Post AhYIn1FmF7CClSmuBM by JustinH@twit.social
(DIR) More posts by JustinH@twit.social
(DIR) Post #AhYERMYpwTIwf27YDA by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:05:05Z
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So there's a lot of kvetching, from myself included, about how the modern internet has gotten worse, usually due to a combination of SEO, social media gone evil, and the prevalence of money as more and more of a guiding factor in tech.But of course the old internet had the problem of being fairly boring. The interesting question is how to get a third way. I've heard a few proposals:
(DIR) Post #AhYElaxg6uHR7DO61w by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:08:45Z
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One from Cory Doctorow, and others, is to essentially have government intercession to prevent rent-seeking. The tech solutions I've heard tend to focus on some kind of tokenization. I honestly don't know what will work, and one thing that worries me is that I think we content-suppliers see more rot than consumers. That is, we're saying "but arrrrrrrt" while people are actually getting lots of media they like for free.
(DIR) Post #AhYEoDDCroxWKHtmj2 by dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
2024-05-04T15:09:10Z
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@ZachWeinersmith The social aspects of the internet were way way more interesting in 2000 than they were in 2015... Mastodon has brought back Usenet discussions so that's good. What was "boring" was the fact the technology wasn't developed, so you had much more static everything and text based stuff and people hadn't built much yet.
(DIR) Post #AhYEuboSJa3EMUN7lQ by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:10:22Z
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In other words, my worry is that on some fundamental level evil social media (or whatever) will always win because they're supply what the consumer wants, or anyway is engaged by. One reads stories about GenZ wanting to drop out of obsessive media culture, but I have no sense that this is the norm. And I think as long as most entertainment comes through these filters, it's going to be hard to live in a golden age of good work. It'll necessarily be more disposable algorithm-tripping stuff.
(DIR) Post #AhYF04FQ1QS7zzaQiW by itty53@beige.party
2024-05-04T15:11:18Z
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@ZachWeinersmith The Internet is just a facet of life, and "life is boring" or "life is unfair" or "life is stacked against me" are all very common complaints about life. Replace life with the Internet there and it's all quite familiar, even has the same conclusions.The reality is life is what you go out and make of it. It's a big world, but of course you're bored sitting in the same room doing the same thing. Same with the Internet. The old Internet didn't go anywhere. There was no "new" Internet to take over. It's the same Internet: HTTP protocols. Hell there's still BBS and IRC around. People changed. What people think has changed. Focusing elsewhere besides the people who make up the Internet (and life) is just assigning blame to something more convenient.
(DIR) Post #AhYF5Q3WMqCj5EZcGW by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:12:20Z
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To my mind the ideal ecosystem for creativity has certain qualities, e.g.1) There's a large artistic "middle class," meaning that although there may be big stars, people doing solid work, or still learning their craft, can make enough money to focus on their work.2) Getting work viewed is less about advertising than about quality, meaning that most tastemakers should care about what's lasting more than what's zeitgeisty.
(DIR) Post #AhYF7wq9RlnRLEWeiu by dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
2024-05-04T15:12:44Z
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@ZachWeinersmith I love your stuff, and I think you should be paid. But there's really no reason you need to be paid by every individual who enjoys your stuff any more than there's a need for a factory that's doing smokestack scrubbing to be paid by everyone who breathes clean air.Grants... we need grants for people like you or people like Steve Mould who makes great educational science videos, or people who would like to produce educational content but don't want to go anywhere near YouTube
(DIR) Post #AhYF8UpH5XIUkMNR4q by gsuberland@chaos.social
2024-05-04T15:12:46Z
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@ZachWeinersmith my personal view on the matter is that there's a divide between people who use the internet as a purely consumer experience and people who want more out of it, and the latter will organically seek out and build capabilities and platforms to fit those wants and needs, while the former group will largely continue to be served by commercial interests while also occasionally benefitting from the work of the latter group. there will not be any defining structural change.
(DIR) Post #AhYFFNZmRRcSHxPai0 by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:14:06Z
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3) There should be enough money coming into the system to support many axes of diversity among creators in order to encourage more new weird stuff.4) Consumers have to actually care about the different between what is amusing and what is good - the artistic equivalence to the difference between another candy bar and a healthy meal.5) The locus of great art should be among the public, not universities or restricted environments.
(DIR) Post #AhYFJAt3Yrfg5nEnse by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:14:48Z
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@ZachWeinersmith there were a lot of things about the old internet I definitely hated at the time. The old forum admins were even less fair than social media managers. Trolls everywhere. And so many websites were IE-only or didn't properly support non-Latin languages. Open standards were often disregarded and important software was often Windows-only.But this is all beside your point. One technological solution that would help a bit is AI to filter out repetitive and stolen content.
