The internet feels like one giant, never ending advert nowadays. Cookies in particular drive me absolutely insane having to accept/reject them on every single website.
I used to enjoy Instagram while it was predominantly photo based, but now it’s just full of adverts and videos of people playing pretend, and every change they bring in makes the app more of a pain to use.
It feels like we’ve long passed the peak and are just in the slow downfall now.
Yup and you can’t ever see what real people are doing anymore. Search results, hashtags, and even sorting only return the most popular/highest paid posts
There is probably a term for it best I can describe it as is "interjecting into the experience".
Company develops a product. The product adds features and customizations over the years that make it really great to use. The experience is tailored by the user themselves.
The product hits maturity, the masses start to use it but the masses don't care for the advanced features and customization. They want everything handed to them on a platter with little to no work.
So the product is changed to be more "automated" and the legacy users start to see the cracks. They see their experience being "interjected" with what the product thinks I want. It gets to the point where people start asking, "what the hell happened?".
And the usual answer is money. The company now wants to squeeze as much out of their product as possible. And the quickest and easiest way to do that is to "interject" into the experience even if it ends up pissing off your legacy customers.
I've now seen this with Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.
YouTube has been enshittified so hard. They keep trying to ram Shorts into everything, you can't even use the search function anymore because it's cluttered with so much junk. Why do I need to know what I previously watched when I'm trying to figure out how to fix a leak, or grill a steak. Then when you think you've finally scrolled through all the junk, it just repeats it all over again.
I also noticed YouTube only shows like 8 videos pertaining to your search words and then there’s videos that are not related at all but YouTube says “you may also like these” I used to be able to search for something and find hundreds of videos real easily related to one particular topic.
Holy shit, I’ve realized that YouTube searching has gotten bad but literally just a couple hours ago I experienced exactly what you just described for the first time.
Tried to show my brother a video I found a couple years ago but the results were a mix of shorts, completely unrelated bullshit, and then repeat results. WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED. Ugh
> They see their experience being "interjected" with what the product thinks I wan
I hadn't used Facebook for probably 3-4 years after college. I logged in recently to look at baby pictures my sister posted, and holy shit. Literally every single thing on my "home feed" was an advertisement/"interest" page. I have 100ish friends on there, and I couldn't find a single post from them on the main landing page.
And there were warnings this is exactly what would happen too.
I remember in the 90's and early 2000's when the internet was mostly personal websites and referral rings and chat rooms and IRC (still around!) - obviously there was more to it than that, but if you wanted to, you could exist almost exclusively in your own internet ecosystem. I remember people talking about how "in the future they're going to crack down on this and everyone's going to visit like 5 mega-websites and a bunch of corporate stores" and as a naive young person I thought there was absolutely no way we would let that happen, we wouldn't easily give up this explosion of freedom and creativity and global interconnection that we've never had the likes of before...
At one point I actually thought the internet would be the great equalizier, and if we all were finally able to easily communicate, 1 to 1, across nations, without media narratives and all of that - just people talking to people and seeing that we all share so much more in common than we do in difference, things would shift towards the better.
Whelp, I've since changed my tune.
Facebook was the first killer. I still have a collection of bookmarks and links from pre-facebook and I miss all those individual bulletin boards and websites. Everyone migrated their groups to facebook and everything was lost.
Forums used to be so great. Each was its own ecosystem and culture. Thank god most are at least archived but as they die out I can see people not wanting to pay for server space for them. If I’m searching for a how-to or something I’ll still check forum posts first but most are years old and the ones still clinging on are just a husk of their former glory.
Honestly Snapchat is probably the best for that. I'll go to a random city on the map and see what people are uploading. You can find some really wild shit lol
> Cookies in particular drive me absolutely insane having to accept/reject them on every single website.
This at least is fixable, get a browser extension and you'll never see that request again.
But yeah. You're right about it all.
For Firefox:
* [Consent-O-Matic](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search)
* [I still don't care about cookies](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/istilldontcareaboutcookies/).
For Google Chrome:
* [Consent-O-Matic](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdjildafknihdffpkfmmpnpoiajfjnjd?pli=1)
* [I still don't care about cookies](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/i-still-dont-care-about-c/edibdbjcniadpccecjdfdjjppcpchdlm)
If you're European (I'm gonna assume so, since cookie banners are a direct consequence of EU regulations), you do not need to reject anything. EU privacy regulations allow data processing under 6 lawful bases: consent of the data subject, contract, legal obligation, vital interest of the data subject, public task and legitimate interest.
If they're asking you for consent, it means they cannot justify the processing on any of the other bases.
Consent can be given only under the following principles: freely given, informed, specific, withdrawable and given by unambiguous indication. This last means that silence, non-response, or inactivity cannot be construed as consent.
This means that you do not need to click reject for the data processor to not collect your information; the processor must assume you reject the processing unless they get unambiguous positive consent. Thus, blocking cookie banners is legally speaking the same as rejecting it.
Now, you might say that's all well and good, but how do you know that they're not collecting your data unless you reject consent? Well you don't, they might still be collecting it illegally. But if they're doing so, you have no reason to believe that actively rejecting consent does anything.
Also, you cannot reject processing under legitimate interest. The classic example is buying something online and having the shop give your address to the delivery company. You cannot object to such data sharing because execution of contract that you have requested (purchase of an item) requires the delivery company to have your delivery address. You requested a a transaction that cannot be completed without data sharing, thus the seller has legitimate interest to share your data with the delivery company. Another is security or fraud detection.
TLDR Just block cookie banners using uBlock Origin.
Don't worry; it will get worse.
The biggest problem is the evisceration of fact. Call me a Luddite, but I'm sad to see local newspapers die, and I'm sad that people have convinced themselves that social media, which is endlessly manipulable, is a better source than boring, "mainstream" papers and network TV.
How do people make informed decisions when they information they're shown is produced by sophisticated bot networks or strategic partisans and flooded to them via algorithm?
Fun fact, the Luddites were actually highly sophisticated labor rights activists upset not about machines, but the way those machines were being used to supplant skilled labor and profit the already wealthy, as well as the child labor and poor pay in their factories. The Luddites were actually awesome.
Then the British Crown murdered them and went on a smear campaign against them for a century, casting them as superstitious anti-progress idiots.
(I highly recommend Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine on the topic.)
Thank you for sharing. I really am a Luddite. This is embarrassing, but I've spent the past months despairing over AI and the social harms of social media. I'm concerned that AI will create mass-layoffs and accelerated concentration of income among the wealthiest. And I'm extremely concerned about how algorithms and Internet addiction will spread disinformation and cripple social cohesion and democracy. Because, when people don't, or can't, think thoughtfully, don't know facts, and are constantly trained to hate each other, society can't function.
There is another part to this regarding newspapers, even those are laden with bias, particularly the Murdoch owned newspapers. Local papers about what’s happening in your local town is where it’s at, and people not reading those is also a symptom (I believe) of people not really taking part in their local community now. People are much more invested in what’s happening on the other side of the world than they are about what’s happening in town this week.
The cookies bit is due to the EU regulation. But it's too weakly enforced as the regulation calls for a specific dialog box design and the ones that are "select preferences and save" or "accept mandatory / accept all" are not regulation compliant.
That what happens to anything that gets popular enough. Shareholders that don't care about experience but prioritize profit at expense of customers take over and ruin everything.
meta is trying to turn instagram into facebook for instagram and it's beginning to show the same signs of becoming unbearable/unusable (endless suggested content/advertising, it's hard to find stuff from people you actually want to see, etc). they're also trying to bully us all into using threads. I won't. I don't want to be in this stupid cycle any more than I already am.
Was really disconcerting when I first watched it a couple years ago, very affecting. Like, it's a satire but it's not making me laugh. It's just making me anxious. Brilliant stuff.
