I want to fine-tune AIs on my own decision-making in an auditable way where I can review their decisions and course correct their decision-making when they get it wrong.
Where I don't need to read every letter I receive in the mail, and every text message delivered to my phone. I want to fine-tune AIs that can make approximately the same decisions I would about what is worth spending my time on, and what can safely be sent to the rubbish bin.
I want an army of executive assistants, an org chart of AIs, working on managing my information on my behalf in a way that is aligned with me.
I do not want a neutral aggregator.
I want a biased aggregator whose bias is intentionally aligned with my own. An aggregator who is accountable and aligned only with me, not a 3rd party who happens to run the servers my communication is flowing through.
I don't think this is a novel desire. Secretaries and executive assistants have existed for a long time, and have filled this role. But I can't afford to pay someone a livable wage to sort through my email for me.
I'd be happy with a site like HN where thoughtful people gather to share what they know, to both provide and consume information and insight, to amplify our collective understanding and capability.
A site that is self-moderated by the community to suppress spam and trolls while surfacing quality material.
And a site where there are consequences when community members abuse their moderation privileges by downranking and flagging legitimate ideas, submitted in good faith, that is neither spam nor troll.
I think many people would relate in some fashion to your sentiments. However, your sentiments are ironically what spurred how we got where we are.
The eviscerating 'me' movement has underpinned all other movements and social interactions. It's everywhere. Individualized everything. This started sometime in the late 1990's early 2000's. It made observational journalism briefly a few times over the last two decades, but not enough nor deep.
No longer is it just material items - no it's worse - fully digital and everything everywhere.
I speak for myself from the US but I can only assume it's prevalent everywhere else in world, at least to some extent.
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.
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.
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.
In the day when a lot happens online, purely sitting in front of a screen it’s possible to produce excellent and deep investigative stories. You do own open-source intelligence, you interview sources, etc., all while in front of the screen. Bellingcat does it on a regular basis, for example. You do not need to step out of your room to spot lies and discrepancies.
Yes & No.
Twitter, it is always worth remembering, is not real life.
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.
When someone publishes a recording that is verifiably Russian bombing of Syria, and claims it to be Israeli bombing of Gaza, it is not a matter of “opinion”. And investigative journalism has nothing to do with Twitter in particular. However, do remember that Twitter (as well as Facebook, TikTok, Hacker News, Mastodon, email, Matrix, WhatsApp, or what have you) is as much part of real life as anything else, online and off, is part of real life. It is not some proverbial Las Vegas where nothing counts.
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.
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.
> I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
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).
You used to get the same phenomena in broadsheets before that though. I saw it frequently in the Sunday (maybe Saturday?) magazine included in the big UK papers.
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.
Yes! I hadn't managed to sit through and read the thing until now, though I've seen a number of interesting excerpts quoted.
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”.
20 years ago, when I was right-wing myself (in College Republicans, etc), the AM radio I listened to and people I talked to all thought NYT was very left-wing ("liberal").
I don’t know what you mean. “Liberal” was in scare-quotes because that’s just the word that rightwing talk radio used to describe anyone on the left (or even center), and they said the word with disgust.
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.
I meant that this happened in the past 10 years. “Liberal” wasn’t associated almost solely to “left”. It was generally accepted. This “classical liberal” euphemism, in its current meaning, is also kinda new, and almost everybody who uses this nowadays is not associated to liberalism at all.
The NYT has always gathered the zeitgeist of highly affluent and artsy new Yorkers, who tend to be highly invested in maintaining their status quo. They may not be right wing by principle, but they get there a lot on some subjects by talking to lots of bankers and financiers.
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.
I guess 'maintaining status quo' is to me a conservative / right wing thing. I'm recollecting for example in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent a critique of the NYT being very pro-establishment, pro-government. But I guess that critique itself is from an extreme.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
These days the only persons who start to follow me, like my tweets or even advertise in my feed are those onlyfans, digital prostitutes or whatever. In fact it's the first time I have to use the block function on Twitter.
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
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.
This coincided with a reevaluation of the role of objectivity in journalism, and the rise in the number of journalists who also self identified as activists. While I don't think The View From Nowhere was every really possible, I do think that this reflected a shift in norms that resulted in more blatant cherry picking of facts and backfilling of narratives to support predetermined conclusions.
One of the benefits of being so incredibly unbelievably wealthy, pay no rent to live in many people’s heads AND buy a letter of the alphabet. Personally I would have chosen Z but with the line through the middle. X is too edgey for me. X is associated with sex, drugs, rock and roll and death. Z is my favorite, calm, pleasant to pronounce and rarified. I enjoy seeing it out in the wild when it decides to make a foray.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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.
