How the internet became shit

No, seriously. There's no one big thing or even a bunch of big things. Instead it is a ton of little things that accumulate over decades. While this video is about voting[0], it is better we recognize that voting is actually about social choice. The crazy thing is that we can continually attempt to maximize our own objectives and because we live in a many player system this strategy can lead to a worse setting than where we began.

I want that to sink in. Because, we like to paint people to be evil (there's definitely clear cases) but most of the time there's no conspiracy and it is just the nature of a chaotic system and our strategies. Our world is complex enough that we can no longer employ strategies where we only consider the optimization objectives of us and our immediate allies. To optimize our objectives we need to actually consider those far from (i.e. people we disagree with) us and actually work with them in some capacity.

The article brings up Reddit, so I'll use it as an example (and goes for HN too). Lots of people even try to be helpful and will write comments (maybe this is for themselves too), but you'll often see a long chain of nearly identical comments/replies that aren't done in a joke. They're simply done because people didn't read the other replies before replying themselves (sometimes there are collisions), and the more this happens the more likely people are not going to read all the replies. Momentum is one hell of a force.

You'll also see naive and wrong comments float to the top while detailed correct comments are lost in the sea (I'm not saying my conjecture is correct, but you can see this phenomena on any subreddit in your domain expertise unless it is very niche). Just because people are trying to be helpful, might stroke their own ego because they presume correctness, and others reading can validate because it sounds reasonable. I mean how often do we hear for calls of debate? Debate isn't a means to get to objective truths, though it can be useful in matters that have no objective truths (e.g. this meta discussion itself). Truth has a lower bound in complexity, but we don't like complexity and we don't like chaos. We like conspiracies because we fear the chaos so much, because it is better to have evil men in charge than no one at the wheel. But I'm claiming a significant part of enshitification is due to the latter. That we can reduce it if we coordinate better by not just looking for our own/local gains.

Yeah, you could say that I'm even doing it as I'm writing here. Hard to tell. But I'll also welcome disagreement to my comments and we can discuss. I think things will always be noisy but it's working through and with that noise that gets us further. There are no global optimas in large solution spaces like these, so there'll always be critiques and trade-offs. Which we could say is damning, or we can see as a blessing as it gives more spice to life and allow us to adapt to the dynamic state of things where the importance of those differences is ever changing.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw

Yeah. Sadly the infinite growth mentality has destroyed many a franchise. Most of the franchises are simply rebranded sysco foods reheated in the microwave.

I pretty much just don't eat at old franchise locations anymore as a result. Why get fettuccine from olive garden when it's basically exactly the same as a frozen stouffers meal at triple the price. So a "chef" can heat it in the microwave for me? No thanks.

Otherwise you’re just dependent on the popularity of the market, which I don’t think is a great thing all of the time. There are a lot of things I’d enjoy reading or writing that have zero monetary value and thus are strongly incentivized against existing.

I lived in a (rental) house that was built incredibly cheaply. The handle on the sliding glass door broke, and I just ordered a replacement handle. It was the same brand as the original handle on the door, cost me about $30 for the whole replacement handle assembly. The replacement handle had about twice as much steel in it as the original one. They clearly still make the old part, they just sell the cheap ass easy to break one for cost savings.