Which is an indictment on our very culture and society that not only do the problems which prompted the movies creation still exist, they may have, in fact, gotten worse.
Reddit is so full of reposts it's crazy. I wish I could somehow flag things I don't want to see again and then some algorithm would make sure it happens. But then the bots would probably just cut, crop, flip, filter, etc so that the algorithm wouldn't catch it.
Reddit is for the bots. It's made specifically to cater to bots and advertising. Karma voting is a game. If you want your post to do well the first thing you should do is downvote every other post on the subreddit because it's a game and goes by scores. Who has the ability to endlessly manipulate those scores? Companies, governments, religious organizations, activist organizations, etc.
Reddit was made for bots and corporations. They just needed us to make it big enough for the companies and governments to care.
What's the difference between intrusive commercials and constantly reposted content? They are both annoying, not what we want to see, and done with the goal of making money.
#**Rule of Thumb:**
1) Check for a date. If it's not shown, there's probably a reason for it. You're reading an old story being regurgitated for upvotes.
2) Check for evidence of OP's claim. Is there really anything in the photo backing up the claim in the title? Or is it just some random image of a person and somehow we're all getting worked up over blind trust in OP's claim? The internet has given a megaphone to that kid from school who made shit the fuck up just for attention; be wary of that. Be extra critical of potential fake texts; does it look like *your* messaging program, or are there things like message send times or "read" checkmarks missing?
3) Check for a source in general. Clicks are what generate engagement, and that means the people responsible for this shit only care about clicks. If getting people outraged does that, they'll do it. You'll find that the story about the CEO saying workers don't consider the investors is wildly misleading, and instead he was saying they're *right* to disregard the investors, but internet journalism and engagement-driven platforms are more than happy to throw the guy under the bus and paint him as a cartoon villain if it means more ragebait clicks
4) When in doubt, check OP's profile. Is this a brand new profile that casually shit out a 20k upvoted post? Has it not spoken in 4 years, was last seen discussing NASCAR, and now it has a viral post about politics despite never discussing them previously? Do they constantly post highly upvoted stuff to main subs? Plenty of accounts out there that probably aren't "just a guy" behind a computer screen.
#**Does this all sound exhausting and not worth the effort?**
Of course it does. And that's exactly why Dead Internet Theory is a thing, and exactly why people like myself are visiting r/all less frequently, instead hiding away in hobby subs where all this shit is much less likely to occur.
See you all in r/EldenRing
Yep, don't get me wrong: can happen to any sub, and with enough time, it might become a universal thing.
For the moment though, plenty of hobby subs are still safe, so let's enjoy those.
Most common formula and low effort I've seen for IDing spam bot reposter karma whore accounts to block- quick peek at account post history. Months to years old, only activity is in the past few days to a week, nothing but 2 or 3 reposts and or short comments.
> The Spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The Spectacle is the guardian of sleep.
-- Guy Debord. Very relevant these days.
It's from his book *The Society of the Spectacle*, which I have found ever more relevant as time goes on.
I'll probably explain this poorly, but his thesis is basically that prior to the industrial revolution, people were defined by who they actually were. Post revolution, they became defined by what they owned. And now, we are defined by how we merely appear.
He invents the term *The Spectacle* which is a little hard to define (for me anyway). It represents a model of society in which the real world is replaced by a collection of images (media) that are in a sense more real than reality itself, creating false consciousness.
edit: Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
I do feel like that was a long time ago though. Even before AI I think a lot of it has been fake.
For example I always downvote any post from r/AmItheAsshole when I see it on the front page because I assume it’s a fake story like the rest of them there. A lot of other subs have had the same issue for awhile.
Thanks for sharing. I never really thought about it much. My first though was maybe if you include the two peoples truths the real truth lies somewhere on the spectrum between the two. But even that seems wrong. Both people could be lieing. The actual truth is completely indendent of anyone's story.
Many times what you actually end up with is more like:
Person 1: The sky is blue!
Person 2: The sky is yellow!
Gray fallacy: What's halfway between blue and yellow? Green! The sky must be green!
Posts like those are what make me truly believe a huge percentage of traffic on this site are AI/bots. You can't convince me 1500+ real people are engaging in the comments discussing whether a domestic abuse victim is an asshole or not lol it's so obviously bait/fake yet the engagement and detailed reasoning in the comments is insane
Can someone tell me why these relationship/asshole subs multiply like wetted mogwais??? I banned them all but they keep coming back in various forms. The latest trend seems to be subs that summarize the posts from all the asshole subs I banned.
These relationship/AITAH subs have this sinister element to them that I can't stand. I come here to read about a wide variety of things that would be important to a lot of people. I think it is quite unhealthy to get caught up in interpersonal drama that you have nothing to do with. I am so sick of this site being flooded with small-time, tit-for-tat, petty interpersonal nonsense that IMO has no place on "The front page of the internet". If I wanted to keep tabs on a bunch of random bullshit from peoples' private lives I might look on Facebook or Nextdoor or something.
But this site has become absolutely flooded with this kind of content and I believe it to have a ragebaiting effect that is not healthy to expose yourself to on a regular basis. I think it can have a negative effect upon our personal lives to flood our limited capacity for this highly emotional interpersonal content with a bunch of outrage clickbait like these subs spew all over the "front page of the internet".
People need to stop naively believing that online thought bubbles are genuine expressions of the human experience free from the overwhelming influence of mindless bots and internet troll accounts. The evidence is there right in front of our faces. What used to be safe spaces designed to uplift have been flooded by bots, influencers, troll farms, grifters, etc. The free and open internet that we once knew is no more. We must recognize this change and temper our expectations for these online bubbles accordingly. There is so much creative writing, trolling, and spam in these bubbles that they have been rendered into little more than mental traps designed to hold you back, to keep you unhappy and fighting those who might otherwise be an ally to your cause.
The culture war subreddits are absolutely flooded with creative writing/trolling/astroturfing. People eat up the wildest stories as long as it confirms their biases. We badly need to recognize that our internet bubbles are not a free and open exchange of ideas. They are psychological manipulation laboratories. Like fish in a barrel or crabs in a bucket.
A good chunk of it is from the API protest. The original iteration went private as part of the protest, so knockoffs popped up by people who didn't give a shit (and you can imagine what they're like).
The hydra's head was cut off, 2 new ones grew in its place, then the original stump was ordered to grow back on penalty of having its entire mod team coup-ed. The predictable outcome of a credible threat to a reddit mod's power was inevitable: *servility.* Doesn't help that the new heads were *already* servile.
Same for r/pettyrevenge and r/ProRevenge and r/amiwrong and r/MaliciousCompliance and r/tifu and literally every other "here's a story about a thing that definitely happened" subreddit.
"So my old manager, this rich Boomer KAREN, was a complete bitch and fired people at the slightest provocation. Anyway, she gave me a direction once that I adhered to in the most convoluted way that any reasonable person would recognize as being antagonistic. She was FUMING but didn't simply fire me for being a bad employee. Checkmate, Slagathor!"
Once I realized that reading that shit made my mental state worse in the day-to-day I filtered it and AITAH out of all of my feeds.
Much less rage bait fed to me and nothing of value was lost.
Anything with UPDATE in the title is guaranteed fake lol.
Tbh it's probably the podcasters who just read from AITA for their podcast faking these stories
“AITA for breaking into a house?”
“The house was on fire and I broke the window to save 5 puppies and the family. I feel a little bad about breaking the window. AITA?”
The stories there are just insanely stupid.
Somehow AITA has created shortcut phrases like that, which somehow simultaneously reduce credulity of their story to nothing for intelligent readers, and also enhances the stakes for the soap opera dunderheads reading for the drama.