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".
And you don't think that the guy with the golden toilet who owns several estates and the guy who bought a social media platform because he was mad they weren't allowing the golden toilet guy on the platform are textbook elites, even by your definition?
They really do have people brainwashed to think they're on their side...
Trump genuinely isn't. Sure he has money in the bank, maybe, but he can't get invited to the cool parties. None of the newspapers support him. The man eats his steaks well done for crying out loud! I'm not saying this makes him better, much less that it means his presidency achieved something, but he was absolutely a different kind of person from who we usually see in power.
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.
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.
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).
That's an entirely different, unrelated argument. I asked about the New York Times, which is just as powerful and influential (probably moreso) as Twitter. NYT content is not free for Twitter users to read, why should it be able to use Twitter for free to essentially mine for subscribers?
Twitter can ban and throttle whoever it wants, they own the platform.
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.
But every NYTimes tweet is, essentially, a free advertisement. It doesn't post a simple comment or opinion (its writers do, sometimes), but every post from the official New York Times account is a brief summary of, and link to, a story on its own platform (most of which are inaccessible to non-paying subscribers). Yes - this is also true of almost every other media platform that tweets - but that makes this an argument about advertising content, not "speech."
NYT does not claim to be a platform for everyone's free speech, and their editorial board is held to account for the shit they publish. Compleyely diffetent business.
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 claims, quite famously, to publish "all the news that's fit to print" and then internally, chooses stories to promote (often with very specious sourcing) and others to squash.
I've always found this story so fascinating. The amount they get targeted is insane for being a satire website, regardless of if you think it's funny or not.
I think people with near zero empathy regard their interpretation as primary, but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor.
> but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor
I agree completely. And I would think that someone with greater than zero empathy would have a hard time arguing that there is one and only one correct way to interpret a piece of writing. An author with a non-zero amount of empathy should be well aware that their work will be interpreted in a variety of ways by a varied audience, and won't seek to hide behind the flimsy shield of "satire" when they publish something intentionally provocative and incendiary.
If i found out who you were in real life, and lets say I had a big platform, and started writing "satire" about you to spreading rumors, you just have to deal with it? I can hide behind the idea I'm calling it satire with no repurcusion?
Like sticking with the Halloween theme, "Mensetmanusman's neighbors are unsure if the screams are Halloween decorations, or another child locked in his basement this year"
I can write stuff like that, because lets say I want people to start thinking you are the kind of person that tortures kids for what ever reason, call it satire, and be protected?
No one’s fundamentally obligated to impose repercussions on you for such speech, and the first amendment protects those that choose to publish your speech from any government repercussion.
John Oliver and Stephen Colbert (and formerly Jon Stewart) would beg to differ. Their "satire" consists entirely of making fun of anyone to the right of AOC.
Saying something that's officially forbidden is quite often satire. Saying something that you know your audience agrees with is not.
Can you explain the satire to me then? To me that article looks like another example of Clinton's have people killed. Who is being made fun of? What's the joke?
"Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement." [0]
Considering the thousands of deaths and people murdered by the US government in places like Libya while Hillary Clinton fumbled foreign policy as Secretary of State, the article is clearly, by definition, satire. QED.
> if people select out, it’s no longer a common/shared space for everyone.
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.
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.
> 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.
> The people whose posts you wanted to read no longer post on X, but also nothing has changed?'
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.
> there was no meaningful change to the Twitter software
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.
> Yes, that's what the rest of the comment says – that the people left due to a change in the social dynamic.
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?
That's right, the "toys" are explained as being status. The comment explains that the community moved to reducing these people to being regular Joes like everyone else, and that is why they ran away crying, so to speak. I'll leave you to ponder the veracity of that claim, if you care. It is irrelevant here.
> 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.
Oh, yes, I understand now how reading the comments might impede or otherwise distract from you reaching some kind of goal. Reads like bad faith participation, but thanks for the explanation anyway.
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.
And all of those "brainwashed mids" just randomly happen to live close to cities, where housing is more expensive, meaning higher income, which means higher education levels.
Common sense is more valuable (in the real sense, not just money) than a diploma.
And, the GPT revolution is making traditional education even less important than before.
“Hate all you want, but I'm smart, I'm so smart, and I'm in school. These guys are out here making money all these ways, and I'm spending mine to be smart. You know why? Because when I die, buddy, know what's gonna keep me warm? That's right, those degrees.” - Kanye West
Common sense has a new meaning nowadays: it is just opposite of educated. And in that semantic space education = brainwashing. So yes, by that definition higher education (etc) leads to less common sense.
