Dead Internet (2023)(darkfutura.substack.com) |
Dead Internet (2023)(darkfutura.substack.com) |
And by troll I mean Elon
I knew the memes that facebook has become a bit of a wasteland but I was genuinely shocked by how bad it is. The “new account” experience is wild, having zero friends on an account just results in a torrent of spammy content. Sexist comics, AI generated garbage, just repulsive..
I've been seeing people suggested as friends who are my customers at work. My FB account is pseudonymous, and has nobody work-related as a friend.
So - a few possibilities:
1. Someone at work tried to look me up by my cell, and they were friends with this person. (less likely)
2. I had a Facebook tab open when I connected to the VPN, and then someone at work who was friends with that person got associated with my egress IP since they connected to same VPN endpoint (more likely)
I have tested the IP address theory. Profile 1 connects to your home wifi network. Profile 2 on different machine connects to your wifi network. You now get friend recommendations of Profile 1's friends on Profile 2.
Nothing would surprise me when it comes to how Facebook builds its shadow profiles / shadow graphs. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought from data brokers and had things like your SSN's and historical home addresses and everything.
Least common denominator planet of doom.
I don’t know what’s going on with Facebook but I guess if you didn’t start using it 10+ years ago it’s too late now.
Instagram is a walled garden, as is LinkedIn.
I recently did the North Coast 500 miles around Scotland and when I was using wifi I was challenged often to prove I'm human. It got really tiresome and I ended up going back to mobile data just to avoid that.
Having access to a vast quantity of information at all times does not seem to stop authority figures from being ignorant of the law, anti-vaxxers from being ignorant of medicine or Flat Earthers from being ignorant of just about everything. It actually amplifies those groups.
I loved the olden days of the world and their dog having a personal website about whatever they wanted, which you could visit without being tracked or having to login. Oh, and I wish the Internet of Things wasn't still so shitty.
Somehow I don't think you read the article.
This thing we call The Internet has always been "funny smelling" if not a bit crap. Dead? Not really. Just more and more obvious about the nature of the creation.
It is the ultimate duality. Correct use requires holding two can-be-seen-as-divergent ideas in your head at once and then making a decision as to which better applies to the current situation. It simultaneously holds a lot of information -- asymptotically approaching the sum of all human knowledge. It is also a dark mirror, containing all the assorted sins and vagaries of humankind.
To say The Internet is Dead is, in a way, to say that Humanity is Dead. Maybe, in the minority, it is. Maybe that minority is encroaching on the majority and will reach parity. Or even surpass it.
This view is an easy path towards Nihilism. It is a struggle to acknowledge the negative and push back against it anyway.
Your comment reminded me of Camus's interpretation of Sisyphus:
> As a life filled entirely of mundane and trivial labor, Sisyphus’s existence is meant to illustrate the futility (and absurdity) we confront in our own lives. Camus observes that a person’s life can become, essentially, a mundane routine: “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm…” (12-13). Yet, for Camus, Sisyphus is not to be pitied. Sisyphus represents the “absurd hero” because he chooses to live in the face of absurdity. This “choosing to live” is a matter of consciousness, for through his attitude and outlook, Sisyphus can free himself from his punishment and triumph over his situation without being able to change it. Sisyphus is aware of the full extent of his punishment: he is fully conscious of the fate imposed on him by the gods and the utter futility of his existence. His passion, freedom, and revolt, however, make him stronger than the punishment intended to crush him.
https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2019/05/01/camus-on-the-absur...
That said... the "dead internet conversation" has been going for a while. Current versions tend to be "gpt . I kind of think LLMs may just replace a lot of internet media, without the contrivance.
We still don't know how or if people will accept AI therapy, friendship, art or whatnot. Where or why being produced by a person matters. Online media (HN, reddit, twitter, etc) seems like the easier entry point. People like their friends and therapists. Most seem to hate the online media we are addicted to.
Is an LLM generated subreddit, to your tastes and interests something we would read? I suspect yes. It's a quicker sell, if you are replacing something people hate.
Media transitions (as we are already experiencing) have a lot of good and bad disruptive potential, typically. I'm beginning to suspect "media" will be LLMs' first major disruption.
