Dead Internet (2023)

Stop feeding the troll.

And by troll I mean Elon

The main issue with that isn’t just the core concept, ie an ai that extends your ability to field preliminary conversation, but also the fact that llms currently can’t mimic you very well, so it just doesn’t work for this use case lol.

>Then, as the Obama Era unleashed a rogue-wave of cultural disintegration, birthing the modern Woke Era, with its attendant digital sequestrations and industrial-scale deplatforming, the ‘Web’ turned another critical corner in its descent toward moribundity. The now-dominant Big Tech Hall Monitors became riot-police and gatekeeper in one, smoting down the sunless pate of any poor schmo who dared lean an elbow on the hallowed sill of the ever-shrinking Overton Window.

Somehow I don't think you read the article.

Try youtube without an account or history. Even worse, on the smart tv in a hotel room.

It's the same on Twitter/X, possibly even worse.

Instagram is a walled garden, as is LinkedIn.

I recently did the North Coast 500 miles around Scotland and when I was using wifi I was challenged often to prove I'm human. It got really tiresome and I ended up going back to mobile data just to avoid that.

Having access to a vast quantity of information at all times does not seem to stop authority figures from being ignorant of the law, anti-vaxxers from being ignorant of medicine or Flat Earthers from being ignorant of just about everything. It actually amplifies those groups.

I loved the olden days of the world and their dog having a personal website about whatever they wanted, which you could visit without being tracked or having to login. Oh, and I wish the Internet of Things wasn't still so shitty.

My wife hadn’t had Facebook for years. She tried to make an account to use marketplace and it got immediately banned with no explanation.

I don’t know what’s going on with Facebook but I guess if you didn’t start using it 10+ years ago it’s too late now.

I love your username! I also had to make a fb account for work recently (after being off the platform since 2012) and even with a fake last name, work email and different phone number it managed to find and suggest as a friend: someone I went to university with _in another state_, who incidentally moved to the same city as me a few years later. There's no way they aren't maintaining shadow profiles and still accomplishing that. Aside from that, the feed is indeed an utter cesspool.

I became interested in this clearly AI created "poorly" woman profile who would post just the most nothing questions "What's smells better, fresh baked bread or freshly cut grass?" That would have thousands of replies.

Least common denominator planet of doom.

Any in particular that you recommend?

> However, by now I think we've found our places where the internet is still fun. There's still some forums and chat rooms that keep things interesting without the constant barrage of advertising.

I haven't. Internet is nothing more than an addiction for me. Internet is dead and misanthropic nowadays. It's soulless and corporate. It used to be fun, artistic, creative, and educational. Now it's neither of those, with extremely few exceptions like Wikipedia.

> This site is one of them, but there are a bunch of federated platforms out there now too that are fun to explore.

I read reddit and HN constantly because I seem to have an unhealthy compulsion to keep up with the news, politics, tech, and the world, but other than that I wouldn't say I like either site, or that they're fun.

The thing is that before most of the Internet population was in those places, and granted the population was much smaller (with pretty good self-filtering). But now everyone is scattered in the social media meme hellscape, and those old cool places are mostly populated by greybeards (not necessarily old-aged, just old-timers).

Don't get me wrong, they are very cool people, and usually quite welcoming, but superficially so. Once you start trying to get into these communities a bit more seriously, you realize is just a big pile of old drama, discursive substance has long left, and it's just a bunch of weird old friends you don't know hanging out.

The most extreme instance of this are old MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). Oh man, I really want them to be big thing again, they are so deep and interesting. Like old bulletin-boards, IRC and forums, but embedded in a living world. The closest we've gotten to an actual social metaverse world simulation is in text-form. Some are still relatively active, but most users are not engaged with the world anymore, it's mostly just a small chatroom with a musky odor.

I do agree that HN is a big exception to this, and there are indeed fresh federated platforms that are thriving. Mastodon is the main one, although I was never a big fan of the Twitter formula. And I couldn't get into Lemmy as a Reddit alternative, it's still too sparse and wild, the focus on semi-isolated server communities is both a strength and a significant source of disorientation.

