTok an artist/band can have a song getting very popular for a limited amount of time and that's it, it doesn't lead to anything else for him/her/them. No really new fanbase, etc.
> "This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify."
Suggested reading: > "The detailed and engrossing 2008 book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford investigates the CIA’s ideological struggle from 1947 to 1967 to win “hearts and minds” for US capitalism and to prosecute the Cold War."
That effort to control the media narratives being fed to the American public did not end in 1967 of course, it's alive and well today (although the organizations responsible are more nebulous, ranging from government bureaucracies to non-profit foundations to corporate ownership umbrellas).
It's true that the siloing of information due to the self-reinforcing effects of social media optimization algorithms (related to the desire to generate captive audiences for targeted advertising) is a problem, but having multiple independent social media accounts devoted to different topics is one way around it.
> [maladjusted 19 year old desperate to prove that he is smarter than his parents](http://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ihk09/iama_cuban_who_li...)
Bonus:
> On 4chan, smart people pretend to be stupid. On Reddit, stupid people pretend to be smart.
there are lots of things happening online but off reddit, and also lots of people that actively don't care what is happening on Reddit.