The paywall on the article is ironic since the collapse of free reputable news is likely another aspect of that. 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 st…
You can either have free or you can have reputable. Real journalism costs money. You know people used to buy the newspaper for a few bucks everyday right? Now people can't be bothered to spend the same amount for a whole month's worth of news.
Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
441–450 of 537 posts
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost as though basing our society around profit maximization yields negative outcomes. But I'm sure this is just a blip that the Market will correct for.
Profit-maximizing business is the engine of economic growth. Looking over the past couple hundred years, I’d say the outcomes have been nothing short of spectacular.
I think that entirely depends on the outcomes you value. If you value economic growth, then yes -- it's been spectacular. However, it has also come at great cost in terms of other desirable things.
It's a tradeoff. Some things are better, other things are worse. There's nothing wrong, and everything right, with examining those tradeoffs and deciding if they need adjustment.
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#443Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going…
> 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. I like it. Instead of sitting around talking about whatever the big media gatekeepers shoved down our throats we can get together and share what we've found a…
> we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.
That's the theory, yes, but what I've been seeing is people increasingly just staying in their own little world and not talking about those things with each other much at all.
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter can ban and throttle whoever it wants, they own the platform. What's __silly__ about the NYTimes being throttled on Twitter is how Musk champions his platform as a bastion of "free speech", while silencing those he disagrees with (NYTimes) or can't be bothered to defend (enemies of authoritarian governments). What __concerning__ is how many people claim to believe that Musk is actually a free-speech champion.…
But every NYTimes tweet is, essentially, a free advertisement. It doesn't post a simple comment or opinion (its writers do, sometimes), but every post from the official New York Times account is a brief summary of, and link to, a story on its own platform (most of which are inaccessible to non-paying subscribers). Yes - this is also true of almost every other media platform that tweets - but that makes this an argume…
Advertising content is speech
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the successes of this age-old solution?
Many fewer people dying alone in gutters.
Agreed that the social democratic solution of redistribution and welfare programs does great on this front, and I think all Western countries have some form of it. But I think here we are talking about other socialist prescriptions, which have a much worse track record.
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
And for the first time in the history of those stories, reality is extremely close to that fiction. The reasons those stories are told over and over is because we're highly susceptible to things that use our pleasure centers in ways that lead to maladaptive outcomes. You could reframe this to say we've collectively warned ourselves about this for decades, and we're still plunging headlong towards this future despite…
> The reasons those stories are told over and over is because we're highly susceptible to things that use our pleasure centers in ways that lead to maladaptive outcomes. That’s an outdated and primitive view. People who are rich aren’t fat simply because they have easier access to food. Non-illicit addictions (like smoking) don’t happen to people uniformly simply because nicotine is at the same supermarket that every…
> If people are about to “amuse themselves to death” then that is because they are leading an unbalanced life in some way, like being overworked or not having their needs met
This is essentially the point I’m making, i.e. “we're highly susceptible to things…”.
It’s not clear to me what aspect you consider to be outdated and primitive vs. what you seem to be restating. I suspect we’re in agreement and that you may have misunderstood my comment, which was not trying to claim that people have problems just because they have access. Clearly there are systemic factors that make access more or less of an issue.
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#447Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going…
This seems like a persistent illusion to me. As access to the Internet and telecommunications reach has expanded, and language barriers or at least translation barriers decreased, any culture whatsoever, including whatever you might call "youth culture," is broader reaching and more uniform than ever. Hell, I'm not that old, last being a minor in 1997, but even then I barely knew what kids in the next school district were into. Radio was not national. I grew up in California and my wife in New Jersey and what was popular to us was often quite regional to the point I had never even heard of bands that were huge to her and vice versa. Television was more national but even that is only "national." Whatever got broadcast in the US was not broadcast in any other country that I'm aware of. Hollywood films were exported but not to the extent they are today. A few very popular, usually English-speaking bands became international hits, but again, that was exceedingly rare. The vast majority of what got popular in Germany or India I'd have never been aware existed.
Even Reddit was never really the front page of the Internet. That's a marketing slogan. I was pretty heavily online from at least 2003 to 2010 or so and never visited Reddit at all. I have no idea if any of my friends and other acquaintances did, but it was nothing they ever talked about to the point that I felt like I was missing out, and that includes friends I only knew from the Internet.
Go back before film and television existed and then what? You think there was any kind of meaningful cultural similarities between young people in Russia and young people in Argentina in 1890?
Where I think the disconnect you feel is very much real is that communities that cut across generations have largely disappeared. In the past, they may have been hyperlocalized, but they were real. 80 year-olds and 16 year-olds regularly interacted with each other, whether that be at church, service jobs, multigenerational housing, or simply that people visited each other in-person more often, if only because those visits were often only around the block. An old person in 1780 may not have had any clue what anyone was up to in another country or even another subnational district, but they probably felt like they knew their own grandchildren. I certainly spent quite a bit more time in the 80s hanging out with and talking to my aunts and uncles than I currently spend with any of my nephews and nieces.
The "pretty distinct cultural trends and identity" you're thinking of are what happened to get recorded by historians and/or make it into a popular Hollywood movie. It's very far from everything. As just a simply example I can think of from my own childhood, it became huge for a few years in the late 80s for kids to pull the magnets out of large speakers and use them to sift iron from sandboxes at playgrounds and schools. The idea was to trade in the metal to hobby shops for cash. Talk about it to any kid from my school district in 1989 and I guarantee they'd know what you were talking about. This wasn't obscure middle of nowhere. I lived 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Yet I have never seen this depicted in extant media, can find no evidence on the Internet it ever happened, and have never talked to anyone I didn't grow up with that would know what I'm talking about if I mentioned it.
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#448Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going…
The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation. I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".
Contrast that with the account I read about the 1930s-40s: The major media was radio, and on summer afternoons when President Franklin Roosevelt was speaking, you could apparently walk down the street and not miss a word of the speech, because every radio in every house was tuned to the same broadcast.
Unimaginable today.
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation. I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".
Contrast that with the account I read about the 1930s-40s: The major media was radio, and on summer afternoons when President Franklin Roosevelt was speaking, you could apparently walk down the street and not miss a word of the speech, because every radio in every house was tuned to the same broadcast. Unimaginable today.
Imagine a nation that had a direct dialogue with their president like that? Nowadays, it's too polarizing.
Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
#450The peak of this, for me, was pizza rat (late 2015) which felt like the last time everyone on the internet had seen the same thing. Kind of like the old days of TV where the whole nation would watch the same episode of something in the same evening. 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.
Never heard of pizza rat or dat boi.