[HN Gopher] Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
___________________________________________________________________
Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
Author : furrowedbrow
Score : 90 points
Date : 2023-12-19 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| panarky wrote:
| https://archive.is/wyoId
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231219190051/https://www.theat...
| segasaturn wrote:
| Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when
| journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we
| had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it
| was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and
| the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of
| fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's
| centralized web.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Would agree. Some old school journalists from NYT wrote about
| that phenomenon. Colleagues doing a lot of stories that were
| basically the groupthink of their friend group or what they saw
| on Twitter.
|
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| One sourcing was this interview with NYT publisher -
| https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-
| interview/a...
|
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That sounds a lot like how "news" were sourced before that,
| with random interviews at street corners near the newspaper's
| office, stuff they heard at parties and from friends.
|
| I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how
| much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I tend to agree. Far too many "journalists" are publishing
| articles like "here's what one reddit user discovered about
| xyz".
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I've seen websites that automate all article creation from
| social media posts where they don't even check if the title
| generated makes sense.
| robotsquidward wrote:
| The article goes into that in depth, and how that hasn't really
| changed even on newer platforms like TikTok, just gotten harder
| to follow and understand.
| Dig1t wrote:
| Traffic is up on X 22% YoY
|
| 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.
| kurthr wrote:
| Man, those are some terrible statistics... 142.86% of nothing
| is still nothing. 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.
| Dig1t wrote:
| Yeah I had the same thought about the account creation
| metric, I agree that X is such a new name that increased
| searches about its name don't really mean much.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| Yup, and it was even worse because you could drive any
| narrative and reinforce any bias that way. Make up a story,
| search 3 random Tweets that support it, and now you can report
| on anything to an audience that will eat it up, no real
| evidence needed. It is still happening of course, but at least
| now people rightfully look at Twitter with a little more
| suspicion.
| jojojaf wrote:
| This comment uses 'X' as a variable, which I found confusing to
| parse given the recent rebranding of Twitter to X
| cbozeman wrote:
| X isn't dead, nor is it dying.
|
| 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.
| wharvle wrote:
| Musk said a couple weeks back that the loss of advertisers
| will "kill" Twitter, but it's ok because "the world will
| judge them" (the advertisers)
|
| But maybe he was joking. Sure didn't seem to be, but who
| knows. Or he's wrong.
| vGPU wrote:
| Musk has enough money to single-handedly pay for the costs
| of running twitter for the next few centuries, and nobody
| in their right mind would actually let twitter be "killed".
| wharvle wrote:
| I dunno. Weird that he said it like it was _going_ to
| happen, then, instead of saying he wouldn't let it die.
| But he says a lot of weird stuff, so maybe this is one of
| those cases where we're supposed to assume he's just
| saying gibberish that doesn't mean anything.
| gpspake wrote:
| Who are the nebulous "elites" and are you suggesting that
| Musk and Trump don't belong in that number? It seems like the
| argument is that the sheep got one over on the _maybe_ wolves
| by... rallying behind a couple of _definitely_ wolves who
| threw on some crummy sheep costumes?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Don't you love when people do that? lol "Trump and Musk
| aren't like the elites!" like oh I didn't realize your
| normal, everyday, average Joe could just leverage their
| assets and spend $44bn to buy a platform just to ~destroy
| it~ sorry, make it better by making sure no one posts
| there.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree that this is close to reality.
|
| 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.
| listenallyall wrote:
| How is throttling the New York Times on X anti-free speech?
| NYT is its own media platform, among the most powerful in
| the world, why should it expect a separate outlet to
| promote it? Further, as a powerful media outlet, the Times
| itself "throttles" all kinds of voices and opinions with
| which its editorial board and majority of its employees and
| readers don't agree.
| digging wrote:
| The narrative that Musk is "opening" Twitter is false.
| The game has not changed, he just swapped out some of the
| rules for ones he personally likes better. For example,
| deadnaming trans people is now protected speech, but
| calling a cis person "cis" is punishable. I _do not care
| what your opinion on trans people is_ - this is a double
| standard and is not "free speech absolutism". He also
| banned an account that was posting public data about his
| personal jets. He is afraid of absolute free speech
| (which is reasonable - most people are).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Babylon Bee isn't banned for wrongthink anymore, so that's
| a plus.
