On an irrelevant point: do bloggers who use Medium honestly expect people to pay $5/mo to see their content? By comparison NY Times is $1/mo for unlimited articles.
IMO the NYT deserves $0. Even blogspam is better than the narrative pushing they do.
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
21–30 of 182 posts
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#22As much as I love Cixin Liu's "Dark Forest" concept (I've sung my praises of his novels quite a bit here), I'm not sure this post fully fleshes out the analogy. I think it could be developed further, though. What makes Cixin's dark forest so awful is that new intelligent species are going out into a Universe with other species millions of years more advanced than they are, species that can easily exterminate entire s…
If the Internet is a dark forest, it's not populated by evil aliens out to kill you, but a witch in a beautiful gingerbread house inviting you to eat your fill. Don't ask about why the oven seems so dirty.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
we make things. we make fullstack websites, we make payment processing widgets. we hook them together. a product no one wants, so it doesn't get purchased. imagine if other hobbyists could so easily duct tape a virtual point-of-sale to their display cases. imagine if a gearhead could put a card reader on their front door, try to get the public to wander in for 5 bucks and watch, ask questions. if she could do that as…
The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. I'm now in the 1% due to the skills I've learned from free sources, and I pay it forward as much as I can. I have yet to encounter a "premium" medium article that really made me think or change my views. Their auto-Google login, paywall, and other dark patterns are annoying at best. Given their actions and how…
> The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc.
Most of those things were and are maintained by unpaid volunteers, some of them spending their own money every month to keep the servers on.
Which is awesome. I applaud anyone who's willing and able to give to the community like that. But a lot of people now act like it's inherently repugnant to want to be paid for your work, like digital content shouldn't exist unless it's a self-funded hobby. I don't think that's reasonable or realistic.
Just to be clear, is it just Medium you don't like, or the entire concept of paying for content? I'm seeing both.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#24On an irrelevant point: do bloggers who use Medium honestly expect people to pay $5/mo to see their content? By comparison NY Times is $1/mo for unlimited articles.
I have nothing against paying for content (and I do so regularly) but there's no way I'm ever paying for something hosted on Medium. The persistent sharing dickbars, the annoying attempts at getting me to sign up, the ridiculously over-sized header, it all really ticks me off. It's funny how a website that portrays itself as a home for great content consistently displays the utmost disregard for content.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#25A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest . Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. I'd like to believe it's not true, but so long as any two civilizations are likely to have dramatically different rates o…
>> Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves.
This is a great conceit for a sci-fi novel (two, actually) but I wouldn't take it too seriously as a real-life argument. To begin with, it's a theory about essentially evolutionary imperatives. It says that every civilisation, regardless of species, location, or any other condition, will eventually reach the same conclusion about the nature of the universe and the rules defining the co-existence of civilisations inside it.
To put it lightly, that is a very long stretch. We have no way to know anything about how a non-human civilisation will think, or even if it will "think" in the same sense that we do (they may be space-faring social insects without a real capacity for conscious thought, say- a classic sci-fi trope). We have no way to know what are the goals and rules that such a civilisation might choose for itself. Some may see it as their duty to protect and help life in the universe, as something unique and irreplaceable. Some might indeed see it as a survival imperative to go out and destroy or conquer other civilisations. Some might choose to develop along a sustainable path that will not end up in them exhausting their local systems' resources (eliminating the second axiom of cosmic sociology).
It's a huge universe. There's space for any number of different outlooks on life, the universe and everything. I don't doubt that the Dark Forest theory is one thing that may well have arisen somewhere, somewhen, but to assume that everything that is conscious in the universe will have "developed the hiding gene and the cleansing gene", that's just assuming way, way too much (and first of all- about the way genetic information is transferred).
We don't know anything about other technological civilisations. Cautiousness is well advised, but part of that is not assuming that we understand how they will necessarily think.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
we make things. we make fullstack websites, we make payment processing widgets. we hook them together. a product no one wants, so it doesn't get purchased. imagine if other hobbyists could so easily duct tape a virtual point-of-sale to their display cases. imagine if a gearhead could put a card reader on their front door, try to get the public to wander in for 5 bucks and watch, ask questions. if she could do that as…
The internet I grew up on didn't charge money for IRC, Blogspot, forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. I'm now in the 1% due to the skills I've learned from free sources, and I pay it forward as much as I can. I have yet to encounter a "premium" medium article that really made me think or change my views. Their auto-Google login, paywall, and other dark patterns are annoying at best. Given their actions and how…
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your content. Internet access must be paid for, but content is something to share. Who cares if the people who wrote it get paid?
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#27Is this a meme? '''Calls out the internet for becoming a 'dark forest' bc of indexed, optimized, and gamified nature...posts on Medium'''
the point of the post is that there's also a danger in withdrawing from participating in the public and that there's a significant downside to the public and oneself when we withdraw from discourse, so I don't think there's a contradiction here at all.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#28A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest . Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. I'd like to believe it's not true, but so long as any two civilizations are likely to have dramatically different rates o…
People don’t always or even normally act at the level of civilizations. Why would this apply at the civilization and not the town or the state or country or corporate level.
Different groups of people get along because we're all still human and very similarly culturally and understand each other's desires and goals. Things start going badly when there's major social and technological differences. Think of how things went for the natives when America was discovered.
Now amplify it. Imagine if different countries were isolated from each other for millions of years, evolving into different species, and advancing technology the whole time, lost track of any commonalities between each other, and were then exposed to each other.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#29A bit off-topic, but I've kind of struggled mentally since finishing The Dark Forest . Even though it's science fiction, it actually seems hard to argue with the theory in the book -- that civilizations must act to eliminate each other or they are overwhelmingly likely to be eliminated themselves. I'd like to believe it's not true, but so long as any two civilizations are likely to have dramatically different rates o…
Sadly, game theory bears out that observation. [1] Trust is difficult to cultivate.
Re: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
#30Is this a meme? '''Calls out the internet for becoming a 'dark forest' bc of indexed, optimized, and gamified nature...posts on Medium'''
You can criticize a system and still participate in it. The author also stated that they only posted on Medium after vetting their ideas with a more private group.
The article is paywalled so they are also profiting from it as well.