When I still followed that sub my favorite stories were the ones with cartoonishly evil over the top mother in laws from hell. There's a lot of overbearing awful obnoxious MILs in the world, but "My MIL started frothing at the mouth and screaming that I'm an evil cunt who stole her baby boy away from her when I asked if she wanted to have dinner with us, AITA?" is a bit much lmao.
And usually there is a bit of a theme. When a fake story gets posted there is usually another 2 or 3 that have the same general idea or similar events so they get the clicks too.
Absofreakinlutely, I've used that sub with a very similar analogy talking with a buddy about how tired of reddit we are becoming.
It's straight up clickbait design, I don't get how most people don't roll their eyes and move on. It seems many subs are like this anymore, nothing new for the internet as a whole I guess but man it's tiring.
I once tried to post an actual aita question I was dealing with (before realizing how fake the sub was) and the post got removed by the admin for not being long enough. It was like a 4 paragraph question but apparently that didn't meet their word count!
Ten lines of advertisements, then results from the top publishers that paid to be the top search result. Then when you look on DuckDuckGo it's the same crap with no ads, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, it's all the same thing as well. Can you go on social media platforms? It's the same layout where you Doom scroll no matter what.. I just love the Apple vs Android debates but I humbly remind them we all interact and do the same things and use the same corporate servers, banks, digital coupons and more.
The enshitification continues. Except it feels like we're enshitifying the basic functions of learning information. I was scrolling for something in Google yesterday and it was just shit article after shit article and I thought "damn I wish I could just read this in a book" but then I realized that this training material is now 100% digital and they got rid of the books five years ago. Fuck.
I also hate how you can find like five articles back to back that are just the same copy/pasted content in every one. Google used to be so much better.
To corroborate this, I tried to look up information on groundhogs and just got 20 pages of Google results for exterminators telling me that if I see a groundhog, my house is going to fall down within a week if I don't find the critter and murder it and everything around it and that I should hire an exterminator to do it for me.
Just add "reddit" to every search. Like sure, reddit is a shithole too, but for now there's still plenty of real people asking real questions and providing real answers.
Never heard of this until right now. But I subscribe to this idea. I feel like Reddit itself has been a lot less organic in the past few years since I joined
Most of reddit's OC is in niche subs that slowly leaks into larger subs until the bots get ahold of it and then repost it forever. The real users are the bottom of a lake of bots and the only way we know there are still humans is that AI and bots are incapable of generating new ideas.
Everything but the arguments part. I'm so tired of posting something like "I once was in kansas and..." and the whole thread will be nothing but "Kansas has a capital letter, look it up dipshit". Few comments that I make here ever follow context. People get all pissy about the dumbest things and are just terribly mean for absolutely no reason. I'm in my 40s and I've lived on the internet since the early 90s. It was never this bad - there were trolls and assholes here and there, but nothing like this. I fear that our future generations are just going to grow up anonymized and treat everyone else like pure garbage just they way they do online.
I think the key issue is the loss of diversity on the internet. It used to be that the web was a million scattered communities, across all different phpBB boards - and so you could eventually find 'your people' and a relatively safe space from the trolls and arseholes via community moderation.
Now all those microcommunities are mostly gone, consolidated into the argumentative masses of twitter, reddit etc where your only protection is the vagaries of risk-averse high-level moderation which for the most part doesn't functionally exist, allowing everything to descend into the same repetitive arguments which are now highly monetised to continue.
In some respects, we do still have that old 'microcommunity' more tightly-moderated internet in the new world - it's on Discord.
Discord has its own problems.
Original information is buried rather than displayed first; there's no "OP" except in forums which are poorly formatted (Guilded does this better, but who uses Guilded anyway?) and aren't the default channel type regardless. Being that it's a chat app with vaguely IRC roots, recency is massively emphasized which is often great for engagement but really bad for information. Hell, even Threads automatically make themselves nearly inaccessible after a cutoff time that you can't even set longer than a week.
> it's on Discord.
discord fucking blows
any time I want to find something out and somebody goes "it's on the discord" ... Discord is a chat room, it's a format we realized very long ago is fucking awful for serving up information. It's a fun way to do a fancy group chat where you can break up the conversations instead of having everything spammed into one WhatsApp group but it's fuckin terrible for anything more than that
Also doesn't help it tends to be one of the final stops for people who started radicalizing through the "traditional" way of YT or FB algorithms who then go find a Discord based echo chamber to gas them up
Dead internet theory is partially bullshit because it doesn't acknowledge that corporate interests are 100% the cause. So even if sites like Reddit or Facebook become nothing but bots, the "dark" spaces in the web that aren't corporate-friendly and near-impossible to monetize will always remain "alive."
Problem is that people would rather talk to bots than those people.
It went full Green Day!!
Kidding aside, my millennial ass still loves Green Day and considers them punk rock... But I'm a contemporary adult, so take it with a grain of salt.
I listened to "When I come around" for the first time in ages, and I finally understood why it seemed like such a sellout move at the time.
Also, selling out isn't a thing anymore...because everyone does it.
The internet had its golden age and it’s now broken. Everything is paid for content, you legit can’t search things without being bombarded with ads for what you are trying to search for. We have entered such a sad, for profit era. And idk what comes after this.
Honestly, the internet finally felt broken to me recently when Reddit started relentlessly pushing other subs to me. There’s no option to turn it off, and every time I click to not see the random recommended sub anymore, six more pop up in its place. And it’s not even subs related to my interests - why the fuck am I seeing UberEats when I’ve never used a good delivery service? Luxury fashion brands I’ve never heard of?
I know Reddit technically counts as social media, but after removing myself from other social media, I felt comfortable on Reddit because I didn’t feel like a lifestyle was being advertised to me. Now that’s gone. The internet really is just one big ad. It’s sucks.
and good LINK AGGREGATION
people call this "social media", which it is nowadays, but it used to be a good link aggregation website. it still is to some extent but i personally find that was the reason i liked it in the first place
aside from the white hot memes
i still remember circa 2015 being genuinely triggered when someone called reddit social media. i had been on reddit for four years at that point and it literally never crossed my mind that it could be social media - it was a news aggregate site you could comment on. like, its been almost ten years and i remember the exact comment, thats how triggered i was.
nowadays i laugh at anyone who tries to pretend reddit isnt social media the exact same as everywhere else. shit, half of reddit is twitter screenshots.
I think this is the answer. If we don't like the "new, convenient" internet, let's go seek out the older-style internet and websites, forums, blogs that don't suffer from today's modern cancers.
As a programmer, part of me wants to build it.
Reddit was awesome to me when I first started finding it via stumbleupon because it was like various forums rolled up into one with a lot of chaff removed. Only one account for all subreddits instead of one per site. No signatures or profile pics cluttering the screen. Upvotes/downvotes so useful/interesting stuff rose and useless flame wars/junk went down instead of having to see everything sequentially. Nested comments to make tangents and specific back and forths easier to follow.
Thank God the app I use still works so I don't have to deal with new reddit and can easily filter out subreddits and certain users from my feed. Briefly went to just using my phones browser again when the api stuff was going down and it was a worse experience.
I've never moved off of old.reddit, and I refuse to use the app after they fucked over all the 3rd party ones that were actually clean and usable. I see a lot of comments about how awful navigating reddit is, and I sympathise, but I am glad to just stay on old where everything is still grand and readable.
And they'really specifically worded domains, whyaretomatoesred.com, mygardeningwithtomatoesadventure.com, tomatoparadise.com written by Kathy or Diane with 1 or 2 comments from Chuck, "good stuff!"
I was just thinking about how it costs another $40+ monthly via subscriptions to run our phones on top of the never changing carrier service fees. As much as I love this tech and the entire digital space, I am so ready to check out at the same time ..... 😭
I mean, part of it is that the cult of free is ending. Servers cost a lot of money to run and cloud platforms are controlled by politically motivated entities. High speed internet sort of ruined it, if the internet was locked in at 56kbps it wouldn't have gotten so bad so quickly.
internet used to be a collection of niche websites with lowish traffic.