(DIR) Post #AhYFO5sZbjVi0cMDyK by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:15:42Z
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There's likely more, but my point is that all this stuff seems to me to be pretty straightforward, and much of the current ecosystem is against all this stuff. The rise of social media means you have e.g. people getting millions of readers on facebook and deriving literally zero revenue from it, unless they're willing to also do a little dance to get people to buy a t-shirt. Young artists now spend countless hours learning platform algorithms, rather than craft.
(DIR) Post #AhYFRPM5eVvdHWkBwO by nerdybutcute@social.horrorhub.club
2024-05-04T15:16:14Z
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@ZachWeinersmith #4 alone is a huge problem and always has been, internet or no
(DIR) Post #AhYFV3xT9G764tyEa0 by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:16:57Z
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In retrospect, what was best for me about the early internet was that although there was competition and we cared about reader numbers and so on, because there weren't big aggregators or modern social media, your only paths forward were making stuff people liked and making friends among peers. Emotionally, aesthetically, I might even say morally, it was better. But you need money to attract and sustain more artists.
(DIR) Post #AhYFe6P9QCzyGvEFTU by gsuberland@chaos.social
2024-05-04T15:17:57Z
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@ZachWeinersmith proposals to fundamentally alter the fabric of the internet in any widespread technological or sociological way are doomed to remain proposals. the logistics of getting such proposals in front of enough people to matter at the scale of the internet are just infeasible.change will occur organically in microcosms because individuals want to see that change and are willing to put in the work. some of those ideas may grow and reach larger scales, but many will not.
(DIR) Post #AhYFg8KDFjuoo5t5Gq by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:18:57Z
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Anyway, I don't know the solution. Artists can't really unionize en masse because social media could just murder most careers. And anyway, we're too disorganized and dispersed. But as a for instance, if social media networks had to pay 1% of revenue made from ads posted next to artist's creations, on their own sites on the platform, billions would pour into the arts, meaning more full-time careers, more learning, more books.
(DIR) Post #AhYHB1FjhHEPnv5KLI by wordshaper@weatherishappening.network
2024-05-04T15:35:42Z
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@ZachWeinersmith this is, I’m afraid, something that needs a legal solution—like every other problem that’s fundamentally a people problem there’s no technical solution.Your idea about revenue sharing is a good one and probably has the best chance of success, though given all the art theft on the internet it’ll be tricky.
(DIR) Post #AhYHGYWFRPFCQSRrCS by rotopenguin@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:36:40Z
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@ZachWeinersmith no no no, we don't need a functional government to intervene in rent seeking. The blockchain solves it all.As a great man once said - The merkle tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
(DIR) Post #AhYHMw8WXrYzPYOVCS by lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org
2024-05-04T15:37:52Z
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@ZachWeinersmith As someone who has been involved in the Internet before there was an Internet (reaching back to early ARPANET days), I can assure you that it will continue to be a race to the bottom. These are the GOOD days in comparison to what the future holds, including government ID requirements for usage, tracking of all Internet use, blocking of content "not considered appropriate for children", banning of VPNs ... well -- look at the Chinese Internet and you get an idea of the future holds for the world. Trust me on this.
(DIR) Post #AhYHeATiTZ6OoYWVVY by johnbierce@wandering.shop
2024-05-04T15:41:00Z
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@ZachWeinersmith I wish I had some clever, thoughtful answer, or at least a pithy joke, but I mostly just share a lot of those same anxieties and worries.I do tend to lean in Doctorow's direction for solutions- I don't think there's much individual, smaller artists like me can do right now. Collectively, maybe, though for novelists like me, unionization isn't really possible. (Thanks, bizarre quirks of US labor law.)
(DIR) Post #AhYIn1FmF7CClSmuBM by JustinH@twit.social
2024-05-04T15:53:48Z
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@ZachWeinersmith Is there a reason it needs to be interesting? The internet is a tool, yet you never see people demanding that their screwdrivers entertain them.
(DIR) Post #AhYIsjNTcLhB3r73Ka by glyph@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:54:50Z
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@ZachWeinersmith I think it's useful to think about this as a manifestation of power relationships rather than as a vague sense of unease with a set of unpleasant realities. Where is power concentrating, and where is it dispersing? Social media conglomerates concentrate power on the aggregation side and they disperse power on the artist side. Infinite niches means no monoculture, no monoculture means no superstars, no superstars means no one to wield power in the interests of artists.
(DIR) Post #AhYItIINnHPvMBzyka by darwinwoodka@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:54:56Z
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@ZachWeinersmith BORING? hah.
(DIR) Post #AhYIx2p1GZNEWb3JpY by GregStolze@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:55:35Z
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@ZachWeinersmith Zach, surely you are not seriously suggesting that "art" should be able to have even a single thing that commerce cannot co-opt, ruin, bury or outright steal?Sounds un-American!