Pre-1990s : Early internet era
1990s -2005: WWW/Nerd era
2005-2020 : Unwashed Masses era
2020-present: Dead Internet era
2025? : Custom content eraGiant wall of cunning metaphors to attract reader's attention just to end with a literal flop at the end:
> For now, I suppose, we can carry on...
The author talks of sharing ideas - I’d trust his more if he skipped the SEO bait
Is engagement and ad revenue so great that it's worth setting up infrastructure to pump out this type of low effort 'content'?
The host was as taken by the sentiment as I was. It's so succinct.
I gotta say, the episode got me to try SocialAI — literally "what if twitter was just bots". And it's like yeah — this is what we've made. This is indistinguishable from modern twitter. It's a great place to talk into the void. The fact that we've made social media a pillar of modern society… idk. Hate it.
* https://www.openstreetmap.org
* ...
Plus the countless documentation websites that we technical writers lovingly toil away at day-in and day-out.
If you implicitly focus on consumer websites, then sure, there is a lot to be pessimistic about. But what professional in any field would say that they had easier access to information 34 years ago than today? How can we say that the information superhighway is not "mission accomplished" in that case? Or maybe the claim is that the information superhighway was most efficient in 2005 and we have regressed since that peak? Are we just upset because some people in the 90s set the unrealistic expectation that the internet would fix literally every bad thing about society and we bought into that silly claim?
The one observation I have is that real-time communication platforms (IRC back in the day, Discord/Slack now) seem to be more resilient if only because obvious spam can be nuked by a mod right away. Of course this just means spammers have to be more subtle, we shouldn't be pretending that these platforms are spam-free.
It's the text chat equivalent of leaving a brand name soda on a table in a movie. Some, for example, game publisher can just have bots go onto Discord and talk about "hey I heard [new game] is getting pretty good reviews".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Plus gopher, IRC and USENET still exists and there are plenty of people still using it. But some USENET news groups are a political cesspool.
True, no pretty pictures but gemini has a lot of unique and interesting capsules.
Yes the internet commons is becoming a swamp but that doesn't mean the internet is as a whole. There are private places, closed groups, little bastions of wholesome functional community.
I encourage you to run one or at least join one. Do good work, meet good people, be good to each other.
I think they had another where they would give you a PC but you couldn't uninstall the ad bar.
I see some interesting article on any of the major news papers, head to the comment section on their FB page, which is filled with pro-Trump posts from users with south-Asian or African locations. There's just bots absolutely everywhere.
To think that FB either can't, or just doesn't want to filter out this garbage.
I strictly use FB for the closes groups that have replaced many of the older forums, or local groups/pages for information and buying/selling.
EDIT: examples can be found here https://x.com/facebookaislop
It's a feature, not a bug, to those in power.
GenX here, grew up in heyday. Drank the cool aid. Still dream wistfully about the past. The kids these days don't have any of the optimism of the internet revolution, they grew up with it and thus it is just another medium, something more to 'get away from'.
The enshitification is taking over everywhere.
Can enshitification be stopped?
It seems like recently the number of advertisements suddenly grew and now take 80% of the screen. Seems like not long ago there was one popup, now there is half dozen. And they move the screen around to cause text to jump around, unable to read at all.
“Transfixed, I sat watching the almost hypnotic rumblings of a transgender alt-right, conservative, Republican who was anti-trans rights. It was immaterial whether I agreed with them or not—the simple fact of knowing such outright interesting, transgressive voices even existed”
Outright interesting, transgressive voices. Lol. So outright interesting being yet another alt-right reactionary on the internet. Give me a break. I find this viewpoint forced on me on Youtube by watching gaming videos. I have no idea what they find so refreshing about it.
To digress a bit about your last sentence: my opinion, though, is that they don't find it refreshing.
I think this is an example of the subtle manipulations of language people who are knowingly reactionary do all the time. Like many, they have an Agenda and they want to get it done, but since they know that they often can not openly discuss what they want the world around them to look like in plain terms they start to adopt the cover of things like "free speech" and "transgressive voices."
I haven't. Internet is nothing more than an addiction for me. Internet is dead and misanthropic nowadays. It's soulless and corporate. It used to be fun, artistic, creative, and educational. Now it's neither of those, with extremely few exceptions like Wikipedia.