| segasaturn wrote:
| I feel like you may be overvaluing the importance of the blue
| checkmark icon.
| wharvle wrote:
| To the extent people were bothered by the change, I think
| it was mostly because the blue check is primarily a benefit
| _to Twitter_ to make it easier to spot people impersonating
| folks who are worth impersonating. Making it pay-to-play
| defeated the whole reason for its existence.
| mcphage wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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_.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I only have a few anecdotal pieces of evidence but I know of
| two people, who didn't give a damn about checkmarks, who have
| stopped using twitter because it's unusable now. They were
| die-hard twitter users who were on it every day but now they
| don't even open it. They were also the only two twitter-
| obsessed folks I know and now both of them have no interest.
|
| Again, just anecdotes but I feel like that's more evidence
| than you're sharing in this comment.
| the_doctah wrote:
| "Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for
| Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's
| censorship?
| Retr0id wrote:
| "Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request
| For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds" - https://
| www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
| the_doctah wrote:
| Do you think it is more or less censored than before?
| JohnFen wrote:
| If that Forbes article is correct, then it's about the
| same amount of censorship as before.
| the_doctah wrote:
| That implies government requests were the sole source of
| Twitter's censorship.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes indeed. It's only "censorship" when the government
| demands it. Engaging in voluntary moderation is not
| censorship in a meaningful sense. It is, in fact, an
| aspect of freedom of speech that people should not be
| compelled to engage in speech that they don't want to
| engage in.
| the_doctah wrote:
| I don't agree with your definition of censorship. A
| government doesn't have to be involved to qualify.
| Moderation is a subset of censorship.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Strictly speaking, you're correct -- but it also
| highlights that not all censorship is wrong or bad. It
| can very easily be a valid exercise of free speech
| rights.
|
| 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.
| swayvil wrote:
| That's some fine semantic tapdancing.
| vGPU wrote:
| > Forbes reached out to Twitter for comment, and received
| an automated poop emoji, which the company has been using
| to respond to press requests for at least a month.
|
| You gotta admit, the kind of shenanigans Musk pulls are
| hilarious. The definition of F-U money.
| zo1 wrote:
| Call me when we've had a verified audit and report and
| detailed breakdown of all censorship. I want database
| dumps, SQL statements, verifiable guids and URLs, etc.
| Until then that's just a grey blob of hearsay and may very
| well be "true" but doesn't represent reality. We need to
| see the raw data.
| frabbit wrote:
| Failing that it is probably worth listening-to/reading
| Matt Taibbi:
|
| https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/the-censorship-
| industria...
|
| https://public.substack.com/p/censorship-leaders-accuse-
| us-o...
| JohnFen wrote:
| Twitter was a dumpster fire before Musk, but Musk has decided
| to pour gasoline in that dumpster.
|
| 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.
| segasaturn wrote:
| I've never been a Twitter user, never have and never will, so
| I can't comment on whatever the previous regime was doing,
| but I see people talking about Twitter _much_ less than they
| did a year ago, which is kind of what the headline article is
| about.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm eager for Twitter to fail because I think it's been a net
| negative influence on the world almost since its inception,
| but it has not seemed realistic to hope that it could go away
| until now. Certainly, it will be replaced by something, and
| that thing may be just as bad, but I'm happy for the
| possibility that it might be better too.
| highspeedbus wrote:
| I think this is a bad thing for the way it was implemented.
|
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| They got so sick of hearing about political bias they decided
| they didn't want to be news sources after all, is my
| impression. Too bad they only came to their conclusion after
| getting news publishers to totally reorient themselves around
| social media though.
| emodendroket wrote:
| So you think that the fragmentation of Web communities is going
| to lead to people having a LESS blinkered perspective?
