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The internet wants to be fragmented

noahpinion.substack.com

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Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#131

Post by borski »

seydor wrote: post #130
borski wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path. Another way of saying this is that your comment is condescending to… most people. Most people used to have an easy way to find forums on the internet, even if they were AOL chat rooms, where they could find moderated content that was interesting to…

I think you re making the argument that people should stick to the mainstream of every medium (in this case the internet) because it's easy. That's why i called it lazy. I 'm not saying it's bad, but people shouldn't complain that everything looks alike, when they literally only stick to things that are alike forums are just as hard to find today, as they were before. In fact many of them are back in the places where…

I’m not saying they should stick to the mainstream, but I’m saying that a majority will. What has changed isn’t most people’s behavior, but the internet around them, and I’m arguing it’s changed for the worse.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#132

Post by jacooper »

mindslight wrote: post #48
jacooper wrote: post #13

The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media. They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic. I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some rando on twitter. community run communities will probably have a resurge, the problem is the tech barrier…

> The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media Exactly! I myself do not identify with " we take the internet wherever we go, and its little colored icons are always beckoning, telling us to abandon whoever we’re talking to or whatever we’re working on and check the latest posts. " This is due to a few things. First, having long established pattern of using desktop computers / laptops, revealing "s…

> Sadly I stopped using that phone due to the early 4G shutdown in the US, and I have yet to find a good device to replace it.

A pixel with GrapheneOS or Calyx.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#133

Post by jacooper »

poszlem wrote: post #77
LinuxBender wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, having run small communities I can see platforms like Mastodon growing into Twitter albeit with a different twist of behavior but eventually becoming equally toxic, just a different flavor of toxic. I believe one of the root causes is that the internet basically connected billions of people from many different cultures into one big pool without any arbiter mechanisms which is bound to get ugly fast. I…

You can already see that. If you think Twitter moderation is arbitrary or weird, clearly you haven't seen some of the popular Mastodon servers. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

The difference, as the article mentions, is that you can just leave. You can follow the same content from another instance with other rules and not be effected by any of the weird laws on the main mastodon instance.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#134

Post by nathias »

fexecve wrote: post #26
nathias wrote: post #5

Not at all, we want to have a unified discourse, but we have vastly different values and therefore moderation preferences. The only solution to this is making moderation user-based, but with better UX than just block everyone you don't like. The user initiatives formed 'block lists' on twitter, which are kind of a good idea for this, you have decentralized decisions that get aggregated into a single filter which then…

This is already a solved problem. If I block every anti-vaxxer I see on Twitter, eventually Twitter will stop showing them to me. But if I view the tweet replies to President Biden, I see the anti-vaxxer replies right at the top. So they just need to apply the user preferences across the entire platform.

yea, thats what I mean, we have the solutions and they would also work for decentralized protocols which is always presented as the biggest obstacle for alternatives ...

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#135

Post by jacooper »

ilyt wrote: post #74
jacooper wrote: post #13

The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media. They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic. I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some rando on twitter. community run communities will probably have a resurge, the problem is the tech barrier…

> The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media. Just media. Social media might be latest iteration, but traditional media works the same way, outrage gets you views or sells your newspaper.

The difference is normal media isn't the main conversations space for many people, social media is.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#136

Post by neilwilson »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #4

The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…

The dislike button is worse than the like button.

You may as well say get lost.

The Orville episode “Majority Rules” allegorises the concept wonderfully

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#137

Post by creeble »

Nextgrid wrote: post #113
dayvid wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is that you can make money from the internet. The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then people realized they can sell things or themselves (being a "content-creator", "thought-leader", etc.). As a result the most active people are tailoring their actions towards increasing engagement, getting you to buy something, getting you to think a certain way, etc. and we have a divide betwee…

I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free" but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and t…

Pushing like button on this.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#138

Post by peoplefromibiza »

ROTMetro wrote: post #98
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the way we did before massive corporate social walled gardens people keep a blog and you subscribe to the blog feed. bonus point: it's completely free, you don't even need to give away your personal data and be forced to watch ads. but it's 2023, realistically if Twitter dies these people will open a fediverse account that you can follow.