(DIR) Post #AhYJ9mYh2nibqjUR3w by darwinwoodka@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T15:57:56Z
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@ZachWeinersmith UBI! UBI! UBI!
(DIR) Post #AhYKTlQH4oDK4Zdz8a by MacBalance@mstdn.games
2024-05-04T16:12:43Z
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@ZachWeinersmith I still think about the proposal years ago to fight spam by essentially charging a penny per email. You want to get in my inbox? Spend a penny. E-commerce would have to factor it in and it’s be a wash in the case of freinds. The big issue is always how to handle the money unfortunately.
(DIR) Post #AhYLALyFaA27aRqOcS by neverbeaten@mas.to
2024-05-04T16:20:26Z
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@ZachWeinersmith Peak internet was homestarrunner.com and ms comic chat. It wasn't boring.
(DIR) Post #AhYOsEioC9Z3hzEorY by drdirtbag@mountains.social
2024-05-04T17:01:57Z
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@ZachWeinersmith Re (1) and (3): I do completely unrelated things for money and meaning, as many people do, and that amateurism is a lot of what made the old internet fun to me. It was possible because the people making cool stuff had jobs that made them financially secure and left them free time. This has often been the case, e.g. the writers who were fire lookouts (Snyder, Abbey, Kerouac). If SMBC were published more sporadically because you had to make money some other way, I'd still subscribe to the RSS feed and enjoy it just as much.
(DIR) Post #AhYP66THfO8wAsaZ3w by lafncow@mastodon.social
2024-05-04T17:04:30Z
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@ZachWeinersmith "But of course the old internet had the problem of being fairly boring."[citation needed]
(DIR) Post #AhYPUwt4R9oLgoUu3s by robryk@qoto.org
2024-05-04T17:08:53Z
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@ZachWeinersmith Can you expand on what you mean by boring? When I was a preteen I could find random websites with lots of circuit diagrams for simple things someone found useful, Seaview fanfiction, and various very esoteric topics. My impression is that finding as satisfyingly in-depth descriptions, especially of niche topics, is now harder.
(DIR) Post #AhYQRJMx0XSsDCIqwK by MacBalance@mstdn.games
2024-05-04T17:19:31Z
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@ZachWeinersmith I also miss the opinionated attitude of so many early web fan sites. Like someone would have megabytes of obsessively hand-written episode guides and such for the Muppets or whatever, then you’d find that one episode offended then so much they refuse to even acknowledge its existence.So many modern wikis have adopted a very bland, neutral tone that is factual, but not fun.
(DIR) Post #AhYVrcLpYUrsNp8sXQ by donaldball@triangletoot.party
2024-05-04T18:20:17Z
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@ZachWeinersmith @cammerman Ummmmm that was not even a little bit my experience of the old Internet.
(DIR) Post #AhYYxEFuM31DFhjtfE by hakirsch@furries.club
2024-05-04T18:54:52Z
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@ZachWeinersmith my take: one is that social media services aren't there for the people who view content on them; they're for the people who run the service to try and make money from, first by venture capital investment and then by advertising revenue or even subscription services. the second is that people who want to view creative works want to join a service and immediately see art, hear music, watch videos, and interact with people. so any system that succeeds needs to hook people in from the start. Mastodon and Bluesky require some fiddling around and so longtime twitter users, for example, join and go "wtf this is empty and boring" and leave. the third is that people who consume creative works don't necessarily have any idea what's involved in making them, so as long as they get something interesting it's irrelevant where it came from. (contd)
(DIR) Post #AhYdxlFECZGpKwUi5g by oblomov@sociale.network
2024-05-04T19:50:59Z
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@ZachWeinersmith FWIW, I disagree that the Internet of old was boring. Despite its technical limitations and questionable accessibility to the general public, it was in fact often much more interesting than the modem web.(Also, the answer to the art issue is, a for many other things, universal basic income.)
(DIR) Post #AhYktjPDnOyu9eC6j2 by glasspusher@beige.party
2024-05-04T21:08:45Z
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@ZachWeinersmith I never considered the old internet boring. Maybe I’m boring? 🤣
(DIR) Post #AhaE0Srsly64ig7glE by chocobo13@mastodon.social
2024-05-05T14:09:39Z
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@ZachWeinersmithSo the furry fandom, but on a different scale?
(DIR) Post #AhdLZHWKElwAoXT7pY by maxthefox@spacey.space
2024-05-07T02:18:29Z
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@ZachWeinersmith @nyrath I want UBI so that artists and writers can comfortably make niche stuff that they and their friends like without worrying about not being able to make a living off it or having to work a day job in addition (resulting in less quantity and probably less quality).rn my webnovels are free but I write them in my spare time, not ideal but what else can I do...