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The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#301

Post by nunez »

The predatory cesspit has always been there. It just moves every few decades. That moving process always looks like what the author outlined here.

New technology emerges. It's first few years are innocent. Then, someone discovers how to con people at scale with it and gets stupidly rich. Then the copycats emerge. Then it gets enshittified until there's nothing left.

It happened with land, medicine, books, steam engines, looms, radio, and TV. It was only a matter of time before it came for the Internet and smartphones. It's happening at plaid speed with AI even.

(Medical grift in particular is an ancient business. Countless fortunes were made selling placebos (or worse!) that claimed to cure literally everything.)

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#302

Post by MattyRad »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #139

Nice article by Stephen Diehl - I really liked his latest on crypto. I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one: > The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective…

That does indeed seem like LLM text to me, which makes a depressing article even morning depressing. Inauthentic and hypocritical.

I'd like to give the author the benefit of the doubt, but since we've set all ourselves on being cynical....

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#303

Post by s1artibartfast »

card_zero wrote: post #284
s1artibartfast wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad, I was genuinely curious about how you viewed cynicism, and thought I was being clear and polite in my questions. Self-deprecating even. I think your reaction is rather ironic given the context. An example of how people can't even talk to each other anymore.

There's Diogenes, the original cynic with a dog's lifestyle, and there's the Diogenes Club in Sherlock Holmes. In this classical context it's about being unconventional and challenging (challengingly silent, even). You can say "that's just skepticism" but it comes with a certain sulky refusenik flavor, and yet it's defensible as a form of individualism, and presumably positive, at least because it's one form of diver…

That is really interesting! I will have to look it up and read more.

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#304

Post by watwut »

mindwok wrote: post #205
AlexB138 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely correct that history helps you see that none of this is new. However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?

If we look at history, humanity has been through some pretty crazy shit and we haven't gone over the waterfall yet.

I dont want to go through ANY of that crazy shit. And I dont want my kids to go through it either. And based on hostory, violent, cruel, oppressive shit can take looong time a hit huge amounts of people.

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#305

Post by rightbyte »

II2II wrote: post #249
AlexB138 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely correct that history helps you see that none of this is new. However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?

It's more like, is it better to be the person who: - sees a waterfall in every river, even when one is not there? - sees the waterfall, and is resigned about their fate? - sees the waterfall, then struggles for survival no matter how hopeless the situation seems to be? - is completely ignorant of the waterfall?

"sees the waterfall, then struggles for survival no matter how hopeless the situation seems to be?"

You could consider that a variant of the voter's dilemma.

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#306

Post by mindwok »

watwut wrote: post #304
mindwok wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we look at history, humanity has been through some pretty crazy shit and we haven't gone over the waterfall yet.

I dont want to go through ANY of that crazy shit. And I dont want my kids to go through it either. And based on hostory, violent, cruel, oppressive shit can take looong time a hit huge amounts of people.

Nobody in history wanted to either. Unfortunately we don’t get a choice.

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#307

Post by ssl-3 »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #228
inigyou wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's exactly as addictive as Twitter.

Exactly. Whether hn is a social platform is a hot topic for some, but in terms of addictiveness it's on the same level as reddit. And there's no algorithm and sub categories. But every day there's basically the same type of threads, with the same predictable discussions and you know just by the title and the amount of comments on a thread that you'll get you dose of dopamine whether you're pro or anti any topic that…

There was a time that whenever I got in front of a computer and opened a web browser, my hands would start typing "slashdot.org" into the address bar and my eyes would watch for autocompletion so I could enter the address as soon as possible.

It was so automatic that when I was working on a new, not-at-all-internet-connected long-distance wireless IP network with the (quite apt) customer looking over my shoulder, well before the days of cheap or free phone hotspots and always-on pocket supercomputers, he laughed when he saw my hands start to type out slashdot and said: "Yeah, good luck with that."

After Slashdot, it was Reddit.

Now, it's mostly HN.

I've mostly avoided traps like MySpace, FB, and whatever LinkedIn has become. But it's all social media, and all of it always has been.

But HN is a little bit softer, I think. Whether it's design elements like the deliberately-quiet cooldown periods on serial comment replies, or the very apt and cordial moderation by dang and company, or some combination of that and everything else else: My compulsion to smash news.ycombinator.com into the address bar is not quite as intense as it was for Slashdot during its prime, or Reddit.

For me, HN is mostly just a place to learn about some new things that are going on in the world (with a focus on tech) and find healthy responses that help me to do better in my little version of that world. Sometimes, I get to teach some things, and I also occasionally vent about some things.

But sometimes, I get still find myself mired in responses from people who I feel are deliberately anti-helpful. This promotes involuntary responses in my brain chemistry that make me want to fight back as soon as I possibly can. I wish I could do better, and I wish that they would also do better.

But! So far, that's usually been pretty easy to shut down or redirect here on HN when it occurs, before it all gets Godwin'd all to hell and back.

(And before Slashdot, I used tin and an an ISP-provided news server. And before that, networked BBS systems; the whole of the 1990s were also rife with social media in my world. :) I even tried [and failed] once to implement an nntpcache box for a local ISP, to help them save on bandwidth and local storage.

Before all of that, it was the 1980s and I was a little kid.)

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#308

Post by senordevnyc »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #294
s1artibartfast wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I think history provides some prophylactic counterbalance to the cynical narrative. To hear some people talk, people are inherently evil, and the US has been a downhill project to oppress since the days of the founding. History shows that things can and do improve when people try. The overall trajectory has been positive, even if bumpy.

I've heard it described as a growing but fluctuating graph (think something like a logarithmic graph, with some noise added in). Progress is positive overall, but there are times of radical progress and decline. And people will feel both aspects. We're definitely in a decline as of now, where we arguably had progress from 80 to 50 years ago.

Are you saying we’ve been in a decline for the last fifty years?

If so, I would agree, but for fairly narrow definitions of “we”.

Globally, the median human is wildly better off than 50 years ago.

Even in the US, I see your point for straight white men (of which I’m one), but would the median woman be better off fifty years ago? What about if you’re gay, disabled, black, etc? That’s not even getting into things like medical conditions, life expectancy, violent crime rates, etc. Infant mortality was more than 3x higher fifty years ago than it is now.

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#309

Post by johnnyanmac »

senordevnyc wrote: post #308
johnnyanmac wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it described as a growing but fluctuating graph (think something like a logarithmic graph, with some noise added in). Progress is positive overall, but there are times of radical progress and decline. And people will feel both aspects. We're definitely in a decline as of now, where we arguably had progress from 80 to 50 years ago.

Are you saying we’ve been in a decline for the last fifty years? If so, I would agree, but for fairly narrow definitions of “we”. Globally, the median human is wildly better off than 50 years ago. Even in the US, I see your point for straight white men (of which I’m one), but would the median woman be better off fifty years ago? What about if you’re gay, disabled, black, etc? That’s not even getting into things like…

In terms of US macroeconomics, yes. End of the gold standard and the Vietnam War put the US in a position 9f slumping it's post WW2 command of the world, and the 80's accelerated the breakdown of all the structures that gave the US prosperous times.

Socially speaking, it's been a much better curve, albeit not without its own share of slumps. Especially recent updates on Roe v.Wade. There's certainly a conversation for that as well, but economics makes sure those marginalized classes remain marginalized.

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#310

Post by econ »

stillpointlab wrote: post #31

One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all. It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind…

I thought it was, become the helper.
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