Blogs were awful. Lack of actual discussion, just pontification and ultimately you curate your own list of (mainly) like minded blogs. Give me a reddit thread anyday where some rando (whose blog I never would have followed) calls out the original post with differing thoughts/viewpoints. Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away from the trap of blogs by people with great credentials giving/polished public face giving t…

> Blogs were awful. Lack of actual discussion

citation needed?

> just pontification and ultimately you curate your own list of (mainly) like minded blogs

is a curated list of fellow "leaders" pontificating on almost everything to blind "followers" helped by an opaque "algorithm" with the ability to block the "heretics" and direct their followers' hate against them, better?

notice the cultist terminology: leader, follower, heretic etc

> Give me a reddit thread anyday where some rando (whose blog I never would have followed) calls out the original post with differing thoughts/viewpoints

I am not advocating for blogs per se, but a reddit thread where "some rando calls out the original post" could have easily have been a thread of comments somewhere else that did not made money for reddit, but for the randos creating the actual content you are interested in

you are criticizing the presentation, but the actual meat (the value) is in the content.

> Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away from the trap of blogs by people with great credentials giving/polished public face giving them un-deserved authority over my thinking

sounds more like a your problem than a blogs problem honestly.

if you are assign authority to someone writing on the internet under fake credentials, it's not that it's written in a blog the issue IMO.

twitter and reddit (which are vastly different anyway both as kind of platform and as audience) made the problem worse, if anything.

> Reddit causes me to re-evaluate and change my positions regularly

again, good for you. but there's no inner quality of reddit that makes it especially good at that. I changed my mind a lot of times by reading books and when reddit was born I was already almost 30, so...

> Twitter makes me actively angry if I read replies, but it has also surfaced many interesting people who are deep thinkers with positions other than mine

replace the word Twitter with "internet" or "school" or "traveling or "hip-hop battles" and you'll find billions of people who had the same realization.

anyway, nothing that a good old BBS couldn't already do 40 years ago. It's where I discovered and then downloaded the Wolfenstein 3D demo.

To wrap it up: the question was "where could I follow X and Y if Twitter dies"?

The answer is: don't worry, Twitter eventually dying won't be an issue, they'll tell you where to follow them cause their status depends on it. You might as well ask them some money to follow them, they'll probably give it to you.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#139

Post by idatum »

mypetocean wrote: post #91
airstrike wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Upvoted for this

For me it was this: > Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart. But there is another aspect to the complexities here. Years ago, I started thinking of the LIKE/UPVOTE button as an "increase visibility" button. I don't upvote just because I like it (humor perhaps being an exceptio…

> Years ago, I started thinking of the LIKE/UPVOTE button as an "increase visibility" button.

I think Mastodon tries to make that distinction with like vs boost. Boost seems to be about making a post more visible ("hey look at this!") and like is more about "thanks for posting". At least on the server I use.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#140

Post by dayvid »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #95
hinkley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet is television with lower production value and longer commercials.

I spend far less time subjected to advertisements on the internet than when I used to watch TV. Near zero time, actually. Now it is a game of figuring out the shills that are advertising, but trying to disguise their content as not advertising.

A lot of internet advertising comes in different forms. For example, with Search Engine Optimization, businesses will create "content" or pages with information for keywords to get their pages ranked higher. This also applies to social media and youtube. In order to be popular or remained ranked, you have to put out video content or stream almost daily.

This is essentially "junk" content which shows itself as reaction videos and related content. If you want engagement, then it turns into having a strong opinion about something the creators probably don't care that much about because it will get people who agree or disagree with the stance to comment and get into comment battles, etc.

It's definitely not as annoying as TV commercials, but it's not good for people unaware of it who get anxiety or waste a lot of time feeling upset about things designed to push views to someone's platform, or in worst cases push their agenda.

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