| zebomon wrote:
| Maybe not the fragmentation itself, but the general awareness
| of that fragmentation, yes. It sounds like a healthy thing
| for none of us to feel like we have a sense of "the internet"
| as a whole. I for one look forward to again being genuinely
| surprised to learn people's batshit insane opinions and
| theories, as I was in the early 2000s the first time I
| stumbled upon AboveTopSecret.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I can't decide if I dislike these more than the articles that
| just list items on Amazon where they just quote the reviews
| like they interviewed them. I assume they generate enough money
| through the link click throughs that make these articles worth
| while? I find these more repugnant than listicles. But twitter
| quotes, amazon review summaries, and listicles have to be the
| top 3 least favorite for me.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend
| really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little
| corner of the internet?
|
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The trick is to auto-tune the algorithm just short of total
| depression, and give them a glimmer of hope and interaction
| with friends. Then it's back to the ads for a new cycle. What's
| great about AI is that the we don't even need anyone to code
| this explicitly, it will just happen automatically.
|
| This way it's not malicious at all! /s
| terminous wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| JakeAl wrote:
| On this note, the invention of the printing press led to The
| Reformation with the first printing of the Bible, which up
| until that point had been duplicated by monks by hand, and
| The Word controlled and interpreted by the Church, who
| wielded their power like modern governments and institutions
| deciding what is or is not mis- or disinformation.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Yep and the solution then is the same as it is now -
| democratizing the means of production and communication,
| insulating it from the influences of capital and profit.
| Socialism is the boring age-old answer to every one of these.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I'm coming around to just ignoring the Atlantic. Their opinions
| have a rambling and stream of consciousness flow because they
| attempt to make something big out of something very small.
| Amplification of problems can be important, however when it's
| done in this style, you still have lots of disconnected
| problems and overall garbage as output.
| Lamad1234 wrote:
| I don't know. I think it's a really good article. The most
| watched Netflix show that nobody's heard of is such an
| thought-provoking thing to bring up.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >The most watched Netflix show that nobody's heard of
|
| 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.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| They should be teaching about algorithmic social media feeds in
| health class.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It'd look like their friends were ignoring them, weren't
| interested in them, etc., possibly leading to depression
|
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Ok, sure, but the parent comment doesn't really mention
| twitter at all. It's entirely normal for friends to
| communicate mostly via IG/FB, especially when separated by
| distance.
| boredumb wrote:
| Reads like an out of touch journalist with a vendetta against
| elon musk before I got pay walled.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Maybe, but that's the point. Who knows who's out of touch
| anymore? Is there any general "touch" left?
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| > with a vendetta against elon musk
|
| 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.
| M4v3R wrote:
| There's an awesome recent Film Theory episode called ,,How
| YouTube broke your brain" that covers a very similar topic that I
| highly recommend watching:
| https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet
| popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live
| in a world where it's easier than ever to be blissfully unaware
| of things that other people are consuming.
|
| 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.
| keybored wrote:
| People have been telling sci-fi stories about society
| evolving/devolving into people locked into their individual
| pleasure boxes for decades, friend.
| haswell wrote:
| And for the first time in the history of those stories,
| reality is extremely close to that fiction.
|
| 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.
| keybored wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| correct, but few people seem able to grok it.
| happytiger wrote:
| Perhaps the problem is that most of the "news" on the Internet is
| now behind a paywall. Audience fragmentation is the inevitable
| result of steady audience segmentation. What we are looking at is
| the inevitable result of incredible amounts of monetization
| effort, which inevitably empties the commons so that audiences
| can be properly extracted.
|
| This very article _about the phenomenon is unreadable by the
| majorly of Earth_ because it's behind a paywall.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Reddit is a good way of knowing
| scottyah wrote:
| Reddit is just another segregated community, it is one that
| just somehow attracts the type who perplexingly think they can
| understand and speak for everyone.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Reddit is a good way to know what is happening on Reddit, but
| this feeds into the point.
|
| 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_.
| dfgfek wrote:
| I know of so many communities that are banned from reddit and
| that had to move to other hosts...
| Pxtl wrote:
| The paywall on the article is ironic since the collapse of free
| reputable news is likely another aspect of that.
|
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| They even mention it
|
| > the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such
| as this one, t
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Why would reputable news be free? Would you expect anyone
| reputable to just give away their product? I have no doubt
| propaganda will remain free at least.
| Pxtl wrote:
| When did I say I expected it to be free? Obviously, it's
| paywalled because that's their only economically viable
| option now that advertising revenues have lowered too far for
| them.
