531–540 of 735 posts
I'm thinking stuff like web rings.
Or if you have a blog, maybe also have a curated set of pages you think are good, sort of your bookmarks, that other people can have a look at.
People are still on the internet and making cool stuff, it's just harder to find them nowadays.
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That’s not because it’s decentralized or open, it’s because it doesn’t matter. If it was larger or more important, it would get run over by bots in weeks. Any platform that wants to resist bots need to - tie personas to real or expensive identities - force people to add AI flag to AI content - let readers filter content not marked as AI - and be absolutely ruthless in permabanning anyone who posts AI content unmarked…
It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again. Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members onl…
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And if you seek out (and push ‘give me more’ buttons on) cat kicking videos? At some point, I think it’s important to recognize the difference between revealed preferences and stated preferences. Social media seems adept at exposing revealed preferences. If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry? Regardless of what words they use. And for example, I never heard…
>If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry? Because their purpose in seeking it out is not to get angry, it's to stop something from happening that they perceive as harmful. I doubt most people watch Alex Jones because they love being angry. They watch him because they believe a global cabal of evildoers is attacking them. Anger is the logical consequence, not t…
We can chicken/egg about it all day, but at some point if people didn’t want it - they wouldn’t be doing it.
Depending on the definition of ‘want’ of course. But what else can we use?
I don’t think anyone would disagree that smokers want cigarettes, eh? Or gamblers want to gamble?
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I suppose the subtlety is that people want to be angry if (and only if) reality demands it . My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed. But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about the…
>in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed Yes, I think this is exactly it. A reaction that may be reasonable in a personal, real-world context can become extremely problematic in a highly connected context. It's both that, as an individual, you can be inundated with things that feel like you have…
But really I'm not a professional in this field. I'm sure there are pitfalls in my imagined solution. I just want some traceability from the images used in news articles.
>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former typ…
> the former type is all but obliterated now. Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it. While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by…
My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the…
divisiveness this kind of stuff will create I'm pretty sure we're already decades in to the world of "has created". Everyone I know has strong opinions on every little thing, based exclusively their emotional reactions and feed consumption. Basically no one has the requisite expertise commensurate with their conviction, but being informed is not required to be opinionated or exasperated. And who can blame them (us).…
Its odd to me to still use "luddite" disparagingly while implying that avoiding certain tech would actually have some high impact benefits. At that point I can't help but think the only real issue with being a luddite is not following the crowd and fitting in.
Paying creators is the dumbest and most consequential aspect of modern media. There is no reason to reward creators, zero. They should actually be paying Youtube for access to their audience. They actually would pay to be seen, paying them is both stupid and unnecessary. Kill the incentives and you kill the cancer.
>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former typ…
You know Meta, the "social media company" came out and said their users spend less than 10% of the time interacting with people they actually know? "Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling entertainment, ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook in that sense. (Less than 5% of users are on old.reddit, the majority is subject to the a…
Most of this is caused by incentives: YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content. LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort. Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups. Is it possible to create a social network (…
the idea being that you'd somewhat ensure the person is a human that _may well_ know what they're talking about e.g. `abluecloud from @meta.com`.