Very funny that this article starts with an ai-generated slop image instead of anything substantial.
The author talks of sharing ideas - I’d trust his more if he skipped the SEO bait
Dead Internet (2023)
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#32Recently I needed to create a facebook account to join a group for some volunteer related work. I haven’t had a facebook account for probably 8 years. I knew the memes that facebook has become a bit of a wasteland but I was genuinely shocked by how bad it is. The “new account” experience is wild, having zero friends on an account just results in a torrent of spammy content. Sexist comics, AI generated garbage, just r…
I love your username! I also had to make a fb account for work recently (after being off the platform since 2012) and even with a fake last name, work email and different phone number it managed to find and suggest as a friend: someone I went to university with _in another state_, who incidentally moved to the same city as me a few years later. There's no way they aren't maintaining shadow profiles and still accompli…
Díky! Yeah I had a similar experience as well, all the people it suggested were surprising.
Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#33Recently I needed to create a facebook account to join a group for some volunteer related work. I haven’t had a facebook account for probably 8 years. I knew the memes that facebook has become a bit of a wasteland but I was genuinely shocked by how bad it is. The “new account” experience is wild, having zero friends on an account just results in a torrent of spammy content. Sexist comics, AI generated garbage, just r…
My wife hadn’t had Facebook for years. She tried to make an account to use marketplace and it got immediately banned with no explanation. I don’t know what’s going on with Facebook but I guess if you didn’t start using it 10+ years ago it’s too late now.
I'm in the same boat. Although I suppose I tried giving out as little legitimate information about myself as possible, so honestly I don't blame them too much for detecting somehow and blocking it (in my case specifically...)
Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#34This article expresses a common sentiment among those of us who grew up with web1. However, by now I think we've found our places where the internet is still fun. There's still some forums and chat rooms that keep things interesting without the constant barrage of advertising. This site is one of them, but there are a bunch of federated platforms out there now too that are fun to explore.
The thing is that before most of the Internet population was in those places, and granted the population was much smaller (with pretty good self-filtering). But now everyone is scattered in the social media meme hellscape, and those old cool places are mostly populated by greybeards (not necessarily old-aged, just old-timers).
Don't get me wrong, they are very cool people, and usually quite welcoming, but superficially so. Once you start trying to get into these communities a bit more seriously, you realize is just a big pile of old drama, discursive substance has long left, and it's just a bunch of weird old friends you don't know hanging out.
The most extreme instance of this are old MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). Oh man, I really want them to be big thing again, they are so deep and interesting. Like old bulletin-boards, IRC and forums, but embedded in a living world. The closest we've gotten to an actual social metaverse world simulation is in text-form. Some are still relatively active, but most users are not engaged with the world anymore, it's mostly just a small chatroom with a musky odor.
I do agree that HN is a big exception to this, and there are indeed fresh federated platforms that are thriving. Mastodon is the main one, although I was never a big fan of the Twitter formula. And I couldn't get into Lemmy as a Reddit alternative, it's still too sparse and wild, the focus on semi-isolated server communities is both a strength and a significant source of disorientation.
Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#35Recently I needed to create a facebook account to join a group for some volunteer related work. I haven’t had a facebook account for probably 8 years. I knew the memes that facebook has become a bit of a wasteland but I was genuinely shocked by how bad it is. The “new account” experience is wild, having zero friends on an account just results in a torrent of spammy content. Sexist comics, AI generated garbage, just r…
I love your username! I also had to make a fb account for work recently (after being off the platform since 2012) and even with a fake last name, work email and different phone number it managed to find and suggest as a friend: someone I went to university with _in another state_, who incidentally moved to the same city as me a few years later. There's no way they aren't maintaining shadow profiles and still accompli…
They maintain a shadow social graph, where they suggest friends to you which are more than one hop away.
I've been seeing people suggested as friends who are my customers at work. My FB account is pseudonymous, and has nobody work-related as a friend.
So - a few possibilities:
1. Someone at work tried to look me up by my cell, and they were friends with this person. (less likely)
2. I had a Facebook tab open when I connected to the VPN, and then someone at work who was friends with that person got associated with my egress IP since they connected to same VPN endpoint (more likely)
I have tested the IP address theory. Profile 1 connects to your home wifi network. Profile 2 on different machine connects to your wifi network. You now get friend recommendations of Profile 1's friends on Profile 2.
Nothing would surprise me when it comes to how Facebook builds its shadow profiles / shadow graphs. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought from data brokers and had things like your SSN's and historical home addresses and everything.
Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#36I remember back in the day these ad companies would pay you directly to run an ad bar on your screen.
Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#37I'm curious if there is anyone who has any resources or anecdotal observations on why and how individuals/groups are spinning up bots that seems to be pushing the internet to this new reality. I've found a pretty interesting analysis of Meliorator[1], which is specific to foreign influence. But it seems like there are pieces missing for me.
Is engagement and ad revenue so great that it's worth setting up infrastructure to pump out this type of low effort 'content'?
Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#38Recently I needed to create a facebook account to join a group for some volunteer related work. I haven’t had a facebook account for probably 8 years. I knew the memes that facebook has become a bit of a wasteland but I was genuinely shocked by how bad it is. The “new account” experience is wild, having zero friends on an account just results in a torrent of spammy content. Sexist comics, AI generated garbage, just r…
>Then, as the Obama Era unleashed a rogue-wave of cultural disintegration, birthing the modern Woke Era, with its attendant digital sequestrations and industrial-scale deplatforming, the ‘Web’ turned another critical corner in its descent toward moribundity. The now-dominant Big Tech Hall Monitors became riot-police and gatekeeper in one, smoting down the sunless pate of any poor schmo who dared lean an elbow on the…
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Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#39We could see it coming, right?, as usenet was taken over by spam and "binaries". https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html "by God I KNOW what this network is for, and you can't have it" is painful to read today. Note this is from 1998. But why would we think the web would be any different?
Any form of communication intended for humans will eventually be used for spam. That should be easy to refer to as so-and-so's law, but I can't find anyone to attribute it to.
The one observation I have is that real-time communication platforms (IRC back in the day, Discord/Slack now) seem to be more resilient if only because obvious spam can be nuked by a mod right away. Of course this just means spammers have to be more subtle, we shouldn't be pretending that these platforms are spam-free.
It's the text chat equivalent of leaving a brand name soda on a table in a movie. Some, for example, game publisher can just have bots go onto Discord and talk about "hey I heard [new game] is getting pretty good reviews".
Re: Dead Internet (2023)
#40This article expresses a common sentiment among those of us who grew up with web1. However, by now I think we've found our places where the internet is still fun. There's still some forums and chat rooms that keep things interesting without the constant barrage of advertising. This site is one of them, but there are a bunch of federated platforms out there now too that are fun to explore.
The thing is that before most of the Internet population was in those places, and granted the population was much smaller (with pretty good self-filtering). But now everyone is scattered in the social media meme hellscape, and those old cool places are mostly populated by greybeards (not necessarily old-aged, just old-timers). Don't get me wrong, they are very cool people, and usually quite welcoming, but superficial…
My favorite weird place like this is themonsterchannel.com.
All the content comes from basically an m3u8 playlist, so you can scrape it if you like (which I do), but it's mostly older folks who just hang out and chat all day about old sci-fi/horror movies. Occasionally, someone I know from IRL way back shows up.