> This site is one of them, but there are a bunch of federated platforms out there now too that are fun to explore.
I read reddit and HN constantly because I seem to have an unhealthy compulsion to keep up with the news, politics, tech, and the world, but other than that I wouldn't say I like either site, or that they're fun.
I feel like the reality is that every recommendation algorithm have been cranked up to 11 to throw garbage at you. The "good old internet" is not completely gone, all the thing you mentioned, fun, artistic, creative & educational are still there.
I'd even say that when it come to educational it have actually massively gotten better, and still is, *but it is getting harder and harder to find it*.
Google search is garbage, Youtube throw you shorts clickbaity shit, so does twitter, and Facebook is a wasteland. Yet the interesting blogs are still there, the youtube content creators are still producing educational content, artists are still producing stuff.
*Search* has gotten worse. So you simply won't find as much as you used to, and your old channel is getting filled with SEO garbage and clickbait recommendation system preferences.
Part of it, for me, is age and locale. If I was in LA or a large city I might feel like there's worthwhile things to do offline -but I'm not, and largely there isn't; not if you're single and older, at least.
So I hover around reddit, hn and various discords because what else am I going to do? Go clubbing? There's no clubs, and I'm too old beside.
Don't get me wrong, they are very cool people, and usually quite welcoming, but superficially so. Once you start trying to get into these communities a bit more seriously, you realize is just a big pile of old drama, discursive substance has long left, and it's just a bunch of weird old friends you don't know hanging out.
The most extreme instance of this are old MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). Oh man, I really want them to be big thing again, they are so deep and interesting. Like old bulletin-boards, IRC and forums, but embedded in a living world. The closest we've gotten to an actual social metaverse world simulation is in text-form. Some are still relatively active, but most users are not engaged with the world anymore, it's mostly just a small chatroom with a musky odor.
I do agree that HN is a big exception to this, and there are indeed fresh federated platforms that are thriving. Mastodon is the main one, although I was never a big fan of the Twitter formula. And I couldn't get into Lemmy as a Reddit alternative, it's still too sparse and wild, the focus on semi-isolated server communities is both a strength and a significant source of disorientation.
All the content comes from basically an m3u8 playlist, so you can scrape it if you like (which I do), but it's mostly older folks who just hang out and chat all day about old sci-fi/horror movies. Occasionally, someone I know from IRL way back shows up.
Then, of course, you have Medium (rather enshitified now, but still big), and it's heir Substack (starting to get enshitified, but thriving) and newsletters in general. They are both huge and growing, long-form content is having a resurgence. Not to mention the phenomenon of podcasts, and let's not underestimate how much high-quality earnest content is on YouTube.
These are all modernized versions of old web patterns, first plain-old HTML content sites, and then blogs. And, well, ol' grandfather Radio, now greatly democratized.
Facebook is literally paying to have it made:
https://archive.is/https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-a... (https://archive.is/YLUOK):
> Much like similar programs at TikTok and Twitter, Facebook’s Creator Bonus Program makes direct payments to people who successfully go viral on Meta platforms, and is meant to incentivize influencers and content creators to post high-quality content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta’s bonus program is “invite only,” but countless of the instructional videos I saw show that consistent posting over time will eventually get an account or page invited to the program.
> ...
> I sent Meta a series of AI-generated pages and content that had gone megaviral on my feed, as well as a series of questions about the creators program bonus and its stance on AI content. This included AI-generated images of Jesus that had 100,000 likes, an image of a family crying outside of a hut in the pouring rain, and AI images of Wonder Woman with semen in her hair and face. A Meta spokesperson told me that some of this content is not in violation of its policies, that payouts for the content I sent them were low, and that, while some of the images violated its content policies, many of them did not. They said that as long as the content is being consumed and liked by real people, is not being boosted inauthentically (with bots, for example) and does not violate Facebook’s community standards, then the program is working as intended.
> "We encourage creators to use AI tools to produce high-quality content that meets all our Community Standards, and we take action against those who attempt to drive traffic using inauthentic engagement whether they use AI or not,” the Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We know bad actors adapt their tactics to evade our rules, so we are always working to improve our detection and enforcement."