351–360 of 392 posts
Not a super well thought out article. Example: lots of speculative complaints that ChatGPT will lead to an explosion of low quality and biased editorial material, without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT). Ditto with the “ChatGPT gave me wrong info for a query” complaint. Well, how does that compare to traditional search? I’m willing to believe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, the system for finding non-garbage content is the same: read publications and writers that you (and other real people you know) already like. If there are 10 good websites and 100 garbage ones, you probably find out about 2 or 3 of the good ones by word of mouth. If there are 10 good websites and 10^32 garbage ones, you will still be able to read those 2-3 good ones.
The system for finding a needle in a sprinkling of hay is the same as finding a needle in a mountain-sized haystack but I would sure as hell prefer to be given the former task over the latter.
Online dating is going to be a nightmare with chatbots flooding the dating sites catfishing everyone. User contrib sites like Reddit will be flooded with bots that keep the conversation going, but drop in sponsored mentions into things for revenue. I think a push for real, verifiable identities and digitally signing content may happen so people can attempt to wade through what is real and what is fake.
Not a super well thought out article. Example: lots of speculative complaints that ChatGPT will lead to an explosion of low quality and biased editorial material, without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT). Ditto with the “ChatGPT gave me wrong info for a query” complaint. Well, how does that compare to traditional search? I’m willing to believe…
> Well, how does that compare to traditional search? Poorly. Traditional search is a dumb pipe, it gives you multiple links to review and evaluate on the basis of a well-understood PageRank algorithm. It's gotten a lot worse, but humans adapted to its limitations, and know what not to click on (affiliate marketing sites that rank #1 for instance). GPT3 is a dead end, it provides a single response and you can either a…
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Yes, I think a lot of work needs to be done around content labeling. Getting away from simple up/down, and labeling content that you think is funny, spammy, insightful, trusted, etc. I don't think any centralized platform has gotten the mechanics quite right on this, but I think we're getting closer. Furthermore, in a world where everyone owns their own social graph, and carries it with them on every site they visit,…
This sounds nice but I doubt it will ever get enough traction. The vast majority of people in power at tech companies believe that they can make more money creating a walled garden than something interoperable. Heck, it's not even just tech companies, most companies in any industry want to create lock-in wherever possible. A captive audience is easier to squeeze for money, so lots of people want to create such an aud…
"the moat" = that thing which a business has that others do not = walled gardens and all sorts of anti-competitive behavior.
Expectations related to returns. Often 10x is a starting point. Nobody wants to invest, unless that 10x or some form of disruption is on the table. Forming that "moat" and making some sort of walled garden and or pool of locked in users almost always appears to be the primary piece able to make 10x plus claims plausible.
Those returns are never associated with cross platform, open type efforts. Frankly, those efforts can be seen as toxic, actually vaporizing "value" that would otherwise be on the table.
Web 1.0 was great!
Regarding "walled gardens", there is a secondary pattern in play. I didn't really notice until we saw Reddit and that "Sanders for President" sub kick into action. Prior to that time, /all was seen by everyone. It was possible to write something and have most of Reddit see that something. And that was, to some degree, true of other platforms too.
Suddenly, very large numbers of people could get behind an idea and act on it!
That happening is completely unacceptable to the established players. I don't care about the politics, or the players here. Just saying that large numbers of people all resonant in some way is a dynamic considered toxic by most, if not all, leaders in the world today.
Last time we saw that kind of thing happen in the USA, we also saw the New Deal happen.
This time, we didn't see any kind of legislative effort. What we did see was changes:
Government being involved with big tech. And top of the list seemed to be changes that insured people all saw different views. No more /all reaching millions at at time.
I'm trying to make a point here related to "lots of people want to create such an audience" and that point is, "yes they are, but they also need that audience fragmented in various ways too."
Some people have suggested public efforts. I'm totally open to those ideas, but am concerned about whether they would be implemented in a way that encourages competition and accountability.
And they will in one respect, that being the little guy having to compete hard to make it through a modest life while being held to account (via real names and ID linked to network activity in a very difficult to shake way), for what they say and do online while the "powers that be" are not experiencing either of those things to a degree of concern.
Right now, there is an authoritarian, puritanical move to "clean" the Internet up. It's everywhere and it looks to me like a move to bring traditional media online as a peer, not disadvantaged as it has always been, until recently. This last decade has been a big push to somehow make sure the likes of FOX and MSNBC have a placement advantage over [ insert indie voices here ].
The thing is pretty much anyone under 50 could care less about big, corporate media. And quite a few over 50 are right there with them, myself included.
I sure miss Web 1.0 in these respects.
But, getting back to tech and the basics of your comment:
Some how we need market rules that require competition. No enterprise wants it that way. They all want to flat out own their niche and keep their costs and risks low while also being free to deliver the least value for the highest dollars possible. If nothing else, that's needed to deliver those huge returns promised at some point in return for investments needed to get started.
Where there is meaningful competition:
Buyers tend to get the best value for the lowest dollars.
Where there isn't meaningful competition:
Buyers tend to get the least value for the highest dollars.
Market advocates often talk up competition as being the powerful justification for running everything as a market.
But that's for the rubes. It's totally obvious the intent is to limit competition to maximize profit and control and we see that play out all the time, almost everywhere!
One fun one I like to get people to think about is big mergers. They always say the same thing and that is some variation on combined resources and blah, blah, blah, mean lower prices and greater value for "consumers." When have you seen that happen?
I haven't.
Sadly, I don't have any solutions either, but did want to expand on your comment and see what others might have to say.
All AI projects need to be immediately nationalized. None of the people in Tech have shown themselves responsible enough for it and it will only be used against people. That's a red line.
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I was thinking more of a federated "webring" structure, with some content being present in more than one node, and where maintenance and curation are distributed (and gathered independently) among nodes. The nation of, say, Japan, has limited interest in funding an american noprofit today; but they would likely have a great deal of interest in funding an equivalent focused on Japanese content, for example.
Ah so more like mastadon or ipfs, but specifically for the purposes of federated archiving. So now you get into the issue of haves and have nots. Who is allowed to be considered an authorized archivist from a robots.txt perspective? Or what happens if an archivist becomes blacklisted for not respectfully crawling? How do national sanctions affect the Internet Archive of Russia? I imagine there would be a certificatio…
Distributed governance on the internet is a massive issue, and it's effectively unsolved for everything from pairing to DNS. In practice, good faith goes a long way, particularly in areas that are largely academic in scope - like archiving.
ChatGPT is our Skynet, it will end our civilization as we know it.
Online dating is going to be a nightmare with chatbots flooding the dating sites catfishing everyone. User contrib sites like Reddit will be flooded with bots that keep the conversation going, but drop in sponsored mentions into things for revenue. I think a push for real, verifiable identities and digitally signing content may happen so people can attempt to wade through what is real and what is fake.
Online dating is going to be a nightmare with chatbots flooding the dating sites catfishing everyone. User contrib sites like Reddit will be flooded with bots that keep the conversation going, but drop in sponsored mentions into things for revenue. I think a push for real, verifiable identities and digitally signing content may happen so people can attempt to wade through what is real and what is fake.
When I heard you could pay for the twitter checkmark, I naively assumed they would use that money to actually verify the identity of the people they gave the checkmark to and twitter was being positioned as an authority on identity verification on the internet. I think that space is ripe for the taking, and twitter was in a good spot for it, before they devalued their checkmarks into a meaningless status symbol