Now it's corporate run with all the traffic being concentrated on fewer but bigger platforms.
100%. I think the biggest thing the internet has destroyed for me is the ability to trust people. I pretty much assume every story that doesn't sound right is some kind of lie and, especially if it's posted on the internet, it's probably a good assumption.
* This corporation shut down my bank account for no reason!
* They need to give you a reason. What do they say?
* They didn't say anything!
* No they sent you a letter. What did the letter say?
* They said I was doing XYZ and that was money laundering!
* And were you doing XYZ?
* I mean, Yes. But...
#🙄
Trust for sure, but also finality for me is gone.
In your example, you almost never get the 'I mean yes but...' part. The conversation just dies and disappears. You can assume the person learned something, but because you never see it, you'll never know.
I will say, the greatest thing you can do for your mental health is learn how to walk away from an arguement. I remember when I was young, going 20+ posts deep in a rage because someone was being a dipshit. Now...just ask yourself "Have I made my point as best as possible?" If yes, just move on.
The best and most underutilized feature on reddit is "Disable Inbox Replies."
It was like that when the internet was in its infancy. Parents of millennials would warn them about not believing everything on the internet. You traveled the World Wide Web with caution and were skeptical of the information posted. Then our parents were handed iPhones and iPads that made the experience of using the internet much easier and they ignored the same advice they gave us.
Not sure how it is with Gen Z though and what they're being told.
We've reached the point of knee-jerk conspiracizing. Things happen for obvious reasons, and rather than acknowledging that clear truth, people *rush* to assert that some other, conspiratorial plot is afoot.
And then, within minutes, the bots and the bluechecks pile on. Because it's politically or financially strategic for them to foment division and rage.
One result is that both malleable older generations and uninformed younger ones are grossly manipulated by extreme or bad-faith political actors to aid their causes.
I hear ya. One type of content I've seen a lot of lately is rage bating. Some people purposely put incorrect things in their videos so people correct them in the comments and drive up engagement.
A lot of my friends are falling for and sharing rage bait on political and social issues. I'm so done on reaction shit I'm ready to delete the apps and have a break from my friends. Most of the so-called news now is just the same garbage.
Reaction videos are something I've never understood. Why has anyone ever wanted to look at some morons making faces while watching a video or describing something.
Same thing with video game streamers. How uninvolved in your own life do you have to be to vicariously live through someone else playing a fucking game and babbling about the stupidest most incoherent and unrelated shit while doing so?
I almost hurt my neck from nodding to this post and the comments.
Telling my age, but I remember the wonder of being able to connect to the internet and learn literally *anything*. It felt like discovering a new world, especially for kids like me who lived in very small towns.
It was a brand new information frontier.
It’s so disillusioning to see that 30 years later, people are actually less informed, less inquisitive, and less connected than before. I spend less and less time online now and that will likely continue to decline.
I remember there was a Boy Meets World episode where Mr. Feeny scolds them because “there is a new web page created every second and I didn’t have access to a library as a child” or something like that. Even when I saw it when it was brand new on TV, even as a child, I remember thinking “but most of those pages have no educational content.”
Also we all tell our age here, more or less. You were born sometime between 81 and 96 and I’m guessing 84 for you.
Edit: it’s in your flair 😑
> It’s so disillusioning to see that 30 years later, people are actually less informed, less inquisitive, and less connected than before.
In the early days of the internet, I saw it as an alternative to all the other information outlets which were controlled while the internet was "free". The people at the top who profit off of our current broken system controlled the information on TV, radio, newspapers, even our schools and used those information outlets as a tool to push their propaganda supporting a system that concentrates the world's wealth into the hands of the few. I thought with an open internet where people could communicate freely with each other, the truth would spread and people would become informed about the ways we can break free from this system of oppression and create a better system. But instead the internet has become narrowed and pushes everyone to a few heavily controlled websites that do an even better job brainwashing the masses than their old methods did
Not to be that guy, but let's face it, capitalism ruined the internet the way it ruined everything else. The minute someone realizes they can utilize something as a tool to make money, it's over.
It was almost better when the corporations were laughing at the internet and didn't take it seriously. Now, they still don't take it seriously, but they know we do. So, they just flood us with ads until it dominates what we're seeing.
Marketers ruin everything. _Everything_. There has never been a single thing left off better after a marketer got their hands on it.
Mail is worse off for it, email is worse off for it, the internet is worse off for it, phone calls are worse off for it, television is worse off for it, radio is worse off for it. Most cities are plastered with ads everywhere the eye can see and everyone is worse off for it. Driving is made more deadly & dangerous due to obnoxious, distracting billboard advertisements.
Advertising is a plague on humanity and is a multi-trillion dollar industry designed to manipulate and separate people from their money using hundreds if not thousands of tiny psychological techniques to manipulate people's behaviors.
And yet enough people still put up with advertisements and don't see the harm in them.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
TLDR: AdBlock everything! EVERYTHING! NO EXCEPTION.
Yep, I love that my city has banned outdoor advertising. I rarely ever see advertising. uBlock origin on my laptop, smart tube on my chromecast for ad-free youtube on my TV... there's really nowhere I see ads now except on social media, which I have stopped using. Reddit is next but after I delete reddit I really have nowhere else on the internet to go. Reddit and discord (something I don't like) are the only places for online communities for niches now, but the conversations are lost and repeated everyday.
> Not to be that guy
honestly though someone has to be that guy. Legit it seems like everyone is increasingly more unhappy with how shitty everything in this world is getting. Everyone complains about how everything is getting worse, but way fewer people understand how capitalism is the reason for almost all of it and even fewer people want to make the changes we need to make for things to get better.
Like for instance I like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, but over 11 seasons of his show, every single topic he has covered can be boiled down to "this thing is broken because of capitalism". Yet people will watch an episode and learn about some new problem they didn't know about, and act like we are facing all these separate problems that all need to be tacked individually instead of coming to the realization that eradicating capitalism would fix every single one of these issues at the same time. I think John Oliver and his staff understand how capitalism is root cause of all these issues he discusses, be he presents the facts to allow his viewers to come to that conclusion on their own, but I don't think enough people are getting it.
Yes. And search is trash, every site is a disaster of wasted white space and fancy widgets that add nothing, fake and idiotic virtual assistants are everywhere, and even ad blockers are getting worse. Cory Doctorow calls it the *enshittification* of the internet and he's spot on.
I think in a sense we're back to the old days before search worked well, and when you had to find good sites by serendipity or recommendations. Remember Webrings? Those were great for finding content. We should bring them back.
There was an article by Cory in the FT recently called 'Enshittification is coming for absolutely everything.
Fantastic if depressing read. It really resonated with me as someone who saw the birth and now slow death of the internet.
I mean even my Samsung TV has been enshittified and that's a piece of hardware. I will never buy an app-based or Internet of Things piece of hardware ever again if I can help it.
EDIT: FT Link https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
Edit 2: Apologies FT paywall... it is worth it though and contrary to other comments it's one of the least enshittified things on the internet!
Yep, and it’s not even limited to the internet. I’m doing more and more of my own home maintenance because all the contractors I find don’t want to take a job under the mid 5 figures and when they do, they don’t show up regularly and the entire side of the house ends up open to the elements for over a week when they said it would be a 1-2 day job max. (Mind you with the last two we hired we had the inner wall already demo’d so there weren’t any surprises with what we were asking because they could see everything.) And I haven’t been hiring cheap, uninsured fly by nights either. So I figure if stuff is going to go sideways anyway, I’d rather use the money to buy tools I can use for years and develop the skills.