I also got strong whiffs of nihilism from this post.

Your comment reminded me of Camus's interpretation of Sisyphus:

> As a life filled entirely of mundane and trivial labor, Sisyphus’s existence is meant to illustrate the futility (and absurdity) we confront in our own lives. Camus observes that a person’s life can become, essentially, a mundane routine: “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm…” (12-13). Yet, for Camus, Sisyphus is not to be pitied. Sisyphus represents the “absurd hero” because he chooses to live in the face of absurdity. This “choosing to live” is a matter of consciousness, for through his attitude and outlook, Sisyphus can free himself from his punishment and triumph over his situation without being able to change it. Sisyphus is aware of the full extent of his punishment: he is fully conscious of the fate imposed on him by the gods and the utter futility of his existence. His passion, freedom, and revolt, however, make him stronger than the punishment intended to crush him.

https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2019/05/01/camus-on-the-absur...

"Digital prepper". Great phrase. Sums up my overall impression of this perfectly.

pretty much Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message"

Any form of communication intended for humans will eventually be used for spam. That should be easy to refer to as so-and-so's law, but I can't find anyone to attribute it to.

The one observation I have is that real-time communication platforms (IRC back in the day, Discord/Slack now) seem to be more resilient if only because obvious spam can be nuked by a mod right away. Of course this just means spammers have to be more subtle, we shouldn't be pretending that these platforms are spam-free.

It's the text chat equivalent of leaving a brand name soda on a table in a movie. Some, for example, game publisher can just have bots go onto Discord and talk about "hey I heard [new game] is getting pretty good reviews".

Not to mention, poorly formatted/organized and to be randomly deleted or removed without warning with all that information lost.

OMG, I forgot about that. I ran that, and they had a pyramid scheme attached for referrals as well. I made a good hundred bucks as a kid.

I think they had another where they would give you a PC but you couldn't uninstall the ad bar.

> To think that FB either can't, or just doesn't want to filter out this garbage.

Facebook is literally paying to have it made:

https://archive.is/https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-a... (https://archive.is/YLUOK):

> Much like similar programs at TikTok and Twitter, Facebook’s Creator Bonus Program makes direct payments to people who successfully go viral on Meta platforms, and is meant to incentivize influencers and content creators to post high-quality content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta’s bonus program is “invite only,” but countless of the instructional videos I saw show that consistent posting over time will eventually get an account or page invited to the program.

> ...

> I sent Meta a series of AI-generated pages and content that had gone megaviral on my feed, as well as a series of questions about the creators program bonus and its stance on AI content. This included AI-generated images of Jesus that had 100,000 likes, an image of a family crying outside of a hut in the pouring rain, and AI images of Wonder Woman with semen in her hair and face. A Meta spokesperson told me that some of this content is not in violation of its policies, that payouts for the content I sent them were low, and that, while some of the images violated its content policies, many of them did not. They said that as long as the content is being consumed and liked by real people, is not being boosted inauthentically (with bots, for example) and does not violate Facebook’s community standards, then the program is working as intended.

> "We encourage creators to use AI tools to produce high-quality content that meets all our Community Standards, and we take action against those who attempt to drive traffic using inauthentic engagement whether they use AI or not,” the Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We know bad actors adapt their tactics to evade our rules, so we are always working to improve our detection and enforcement."

You should immediately install an adblock extension

The author also completely lost me with their anti-woke fixation:

“Transfixed, I sat watching the almost hypnotic rumblings of a transgender alt-right, conservative, Republican who was anti-trans rights. It was immaterial whether I agreed with them or not—the simple fact of knowing such outright interesting, transgressive voices even existed”

Outright interesting, transgressive voices. Lol. So outright interesting being yet another alt-right reactionary on the internet. Give me a break. I find this viewpoint forced on me on Youtube by watching gaming videos. I have no idea what they find so refreshing about it.