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Alive internet theory

alivetheory.net

81–86 of 86 posts

Re: Alive internet theory

#81
AHHH volume control!

It's of no surprise that bots and now even ai powered ones are on the internet. I think OP misunderstands the problem. It's not so much that bots/ai/synth will outnumber. Quantity is unimportant because 1 bot with thousands of accounts is able to manipulate and change what's being discussed. It's that it makes you think there's human activity when there is not. 1 bot has the power to censor online speech on some platforms. Which is how you end up with the dead internet because real people whose speech is censored wont keep trying to talk about it on that platform.

A platform that's declining, will hesitate to ban bots or may even have their own synthetic engagement to justify that it 'looks like' they are still as popular as ever even though people have moved on.

Having experienced the internet on forums, then social medias, then this nearly entirely synthetic era. It's very clear we are living in the dead internet era.

Re: Alive internet theory

#82
post #5

> alive internet theory is a séance with this living internet. Resurrecting tens of millions of digital artifacts from the Internet Archive, visitors are immersed in a relentless barrage of human expression as they travel through the life of the web as we created it—every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web. I like this a lot. It sort of turns internet history into a lava lamp. For those…

love the lava lamp comparison!! i might borrow that for describing it

thanks for trying it :)

Re: Alive internet theory

#83

Isn't the fact that most of the material comes from the Internet Archive somewhat a refutation of the Alive Internet Theory, which is that the internet is alive now , as opposed to some past archived point in time? (yes, I know the IA archives contemporary materials, but the purpose and majority of the content are from the past )

they still add over 10-15 TB of data every day! so even though there's a lot of archive content it doesn't mean there's not modern content either

Re: Alive internet theory

#84

> This website has been temporarily rate limited Although being stuck at loading something was reminiscent of my early internet experience in a way, the site’s backend seems to be rate-limited and unable to serve. Will check back later!

got hit by the HN death hug - it's back now!

Re: Alive internet theory

#85
post #17

Its a cool idea, just beware. Saw some dead kids and some NSFW among the otherwise interesting content.

really sorry you had to experience that! i added a NSFW flag - i'm just pulling content randomly by date and didn't know the Archive had that kind of graphic content :(

Re: Alive internet theory

#86

Funny to have read this today - I read this this morning, and just happened to go to a small gallery in Guelph (small town near Toronto) presenting similar ideas: https://artgalleryofguelph.ca/exhibition/soft-internet-theor...

woah this is very cool thanks for sharing!
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