by furrowedbrow on 12/19/23, 4:00 PM with 498 comments
by panarky on 12/19/23, 4:37 PM
by pavon on 12/19/23, 11:07 PM
I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.
I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
by segasaturn on 12/19/23, 4:45 PM
by JohnMakin on 12/19/23, 4:51 PM
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.
by haswell on 12/19/23, 5:26 PM
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.
by tropicalfruit on 12/19/23, 5:09 PM
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.
by maerF0x0 on 12/19/23, 5:07 PM
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.
by im_down_w_otp on 12/19/23, 11:32 PM
I don’t participate in much social media. Facebook’s entire purpose to me is classified ads for furniture and bike parts. Instagram exists purely as an augmentation to Pinterest. Both of which exist simply to keep me and my partner from arguing endlessly about entirely imaginary design & decorating details. I don’t get the appeal of TikTok, and Twitter is mostly a place to make #dadjokes that I don’t want to subject my actual family to.
There was no positive value in being too online and participating in platforms and venues of the be all things to everybody variety.
by gorgoiler on 12/19/23, 5:14 PM
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.
by janalsncm on 12/20/23, 12:44 AM
We now have maybe millions of content creators jostling for views, rather than three letter TV stations showing the same templates shows. What gets you an audience isn’t uniformity, but being different in an interesting way.
[1] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
by liotier on 12/19/23, 5:17 PM
by autoexec on 12/19/23, 11:55 PM
Reviews for the show (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Agent) suggest that it's mediocre and forgettable. You've very likely heard of, and watched, the most popular shows on netflix when defined as the shows most people consider to be the best on the platform.
As long as I'm able to find out about the good shows on netflix, it really doesn't matter to me if some random netflix original disappointed more people within a specific time span.
by javier_e06 on 12/19/23, 5:30 PM
by Apreche on 12/19/23, 6:43 PM
by Havoc on 12/19/23, 10:58 PM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tik...
by romusha on 12/20/23, 1:41 AM
by M4v3R on 12/19/23, 5:07 PM
by vibrolax on 12/20/23, 1:33 AM
by zem on 12/19/23, 9:38 PM
by night-rider on 12/19/23, 5:25 PM
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.
by guerrilla on 12/20/23, 5:44 AM
> “One reason why there’s so much consternation is that if you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t rig the game anymore,” he said.
Exactly. This is part of it, but the other part is that it's become extremely expensive to rig the game on a regular basis because of how fragmented and distributed everything is.
by superfrank on 12/20/23, 2:02 AM
I can't remember where I read it, but something I read made the claim that this is the reason why TV and Hollywood seem to be stuck in a cycle of remakes, spin offs, and extending already loved franchises for the last 5 or so years. The fact that there is no longer a monoculture means it's harder and harder to guess what media will be popular across a broad spectrum of people. You can make small budget things for a single niche, but it doesn't make sense to spend $100 million on a niche movie. It's riskier than ever to do something novel because our culture is so fragmented, so they're falling back on things that succeeded when we did have more of a monoculture, since they know that has broad appeal (or at least it did at one point).
by Gud on 12/20/23, 5:19 PM
What happens to the human monkey-brain when the rate of technological achievements happen faster and faster?
I am at the airport writing this, on my way home. Everyone who's here alone is on their phone(except me - I'm on my laptop).
A question to you, who is a bit older than me. What did you do when you were alone but in a social setting? Like an airport bar?
by keybored on 12/19/23, 5:24 PM
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.
by manx on 12/20/23, 5:13 AM
I'm part of a small group who does. We would like to get in touch with others.
Or current approach: https://social-protocols.org/social-network/
by zephrx1111 on 12/20/23, 5:49 AM
by MrDresden on 12/21/23, 8:21 AM
I left the whole Facebook ecosystem years ago, Twitter last year, never used Reddit nor TikTok.
The amount of time and cpu cycles I can rather put towards my own interests and going deep on them, rather than chasing what the mass is interested in, is quite big.
Sure, at times I will sound like the guy who has been living in a forest and doesn't know about the latest happening trends. But most of the time I have deeper and better researched knowledge on the subject matters that are always relevant (rather than the fleeting trends of social media).
by bitwize on 12/20/23, 6:15 AM
I don't know "what's going on online" and I probably never have. I only know what's happening in the little corners I visit. I think I like it better that way.
by Pxtl on 12/19/23, 5:09 PM
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.
by cx42net on 12/21/23, 8:09 AM
The difference with the old web is (was) that it consisted mostly of blogs - public pages - available to everyone, in a way that if a piece became trendy, it would be for a broader set of people.
I miss that.
by h0l0cube on 12/19/23, 9:50 PM
by happytiger on 12/19/23, 5:08 PM
This very article about the phenomenon is unreadable by the majorly of Earth because it’s behind a paywall.
by chrisallenlane on 12/19/23, 5:13 PM
by daveslash on 12/19/23, 9:59 PM
by djhope99 on 12/20/23, 1:09 AM
I get offered content on X and I don’t get where it’s coming from or why and I’m not sure if it’s actually something I should be concerned about. It’s all gotten a bit “weird” if you ask me.
by DougEiffel on 12/20/23, 1:34 AM
A student recently introduced me to BLP Kosher. That was... an experience.
by heurist on 12/20/23, 12:54 AM
by pelasaco on 12/20/23, 6:35 AM
by oglop on 12/20/23, 7:27 PM
by isaacfrond on 12/20/23, 9:23 AM
Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers (...) Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, (...) “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows - legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.
That was my feel exactly. How is it possible that I'm even on the same platform and have never even heard of it?
by gonlad_x on 12/20/23, 9:46 AM
by igammarays on 12/20/23, 3:22 PM
by midtake on 12/19/23, 11:24 PM
In comparison, those holding the most data know more than ever. That is how they built the AI tools to begin with. And in the chaos they will dictate what we get out of the internet.
by liveoneggs on 12/20/23, 3:00 AM
There appears to be a resignation that the "news" will now print whatever tiktok puts in front of them(!) and a cynical confession that drumming up clicks for random nonsense was, actually, the previous strategy.
Those of us who never took it seriously can't wait for it to keep unraveling.
by hoseja on 12/20/23, 10:58 AM
by mr_toad on 12/20/23, 6:15 AM
by mediumsmart on 12/21/23, 5:02 AM
by nuker on 12/20/23, 12:33 AM
by bluesounddirect on 12/20/23, 2:30 AM
by leke on 12/20/23, 6:14 AM
by vfclists on 12/19/23, 11:00 PM
by workfromspace on 12/19/23, 7:59 PM
- 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
by throwaway892238 on 12/20/23, 12:49 AM
by ETH_start on 12/20/23, 6:57 AM
Huh? X traffic is up 22% year over year:
by boredumb on 12/19/23, 4:59 PM
by photochemsyn on 12/19/23, 5:28 PM
> "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.
by lloydatkinson on 12/19/23, 5:08 PM