Voting for one of the elites does not really make you get one over on the elites. For all Trump's yapping about draining the swamp, his swamp was a lot smellier.
And guess how billionaires become billionaires? By screwing over poorer people as much they can.
>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.
Some people get it. From before the 2016 election:
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's government censorship when the government is involved with funding the companies doing the censoring or when the FBI "nudges" companies to suppress stories. Having spooks in executive positions doesn't help the optics either. If anything, a bunch of companies acting in lock step to suppress certain stories or opinions should face anti-trust scrutiny...assuming we have a functioning justice system. The government outsourcing censorship to private corporations is government censorship...
Huh? It is now vastly more censored - everyone who isn't paying for the blue check is essentially shadowbanned, while "conversations" are dominated by ChatGPT reply bots and grifters.
> 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.
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.
I'm surprised that someone as interested in this as you has not followed up to try and see whether Taibbi's worrying thesis has any merit.
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:
“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.
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.
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.
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.
I recall reading an article about the genesis of Twitter, and it included one of the tweets from one of the founders who was tweeting 'just had Ethiopian for dinner' or something like that. My response to that, and to every tweet ever since has been, "yeah, I don't give a shit."
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem I notice is even though we might create niche interest groups online, they're hard to translate into real life. Makes it hard to connect with others when you meet them for drinks, find a movie to watch or some other sort of entertainment.
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".
They are not at all. You just need to establish some inclusion criteria, go through one cycle of rejecting people who don't meet it, and the people who remain following a purge tend to have elevated levels of group loyalty. Astroturfing is not that hard, and there's a lot of literature on how to engineer the outcomes you want.
20 years ago, we’d talk each Monday about this week’s Simpson or X-Files, and we knew that 95-100% of the people in our group watched it on Sunday. We don’t have that today.
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 knew a lot of people who got into Ancient Aliens craze (paradocumental series on History Channel). Every week they would meet up and talk about whatever conspiracy they aired that week.
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.
Eh, counter-argument to that is — it is sometimes really fun to discuss absolutely outrageous and stupid conspiracy theories. It’s a fun thing to laugh at, I would say even that gives a common ground to a group.
This is fun until one person says "well, they are kinda right". Happened in that group I'm thinking of, now some of them are unironically saying the pope has UFOs hidden in a garage.
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.
Fair, I totally get what your point. But that’s an argument for getting rid of “for the memes” media, which incites unjustified hatred towards other people. I’ve known people who got into those rabbit holes as well.
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.
I argue that Twitter is far superior now to it's previous incarnation. It's no longer controlled by a certain political viewpoint and now encourages all free speech. I find it extremely useful, much more so than any other source now.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Agreed that the social democratic solution of redistribution and welfare programs does great on this front, and I think all Western countries have some form of it. But I think here we are talking about other socialist prescriptions, which have a much worse track record.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The most live viewers of a TV episode was the season finale of MASH in 1983[0] with 106 million.
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.
Remove toddlers, homeless and old people that believe watching TV is a pastime for kids. How many shows today are watched by half the 18-50 population?
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.
If the author hasn't heard of it surely nobody else has right, this from a paper that still writes breathlessly about the latest SNL episode that probably gets less views than the average semi-popular youtube channel get on a good day.
> 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.
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.
I absolutely would, if it were a thing that was bothering me. They're my friends, after all. Why would someone feel ridiculous for checking in with their friends about something strange?
That's... desperate. I mean good friends will be honest with you, but you will look really desperate for validation, and actually behave like it.
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.
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.
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
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.
* 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
The machines that manage the Matrix towers believe that it's the optimal human society because it maximizes the engagement metrics (measured by dopamine levels).
Reminder that most people consume content, very few curate, and even fewer create.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit has a structure that's uniquely suited to capturing the whole of the internet. There is no mirror of Reddit here, but there is /r/HackerNews and /r/TheAtlantic. And while I'm pretty active on Reddit, the "most popular" posts on Reddit are as alien to me as the "most popular" TikTok videos mentioned in the article.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
>> 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.
> According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.
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.
I'd mostly agree. But we can verify that particular instance's popularity by proxy through political content popularity. I would make the bet that it was not anywhere nearly as effective as Crunchy Cat Luna at getting views.
that comparison offers no insight whatsoever. statistic requires comprehensive sets of numbers and random selection, not two random aggregates from a single time period.
Only if you have the data available, I believe no one does outside of TikTok, and I also believe they would not release that information unless requested through legal means.
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.
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.
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.