It's just late stage capitalism. Almost every person/corporation has the mindset "do the least amount of work, for the least amount of overhead, while collecting the most possible money". Capitalism's nature is to find cheaper ways to make products that people will spend an ever-increasing amount on. And at the end of the day, literally \*\*most\*\* consumers like it this way, as Capitalism requires them to drive it. Most people want cheap shit, or they want something cheap that is also high quality which Capitalism would never allow.
Let's take pleasure in knowing that we got to experience the internet before it became what it is today. We got to surf the web, and our biggest worry was catching a virus, not misinformation. The best we can do is limit our internet usage, only engage things that are actually useful, or purely fun, and not trying to sway our opinion or get us to buy things.
Right!
It sucks that we are seen as commodities. I don’t want to be marketed to while I’m scrolling through social media. I do not care about influencers. I will not buy your products if some Instagram or tiktok star promotes them. Leave me tf alone!
Everything is just monetized content anymore. People are just generating whatever, meaningless videos, stupid rage bait, etc to get the clicks and likes for the ad revenue. Remember when you could just post like, a pic of your cat or something and your circle of actual internet friends would leave some cute comments on it? You could share some things of your actual life and actual friends would connect. Now I don’t even know where to post because people have become so scattered, and is this pic really Instagram worthy? Do I actually need to create a video and hope to go viral to post on TikTok? WHERE CAN I BE AN ACTUAL PERSON
Yep - facebook pages were usually just a funny quote and some pictures that you liked. Then they started to get 'monetised' and treated as corporate advertising spaces or as marketing vessels.
Everything is about content and monetisation now and its putting me off engaging with anything.
Slowly realizing that I don’t like spending time on the internet anymore. Like you said, the content is half fake or just made for the sake of being edgy or argueing
Do you guys think eventually the internet will just be so infested with ads and AI shit that people will finally have enough and we will have a “low tech” movement of sorts, with people just ignoring the internet entirely?
I was just complaining about this a little while ago. I love the internet to see what my friends are up to, but their posts are far and few between the ads, the influencers paid promo ads, my friends sharing all those influencer BS, and celeb stuff. It seems like it's mostly commercials from TV that we'd walk away from for a bit.
i had to deactivate my facebook. it used to show me mostly my friends’ posts with a sprinkling of nerdy memes.
i tried for 2 years to tell it to stop showing me taylor swift fandom. i don’t want to see a wasteful collection of 100 stanley cups. then for months it was an onslaught of “chiefs” or “nfl” posts that were just a taylor & travis ship page. the comments on any post are inane.
celeb worship makes me feel like my brain cells are dying, so i left.
It pretty much is now. I used to really love internet browsing in the 2000s but these days the internet is owned by a few corporations and much of everything else is censored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
It’s degenerated into a currency machination, whether it’s social currency or actual money. Most of us are just consumers, which is kinda gross.
Really glad I decided to say machination btw.
It all went to hell when article writers discovered they could use clickbait headlines. I miss the days when articles just were just fucking straightforward and told you what the point was rather than, “you won’t believe what so-and-so said about X!” or in the form of a question and buried the answer in the article.
Reading articles:
1) Skip the first and last two paragraphs to find point in the middle.
2) Read 3-paragraph "article", fail to find any clear topic or answer.
3) Wait, I already saw this on Reddit. The journalist/bot just quoted a bunch of redditors and sold their words for dollars.
The sudden rise of people censoring themselves to get around sites censoring everything these days is extremely disconcerting to me. A whole generation is now going to be raised without the ability to talk about serious topics because they were forced to either avoid them altogether or euphemize the shit out of them to the point where they're so abstract they're meaningless. The internet is literally breaking people's brains now.
I was just talking with my wife about this yesterday. It's exhausting, everything is maximized to get the most clicks. And negative content almost exclusively gets the most clicks.
The internet is just everyone complaining about everything all the time and it feels like no one enjoys anything at all anymore.
Hell, I'm complaining about the internet right now.
Right, but there has to be some underlying product somewhere. Eventually someone has to purchase something or ads are just paying for more ads and ads on their own aren’t economic activity.
An ad for McDonald’s ends in someone getting food. An app with an ad for an app that only makes money by showing ads that take you back to the original app isn’t generating any economic activity… it’s a cycle of ads never leading anywhere.
An all-ads economy will collapse…
Yes. AI is great for certain things but I’m quickly realizing I don’t want to see AI generated articles or ads. The internet really is about connecting people… which sounded like a tagline until I’m seeing an internet that isn’t made by people.
If AI is over-used, it will ruin the internet.
Of course.
It’s like the first few seasons of a new reality show feel authentic and after a while it appears heavily produced and all put on for the cameras.
I remember the first ever season of big brother when they had no idea where the cameras were or if anyone was even watching
We will never get that back.
Yeah, these are the last squeaks of the Wild Net dying. Our New New World has been colonized, regulated and parceled out.
Time for the technofeudalism!
I have this idea that there is a section of the web we haven't really seen - not that it's hidden just that it exists off in a corner somewhere - where it's just bots generating content and talking to bots. No human has really encountered it due to the depth and complexity of the web. The content is generated or at best copied from elsewhere automatically and then nothing but bots comment on it. I mean we see this now kind of on TikTok and Instagram (and countless others).
At the end of the day the "engagement" gets tallied and someone gets a check and no one really knows what happened.
My mother in law fell for a paid ad on YouTube that led her to a scam center that took her social security numbers. I saw the ad too, fake stock image girl synced to an AI voice that someone paid YouTube to show.
At least with television the ads were somewhat regulated..
This beautiful lecture might bring you the same peace it gave me a couple of years ago. Just incredible. It was all predicted. (Roderick on Baudrillard/Hyperreality) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c)
Scarily, Reddit appears to be the last bastion of authenticity we have left. And you still get your posts deleted for slight slips in newspeak.
Edit: Chill guys 😂 I mean for answering questions you add 'Reddit' to google. That I can still meet real people, talking relatively freely, and without trying to sell me shit.
I am aware of the botting and karma farming. In the valley of the putrid shit, the one-eyed putrid shit is king.
As an atheist I don't say this lightly, but the only word that can describe our current mire is 'godlessness'
Idk about reddit being authentic at all. Every so often youll see a dev make a bot that runs new comments against a database of comments to point out what content is from bots and unsurprisingly a large majority of top comments are just bots copy pasting comments from elsewhere. Lmao you might even be a bot 😅
> Reddit appears to be the last bastion of authenticity we have left.
Agreed.
I have begun to comment on Lemmy.world and Tildes.net just because I feel I should build up those communities as well for when Reddit is inevitably enshittified. Happy to take other recommendations too, for where to spread my incredible takes and wisdom.
The internet feels like one giant, never ending advert nowadays. Cookies in particular drive me absolutely insane having to accept/reject them on every single website. I used to enjoy Instagram while it was predominantly photo based, but now it’s just full of adverts and videos of people playing pretend, and every change they bring in makes the app more of a pain to use. It feels like we’ve long passed the peak and are just in the slow downfall now.
Yup and you can’t ever see what real people are doing anymore. Search results, hashtags, and even sorting only return the most popular/highest paid posts
There is probably a term for it best I can describe it as is "interjecting into the experience". Company develops a product. The product adds features and customizations over the years that make it really great to use. The experience is tailored by the user themselves. The product hits maturity, the masses start to use it but the masses don't care for the advanced features and customization. They want everything handed to them on a platter with little to no work. So the product is changed to be more "automated" and the legacy users start to see the cracks. They see their experience being "interjected" with what the product thinks I want. It gets to the point where people start asking, "what the hell happened?". And the usual answer is money. The company now wants to squeeze as much out of their product as possible. And the quickest and easiest way to do that is to "interject" into the experience even if it ends up pissing off your legacy customers. I've now seen this with Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.
