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Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

theatlantic.com

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Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#41

Post by yamazakiwi »

cogman10 wrote: post #18
segasaturn wrote: post #4

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.

I tend to agree. Far too many "journalists" are publishing articles like "here's what one reddit user discovered about xyz".

I've seen websites that automate all article creation from social media posts where they don't even check if the title generated makes sense.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#42

Post by 1970-01-01 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #8

> 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 s…

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.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#43

Post by jojojaf »

segasaturn wrote: post #4

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.

This comment uses 'X' as a variable, which I found confusing to parse given the recent rebranding of Twitter to X

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#44

Post by cbozeman »

segasaturn wrote: post #4

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.

X isn't dead, nor is it dying.

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.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#45

Post by the_doctah »

segasaturn wrote: post #4

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.

"Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's censorship?

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#46

Post by jeremyjh »

JohnMakin wrote: post #8

> 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 s…

They should be teaching about algorithmic social media feeds in health class.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#47

Post by keybored »

> 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.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#48

Post by night-rider »

> Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web.

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.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#49

Post by Retr0id »

the_doctah wrote: post #45
segasaturn wrote: post #4

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.

"Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's censorship?

"Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#50

Post by haswell »

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.

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