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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

It's tempting to play tiny violins for marketers who have, as a post below puts it, been "following us round smelling our farts to see what we had for breakfast". But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform and subject to that platform's political and social filters. Is that good? Noah Smith thinks so [1], but it's not hard to think of disadvantages.

[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...

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> But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform

All that's happened is the normies arrived some time ago and are now being herded into large containers, just as they always have. The small sites aren't going anywhere, and they are part of "everything".

Giant corporations owning the biggest sites doesn't effect me in the same way giant corps owning the media companies in the 90s didn't effect me. It's a shame, but that's the way it has to be. The average person wants instant and poor gratification, and they will always be taken advantage of.

This reply seems snobbish and to ignore the huge value of the internet to ordinary people ("normies").

Reading it back I agree that it seems snobbish, and I'm sorry for that. I'm tired of bending over backwards to accommodate objectively poor behaviour though. Sometimes you just have to say "this is not for you".

If we go into that with a kind heart (and not just to elevate ourselves above others), it can be a good thing. Admitting unfashionable truths lets us move on to situations where more people are happy.

For my part, I'm more than happy to admit when something is not for me — be that due to a lack of intelligence, interest, or motivation — and I'm happier for it.

"Filthy normies" and such is always a hilarious bit of nerdspeak. But the crux of it, to some degree, I am normie and normie am I - i.e. it's human nature and in all of us. Facebook or reddit never set out to say "Hey, I want to be evil and polarize society". They simply wrote an algorithm, told the algorithm, "Hey algorithm, find out what people like to read, and give 'em more of it". And people answered "we love drama, we love juicy, we love gossip, we love the grey area" which it turns out, gets people worked up, polarized, and keeps eyes on the prize. Just as the original internet was a scholarly interaction method and turned out to be a porn delivery mechanism, so too with social media being intended to join people together and yet it splits us apart. Are we to blame the one who held up the mirror only for humanity to see its own ugly visage and become angered by it, hard to say. Probably we should blame them if they made 9999 gorillon dollars from it, which they did and are doing.

But those people don't really care about how the internet works, they just use the big mainstream sites and go on with their lives.

Everyone else only dislikes them because they're the ones being tailored to. Everything is going to become more generalized and bland because it appeals to the most amount of people, and that makes the most amount of money (and the most boring kind of Internet).

Giant corps owning the media companies in the 90s affected you a lot - whether you noticed it or not.

same with the alphabet tv networks in the 1950s through cable.

Pre-Telecommunications Act was nothing like Post-Telecommunications Act. Things actually changed. In the early 90s, you could complain about the media being owned by just fifty companies. Now imagining that many media companies seems mythical.

It was also the beginning of automated content, with the "Jack" radio format.

Trivia: if there hadn't been rules against media consolidation, ABC and NBC would never have have been forced to split up.

> Now imagining that many media companies seems mythical.

Why are YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/Twitch/OnlyFans channels, podcasts, and other online media businesses not considered media companies?

The same reason television programs aren’t television networks. They all have to play by the platform’s arbitrary rules or their show will get unalived.

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