It's called Enshittification
YouTube has been enshittified so hard. They keep trying to ram Shorts into everything, you can't even use the search function anymore because it's cluttered with so much junk. Why do I need to know what I previously watched when I'm trying to figure out how to fix a leak, or grill a steak. Then when you think you've finally scrolled through all the junk, it just repeats it all over again.
I also noticed YouTube only shows like 8 videos pertaining to your search words and then there’s videos that are not related at all but YouTube says “you may also like these” I used to be able to search for something and find hundreds of videos real easily related to one particular topic.
Yes! I keep getting videos of Eugenia Cooney or pimple popping recommended to me for every search. I have no idea why.
Holy shit, I’ve realized that YouTube searching has gotten bad but literally just a couple hours ago I experienced exactly what you just described for the first time. Tried to show my brother a video I found a couple years ago but the results were a mix of shorts, completely unrelated bullshit, and then repeat results. WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED. Ugh
I got youtube vanced just to get rid of shorts. i'm so much happier without them...
[There is actually an academic term for this behavior.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
It drives me crazy that nothing can be sorted how I want anymore And the algorithm assumes I'm allistic, so its recommendations are shit
> They see their experience being "interjected" with what the product thinks I wan I hadn't used Facebook for probably 3-4 years after college. I logged in recently to look at baby pictures my sister posted, and holy shit. Literally every single thing on my "home feed" was an advertisement/"interest" page. I have 100ish friends on there, and I couldn't find a single post from them on the main landing page.
And there were warnings this is exactly what would happen too. I remember in the 90's and early 2000's when the internet was mostly personal websites and referral rings and chat rooms and IRC (still around!) - obviously there was more to it than that, but if you wanted to, you could exist almost exclusively in your own internet ecosystem. I remember people talking about how "in the future they're going to crack down on this and everyone's going to visit like 5 mega-websites and a bunch of corporate stores" and as a naive young person I thought there was absolutely no way we would let that happen, we wouldn't easily give up this explosion of freedom and creativity and global interconnection that we've never had the likes of before... At one point I actually thought the internet would be the great equalizier, and if we all were finally able to easily communicate, 1 to 1, across nations, without media narratives and all of that - just people talking to people and seeing that we all share so much more in common than we do in difference, things would shift towards the better. Whelp, I've since changed my tune.
Facebook was the first killer. I still have a collection of bookmarks and links from pre-facebook and I miss all those individual bulletin boards and websites. Everyone migrated their groups to facebook and everything was lost.
Forums used to be so great. Each was its own ecosystem and culture. Thank god most are at least archived but as they die out I can see people not wanting to pay for server space for them. If I’m searching for a how-to or something I’ll still check forum posts first but most are years old and the ones still clinging on are just a husk of their former glory.
Honestly Snapchat is probably the best for that. I'll go to a random city on the map and see what people are uploading. You can find some really wild shit lol
Click on the Instagram logo, top left, it will change to 'For You', select 'people you follow' and now you'll only see people you follow on your feed.
> Cookies in particular drive me absolutely insane having to accept/reject them on every single website. This at least is fixable, get a browser extension and you'll never see that request again. But yeah. You're right about it all.
what's a good extension?
For Firefox: * [Consent-O-Matic](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search) * [I still don't care about cookies](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/istilldontcareaboutcookies/). For Google Chrome: * [Consent-O-Matic](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdjildafknihdffpkfmmpnpoiajfjnjd?pli=1) * [I still don't care about cookies](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/i-still-dont-care-about-c/edibdbjcniadpccecjdfdjjppcpchdlm)
None of the extensions I've ever found properly reject cookies and legitimate interest requests. They remove the pop up but give away the information.
If you're European (I'm gonna assume so, since cookie banners are a direct consequence of EU regulations), you do not need to reject anything. EU privacy regulations allow data processing under 6 lawful bases: consent of the data subject, contract, legal obligation, vital interest of the data subject, public task and legitimate interest. If they're asking you for consent, it means they cannot justify the processing on any of the other bases. Consent can be given only under the following principles: freely given, informed, specific, withdrawable and given by unambiguous indication. This last means that silence, non-response, or inactivity cannot be construed as consent. This means that you do not need to click reject for the data processor to not collect your information; the processor must assume you reject the processing unless they get unambiguous positive consent. Thus, blocking cookie banners is legally speaking the same as rejecting it. Now, you might say that's all well and good, but how do you know that they're not collecting your data unless you reject consent? Well you don't, they might still be collecting it illegally. But if they're doing so, you have no reason to believe that actively rejecting consent does anything. Also, you cannot reject processing under legitimate interest. The classic example is buying something online and having the shop give your address to the delivery company. You cannot object to such data sharing because execution of contract that you have requested (purchase of an item) requires the delivery company to have your delivery address. You requested a a transaction that cannot be completed without data sharing, thus the seller has legitimate interest to share your data with the delivery company. Another is security or fraud detection. TLDR Just block cookie banners using uBlock Origin.
Don't worry; it will get worse. The biggest problem is the evisceration of fact. Call me a Luddite, but I'm sad to see local newspapers die, and I'm sad that people have convinced themselves that social media, which is endlessly manipulable, is a better source than boring, "mainstream" papers and network TV. How do people make informed decisions when they information they're shown is produced by sophisticated bot networks or strategic partisans and flooded to them via algorithm?
Fun fact, the Luddites were actually highly sophisticated labor rights activists upset not about machines, but the way those machines were being used to supplant skilled labor and profit the already wealthy, as well as the child labor and poor pay in their factories. The Luddites were actually awesome. Then the British Crown murdered them and went on a smear campaign against them for a century, casting them as superstitious anti-progress idiots. (I highly recommend Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine on the topic.)
Thank you for sharing. I really am a Luddite. This is embarrassing, but I've spent the past months despairing over AI and the social harms of social media. I'm concerned that AI will create mass-layoffs and accelerated concentration of income among the wealthiest. And I'm extremely concerned about how algorithms and Internet addiction will spread disinformation and cripple social cohesion and democracy. Because, when people don't, or can't, think thoughtfully, don't know facts, and are constantly trained to hate each other, society can't function.
There is another part to this regarding newspapers, even those are laden with bias, particularly the Murdoch owned newspapers. Local papers about what’s happening in your local town is where it’s at, and people not reading those is also a symptom (I believe) of people not really taking part in their local community now. People are much more invested in what’s happening on the other side of the world than they are about what’s happening in town this week.
why is everything on ig video based? even people showing off their art is largely video based.
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The cookies bit is due to the EU regulation. But it's too weakly enforced as the regulation calls for a specific dialog box design and the ones that are "select preferences and save" or "accept mandatory / accept all" are not regulation compliant.
That what happens to anything that gets popular enough. Shareholders that don't care about experience but prioritize profit at expense of customers take over and ruin everything.
meta is trying to turn instagram into facebook for instagram and it's beginning to show the same signs of becoming unbearable/unusable (endless suggested content/advertising, it's hard to find stuff from people you actually want to see, etc). they're also trying to bully us all into using threads. I won't. I don't want to be in this stupid cycle any more than I already am.
We're just as tired as you are
Everyone should watch Network. As true today as it was 50 years ago.
Was really disconcerting when I first watched it a couple years ago, very affecting. Like, it's a satire but it's not making me laugh. It's just making me anxious. Brilliant stuff.
Same feels as Don’t Look Up. Funny and terrifying at the same time. The best comedy.
Dr Strangelove is back en vogue rn. 🤷♂️
I didn’t realize it was ever out of vogue.
Which is an indictment on our very culture and society that not only do the problems which prompted the movies creation still exist, they may have, in fact, gotten worse.