Pizza rat was still fairly niche. From my personal memories, the "global unified virality" peaked with Ice Bucket Challenge, Gangnam Style and maybe Harlem Shake. I have a feeling as recommendation algorithms became more prominent, it started to silo every "trend" rather than showing "most viewed things" to the people.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I had similar perceptions about "the modern web" affecting me like you describe, and it was quickly remedied by cutting out or always-swiftly-opting-out-from wherever the topic was "not at all pertinent to my current pursuits". If all your net use is in "utility form", then it is a pure wealth for work, side-project / hobby stuff, study, play, bureaucratic/coordination chores, communication with the folks you know (in my case it's just emails for arranging a meet or a call — don't grok "chatting", neither do my closest relations).
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.
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.
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.
I hadn't thought of it that way until I read your comment, but it explains a trend I've noticed in my social circle, too: very little valuable discussion or information sharing is being done by them on the internet anymore. Now, it's mostly happening on private servers.
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.
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.
I’ve given up on “news” for a long time, as I’ve recognized that most of it brings no value to myself. Because of that, I feel no guilt about reading silly stuff about subjects I simply enjoy because it has something to do with my personality.
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.
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.
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"
> "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."
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] thread> I want my AIs to give me a morning newspaper of content from across the internet (...)
Please make this make sense.
Where I don't need to read every letter I receive in the mail, and every text message delivered to my phone. I want to fine-tune AIs that can make approximately the same decisions I would about what is worth spending my time on, and what can safely be sent to the rubbish bin.
I want an army of executive assistants, an org chart of AIs, working on managing my information on my behalf in a way that is aligned with me.
I do not want a neutral aggregator.
I want a biased aggregator whose bias is intentionally aligned with my own. An aggregator who is accountable and aligned only with me, not a 3rd party who happens to run the servers my communication is flowing through.
I don't think this is a novel desire. Secretaries and executive assistants have existed for a long time, and have filled this role. But I can't afford to pay someone a livable wage to sort through my email for me.
A site that is self-moderated by the community to suppress spam and trolls while surfacing quality material.
And a site where there are consequences when community members abuse their moderation privileges by downranking and flagging legitimate ideas, submitted in good faith, that is neither spam nor troll.
The aggregator is going to generally have some opinion on it, whether it be your own opinion fed back to you, or those of the author.
Whether that opinion is "right" or "wrong" is in the eye of beholder..
In some ways the recommendation engines feeding you your own preferences is the easiest thing to implement that satisfies the most people at once.
The eviscerating 'me' movement has underpinned all other movements and social interactions. It's everywhere. Individualized everything. This started sometime in the late 1990's early 2000's. It made observational journalism briefly a few times over the last two decades, but not enough nor deep.
No longer is it just material items - no it's worse - fully digital and everything everywhere.
I speak for myself from the US but I can only assume it's prevalent everywhere else in world, at least to some extent.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Packer
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.
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.
I agree completely. And I would think that someone with greater than zero empathy would have a hard time arguing that there is one and only one correct way to interpret a piece of writing. An author with a non-zero amount of empathy should be well aware that their work will be interpreted in a variety of ways by a varied audience, and won't seek to hide behind the flimsy shield of "satire" when they publish something intentionally provocative and incendiary.
Like sticking with the Halloween theme, "Mensetmanusman's neighbors are unsure if the screams are Halloween decorations, or another child locked in his basement this year"
I can write stuff like that, because lets say I want people to start thinking you are the kind of person that tortures kids for what ever reason, call it satire, and be protected?
Saying something that's officially forbidden is quite often satire. Saying something that you know your audience agrees with is not.
You nailed it the first time. It's second-degree meta.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire
Considering the thousands of deaths and people murdered by the US government in places like Libya while Hillary Clinton fumbled foreign policy as Secretary of State, the article is clearly, by definition, satire. QED.
Im pretty sure it's referencing conspiracy theories about the Clinton's hiring hitmen and related ideas.
"I would be pretty surprised if a website known for clever wit and satire was being clever."
Even if it's referencing conspiracy theories, it's still satire. Congrats, you played yourself.
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.
That election was about people with common sense getting one over on the brainwashed mids, obviously.
And, the GPT revolution is making traditional education even less important than before.
“Hate all you want, but I'm smart, I'm so smart, and I'm in school. These guys are out here making money all these ways, and I'm spending mine to be smart. You know why? Because when I die, buddy, know what's gonna keep me warm? That's right, those degrees.” - Kanye West
You assume that people with high income/education have less common sense. Correct?
That election was about the working class finally getting one over on the managerial elite.
7 years later and you still don't understand 2016 or refuse to understand it, all while acting smug.
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.
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.
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'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.
This very article about the phenomenon is unreadable by the majorly of Earth because it’s behind a paywall.
> [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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPXUG8q4jKU
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
- 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
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.
> "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."