|
| I'm just stating reality: reputable news sources used to have
| free access to their articles on their websites. Now they do
| not.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| You can either have free or you can have reputable. Real
| journalism costs money. You know people used to buy the
| newspaper for a few bucks everyday right? Now people can't be
| bothered to spend the same amount for a whole month's worth of
| news.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > "Consider TikTok....Try to imagine which posts might have been
| most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the
| Middle East....Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance
| trend....Well, no: According to TikTok's year-end report, the
| most popular videos in the U.S.--clips...aren't topical at all.
| They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a
| huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like
| Iron Man."
|
| 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.
| scottyah wrote:
| I'm beginning to like the revenue driven algorithms. I rarely
| get the BigCo ads anymore, it's usually small scrappy startups
| building niche products for the niche activities I enjoy.
| "Sponsored athletes" are now "influencers" and they're getting
| paid even more money to push the boundaries of the
| sports/lifestyles that I dream of, and now I get to experience
| them both viscerally during the week, and now the barriers to
| entry are lowered during the weekend now that the ecosystems
| are growing.
|
| 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.
| gglitch wrote:
| >> makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge
| house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like
| Iron Man
|
| > 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.
| chrisallenlane wrote:
| I can't read the "Nobody Knows What's Happening Online Anymore"
| article because it's behind a paywall.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| bravo
| gorgoiler wrote:
| The peak of this, for me, was _pizza rat_ (late 2015) which felt
| like the last time everyone on the internet had seen the same
| thing. Kind of like the old days of TV where the whole nation
| would watch the same episode of something in the same evening.
|
| _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.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Never heard of pizza rat, so there you go: not everyone.
|
| 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.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I've never heard of "pizza rat" or "dat boi". I probably spend
| around an hour on Reddit every day since maybe 2006.
| liotier wrote:
| What is happening online ? Easy answer: everything. The online
| world is now just as complex, both globalized and fragmented at
| the same time in different dimensions, as humanity itself... The
| tools of our social interactions, public and private, can only be
| homomorphic to them.
| blueridge wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
| keybored wrote:
| > Popularity and virality aren't the only metrics to determine
| what's important, but without an understanding of what is
| happening online, we're much more likely to let others take
| advantage of us or to waste precious time thinking about,
| debunking, and debating issues and controversies that are
| actually insignificant or have little impact on the world around
| us.
|
| 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.
| night-rider wrote:
| > Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with
| synthetic information and killing the old web.
|
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| Regarding "Is that trend really viral?", I also think some people
| have stopped assigning value to things that go viral. It's not
| just a question of whether or not something went viral, but
| whether or not I should care even if it did.
|
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Legacy corporate media outfit bemoans loss of organized narrative
| control due to rise of uncontrolled unmonitored information
| sources, fears future without panoptic observation of popular
| opinion trends:
|
| > "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.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| Maybe the Internet is becoming the place where good ideas used to
| thrive and now is where good ideas die. If some info is worth
| keeping or reading, it belongs in a private network where access
| implies accountability.
| Apreche wrote:
| I think we never knew. There was just an illsuion of knowing with
| trending tags and such. You could maybe know what some subset of
| people were doing in a particular community. But there are just
| so many communities, platforms, and languages out there. We never
| had, and still don't have, the capability to know.
| workfromspace wrote:
| And some part of this is intentional, such as:
|
| - 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
| zem wrote:
| i feel like this is simply due to the increasing ubiquity of the
| internet, such that it isn't "the internet" any more but a bunch
| of people doing a bunch of things, some of which happen to use
| the internet. replace "online" with "in the world" and the
| absurdity of trying to keep up with it all as though it's a
| single entity becomes more obvious.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| What's interesting is going from cultural scarcity to the
| cultural abundance of the internet has led to silos. But this
| time on subcultural lines instead of geography.
| daveslash wrote:
| I'm going to get this quote wrong, but there was an author
| (Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov? one of those folks) who said something
| along the lines of " _We were lucky to be the last generation to
| be able to read all science fiction that was published. But
| considering that 80% of what is written is garbage, perhaps we
| weren 't so lucky_"
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