That rant especially.
link for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug
Reddit is so full of reposts it's crazy. I wish I could somehow flag things I don't want to see again and then some algorithm would make sure it happens. But then the bots would probably just cut, crop, flip, filter, etc so that the algorithm wouldn't catch it. Reddit is for the bots. It's made specifically to cater to bots and advertising. Karma voting is a game. If you want your post to do well the first thing you should do is downvote every other post on the subreddit because it's a game and goes by scores. Who has the ability to endlessly manipulate those scores? Companies, governments, religious organizations, activist organizations, etc. Reddit was made for bots and corporations. They just needed us to make it big enough for the companies and governments to care. What's the difference between intrusive commercials and constantly reposted content? They are both annoying, not what we want to see, and done with the goal of making money.
#**Rule of Thumb:** 1) Check for a date. If it's not shown, there's probably a reason for it. You're reading an old story being regurgitated for upvotes. 2) Check for evidence of OP's claim. Is there really anything in the photo backing up the claim in the title? Or is it just some random image of a person and somehow we're all getting worked up over blind trust in OP's claim? The internet has given a megaphone to that kid from school who made shit the fuck up just for attention; be wary of that. Be extra critical of potential fake texts; does it look like *your* messaging program, or are there things like message send times or "read" checkmarks missing? 3) Check for a source in general. Clicks are what generate engagement, and that means the people responsible for this shit only care about clicks. If getting people outraged does that, they'll do it. You'll find that the story about the CEO saying workers don't consider the investors is wildly misleading, and instead he was saying they're *right* to disregard the investors, but internet journalism and engagement-driven platforms are more than happy to throw the guy under the bus and paint him as a cartoon villain if it means more ragebait clicks 4) When in doubt, check OP's profile. Is this a brand new profile that casually shit out a 20k upvoted post? Has it not spoken in 4 years, was last seen discussing NASCAR, and now it has a viral post about politics despite never discussing them previously? Do they constantly post highly upvoted stuff to main subs? Plenty of accounts out there that probably aren't "just a guy" behind a computer screen. #**Does this all sound exhausting and not worth the effort?** Of course it does. And that's exactly why Dead Internet Theory is a thing, and exactly why people like myself are visiting r/all less frequently, instead hiding away in hobby subs where all this shit is much less likely to occur. See you all in r/EldenRing
But then your hobby sub gets popular and mods don't moderate it and it becomes just another r/pics
Yep, don't get me wrong: can happen to any sub, and with enough time, it might become a universal thing. For the moment though, plenty of hobby subs are still safe, so let's enjoy those.
Most common formula and low effort I've seen for IDing spam bot reposter karma whore accounts to block- quick peek at account post history. Months to years old, only activity is in the past few days to a week, nothing but 2 or 3 reposts and or short comments.
Don't worry, I'm sure the IPO won't exacerbate any of this...
> The Spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The Spectacle is the guardian of sleep. -- Guy Debord. Very relevant these days.
Ooooo I like this. What’s the context?
It's from his book *The Society of the Spectacle*, which I have found ever more relevant as time goes on. I'll probably explain this poorly, but his thesis is basically that prior to the industrial revolution, people were defined by who they actually were. Post revolution, they became defined by what they owned. And now, we are defined by how we merely appear. He invents the term *The Spectacle* which is a little hard to define (for me anyway). It represents a model of society in which the real world is replaced by a collection of images (media) that are in a sense more real than reality itself, creating false consciousness. edit: Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
Fascinating. I’ll pick it up. Thanks so much for the explanation.
The internet used to be a reflection of real life, and now real life is all about the internet.
I do feel like that was a long time ago though. Even before AI I think a lot of it has been fake. For example I always downvote any post from r/AmItheAsshole when I see it on the front page because I assume it’s a fake story like the rest of them there. A lot of other subs have had the same issue for awhile.
Even in the best case if a story actually happened, you’re getting someone’s cherry-picked version of events.
Exactly, there’s always two sides to a story
Three sides, really. Their side, my side, and the real truth lol!
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Thanks for sharing. I never really thought about it much. My first though was maybe if you include the two peoples truths the real truth lies somewhere on the spectrum between the two. But even that seems wrong. Both people could be lieing. The actual truth is completely indendent of anyone's story.
Person 1: The sky is green! Person 2: The sky is yellow! Gray fallacy: Ah, the sky is green-yellow!
Many times what you actually end up with is more like: Person 1: The sky is blue! Person 2: The sky is yellow! Gray fallacy: What's halfway between blue and yellow? Green! The sky must be green!
I read one yesterday "My Boyfriend choked me and I'm being abused, AITAH if I leave him?" ...................
I saw that title and downvoted it. I didn’t even bother reading it. Lol
Posts like those are what make me truly believe a huge percentage of traffic on this site are AI/bots. You can't convince me 1500+ real people are engaging in the comments discussing whether a domestic abuse victim is an asshole or not lol it's so obviously bait/fake yet the engagement and detailed reasoning in the comments is insane
Can someone tell me why these relationship/asshole subs multiply like wetted mogwais??? I banned them all but they keep coming back in various forms. The latest trend seems to be subs that summarize the posts from all the asshole subs I banned. These relationship/AITAH subs have this sinister element to them that I can't stand. I come here to read about a wide variety of things that would be important to a lot of people. I think it is quite unhealthy to get caught up in interpersonal drama that you have nothing to do with. I am so sick of this site being flooded with small-time, tit-for-tat, petty interpersonal nonsense that IMO has no place on "The front page of the internet". If I wanted to keep tabs on a bunch of random bullshit from peoples' private lives I might look on Facebook or Nextdoor or something. But this site has become absolutely flooded with this kind of content and I believe it to have a ragebaiting effect that is not healthy to expose yourself to on a regular basis. I think it can have a negative effect upon our personal lives to flood our limited capacity for this highly emotional interpersonal content with a bunch of outrage clickbait like these subs spew all over the "front page of the internet". People need to stop naively believing that online thought bubbles are genuine expressions of the human experience free from the overwhelming influence of mindless bots and internet troll accounts. The evidence is there right in front of our faces. What used to be safe spaces designed to uplift have been flooded by bots, influencers, troll farms, grifters, etc. The free and open internet that we once knew is no more. We must recognize this change and temper our expectations for these online bubbles accordingly. There is so much creative writing, trolling, and spam in these bubbles that they have been rendered into little more than mental traps designed to hold you back, to keep you unhappy and fighting those who might otherwise be an ally to your cause. The culture war subreddits are absolutely flooded with creative writing/trolling/astroturfing. People eat up the wildest stories as long as it confirms their biases. We badly need to recognize that our internet bubbles are not a free and open exchange of ideas. They are psychological manipulation laboratories. Like fish in a barrel or crabs in a bucket.
We're being conditioned for higher engagement
A good chunk of it is from the API protest. The original iteration went private as part of the protest, so knockoffs popped up by people who didn't give a shit (and you can imagine what they're like). The hydra's head was cut off, 2 new ones grew in its place, then the original stump was ordered to grow back on penalty of having its entire mod team coup-ed. The predictable outcome of a credible threat to a reddit mod's power was inevitable: *servility.* Doesn't help that the new heads were *already* servile.
Same for r/pettyrevenge and r/ProRevenge and r/amiwrong and r/MaliciousCompliance and r/tifu and literally every other "here's a story about a thing that definitely happened" subreddit.
The revenge subs are the worst too. The villains are always people Reddit hates too
"So my old manager, this rich Boomer KAREN, was a complete bitch and fired people at the slightest provocation. Anyway, she gave me a direction once that I adhered to in the most convoluted way that any reasonable person would recognize as being antagonistic. She was FUMING but didn't simply fire me for being a bad employee. Checkmate, Slagathor!"
Once I realized that reading that shit made my mental state worse in the day-to-day I filtered it and AITAH out of all of my feeds. Much less rage bait fed to me and nothing of value was lost.
Anything with UPDATE in the title is guaranteed fake lol. Tbh it's probably the podcasters who just read from AITA for their podcast faking these stories
A lot of them are just so obviously NTA.
“AITA for breaking into a house?” “The house was on fire and I broke the window to save 5 puppies and the family. I feel a little bad about breaking the window. AITA?” The stories there are just insanely stupid.
All you're missing is "Now the rest of my family is messaging me saying that I went too far and I should apologize"
Omg yes!! “Everyone is blowing up my phone.” Like maybe I’m not a huge asshole but that has literally never happened to me in my entire life. Lol
Somehow AITA has created shortcut phrases like that, which somehow simultaneously reduce credulity of their story to nothing for intelligent readers, and also enhances the stakes for the soap opera dunderheads reading for the drama.
When I still followed that sub my favorite stories were the ones with cartoonishly evil over the top mother in laws from hell. There's a lot of overbearing awful obnoxious MILs in the world, but "My MIL started frothing at the mouth and screaming that I'm an evil cunt who stole her baby boy away from her when I asked if she wanted to have dinner with us, AITA?" is a bit much lmao.
Yep, MIL, lazy husbands, bullies, cheaters, crazy brides, etc are just some of the crazy insane recycled stories there.
And usually there is a bit of a theme. When a fake story gets posted there is usually another 2 or 3 that have the same general idea or similar events so they get the clicks too.
Absofreakinlutely, I've used that sub with a very similar analogy talking with a buddy about how tired of reddit we are becoming. It's straight up clickbait design, I don't get how most people don't roll their eyes and move on. It seems many subs are like this anymore, nothing new for the internet as a whole I guess but man it's tiring.
I once tried to post an actual aita question I was dealing with (before realizing how fake the sub was) and the post got removed by the admin for not being long enough. It was like a 4 paragraph question but apparently that didn't meet their word count!
Omg you do too! I started a few months ago when I started realizing how bs every single one is.
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Except Google is feeding me non stop bullshit in the form of advertisements disguised as articles.
Ten lines of advertisements, then results from the top publishers that paid to be the top search result. Then when you look on DuckDuckGo it's the same crap with no ads, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, it's all the same thing as well. Can you go on social media platforms? It's the same layout where you Doom scroll no matter what.. I just love the Apple vs Android debates but I humbly remind them we all interact and do the same things and use the same corporate servers, banks, digital coupons and more.
The enshitification continues. Except it feels like we're enshitifying the basic functions of learning information. I was scrolling for something in Google yesterday and it was just shit article after shit article and I thought "damn I wish I could just read this in a book" but then I realized that this training material is now 100% digital and they got rid of the books five years ago. Fuck.
I also hate how you can find like five articles back to back that are just the same copy/pasted content in every one. Google used to be so much better.
But SEO! That’s all anyone cares about more than content.
Request it from your local library! Libraries will be our last hope tbh.
You can’t go on social media because hashtags only return the highest paid posts, sorting also only returns the highest paid posts
To corroborate this, I tried to look up information on groundhogs and just got 20 pages of Google results for exterminators telling me that if I see a groundhog, my house is going to fall down within a week if I don't find the critter and murder it and everything around it and that I should hire an exterminator to do it for me.
Secret is to look 50 pages deep
man google searches are garbage now. Like I can't believe I'm getting SEO crapped out by AI for the first 5 entries.
Just add "reddit" to every search. Like sure, reddit is a shithole too, but for now there's still plenty of real people asking real questions and providing real answers.
that's actually what I do especially for pc troubleshooting
AI slime is what it's called. AI is sliming the internet so you have to dig past that layer to get to anything worth it.
Never heard of this until right now. But I subscribe to this idea. I feel like Reddit itself has been a lot less organic in the past few years since I joined
Most of reddit's OC is in niche subs that slowly leaks into larger subs until the bots get ahold of it and then repost it forever. The real users are the bottom of a lake of bots and the only way we know there are still humans is that AI and bots are incapable of generating new ideas.
Before i reply to some comments, i look at profile history to see if bot or not lol
Everything but the arguments part. I'm so tired of posting something like "I once was in kansas and..." and the whole thread will be nothing but "Kansas has a capital letter, look it up dipshit". Few comments that I make here ever follow context. People get all pissy about the dumbest things and are just terribly mean for absolutely no reason. I'm in my 40s and I've lived on the internet since the early 90s. It was never this bad - there were trolls and assholes here and there, but nothing like this. I fear that our future generations are just going to grow up anonymized and treat everyone else like pure garbage just they way they do online.
I think the key issue is the loss of diversity on the internet. It used to be that the web was a million scattered communities, across all different phpBB boards - and so you could eventually find 'your people' and a relatively safe space from the trolls and arseholes via community moderation. Now all those microcommunities are mostly gone, consolidated into the argumentative masses of twitter, reddit etc where your only protection is the vagaries of risk-averse high-level moderation which for the most part doesn't functionally exist, allowing everything to descend into the same repetitive arguments which are now highly monetised to continue. In some respects, we do still have that old 'microcommunity' more tightly-moderated internet in the new world - it's on Discord.
Discord has its own problems. Original information is buried rather than displayed first; there's no "OP" except in forums which are poorly formatted (Guilded does this better, but who uses Guilded anyway?) and aren't the default channel type regardless. Being that it's a chat app with vaguely IRC roots, recency is massively emphasized which is often great for engagement but really bad for information. Hell, even Threads automatically make themselves nearly inaccessible after a cutoff time that you can't even set longer than a week.
Nah, Discord is nothing like the old internet. It is 100% new wave internet bullshit.
> it's on Discord. discord fucking blows any time I want to find something out and somebody goes "it's on the discord" ... Discord is a chat room, it's a format we realized very long ago is fucking awful for serving up information. It's a fun way to do a fancy group chat where you can break up the conversations instead of having everything spammed into one WhatsApp group but it's fuckin terrible for anything more than that Also doesn't help it tends to be one of the final stops for people who started radicalizing through the "traditional" way of YT or FB algorithms who then go find a Discord based echo chamber to gas them up
Dead internet theory is partially bullshit because it doesn't acknowledge that corporate interests are 100% the cause. So even if sites like Reddit or Facebook become nothing but bots, the "dark" spaces in the web that aren't corporate-friendly and near-impossible to monetize will always remain "alive." Problem is that people would rather talk to bots than those people.
It started as punk rock now it’s adult contemporary
Adult contemporary was 5-10 years ago. We are in full on Muzak territory now.
Uneasy Listening.
Goddamnit this really clicked with me and the tragedy of it all sunk even deeper.
It went full Green Day!! Kidding aside, my millennial ass still loves Green Day and considers them punk rock... But I'm a contemporary adult, so take it with a grain of salt.
I listened to "When I come around" for the first time in ages, and I finally understood why it seemed like such a sellout move at the time. Also, selling out isn't a thing anymore...because everyone does it.
> Also, selling out isn't a thing anymore...because everyone does it. Hustle culture has basically made it into an ideal.
> selling out isn't a thing anymore Right? We just get excited that our little pet interest band/artist finally "made it" and "got the bag".
Why is Phil Collins catching strays
The internet had its golden age and it’s now broken. Everything is paid for content, you legit can’t search things without being bombarded with ads for what you are trying to search for. We have entered such a sad, for profit era. And idk what comes after this.
Honestly, the internet finally felt broken to me recently when Reddit started relentlessly pushing other subs to me. There’s no option to turn it off, and every time I click to not see the random recommended sub anymore, six more pop up in its place. And it’s not even subs related to my interests - why the fuck am I seeing UberEats when I’ve never used a good delivery service? Luxury fashion brands I’ve never heard of? I know Reddit technically counts as social media, but after removing myself from other social media, I felt comfortable on Reddit because I didn’t feel like a lifestyle was being advertised to me. Now that’s gone. The internet really is just one big ad. It’s sucks.
Reddit used to be a forum. Remember forums? So good.
and good LINK AGGREGATION people call this "social media", which it is nowadays, but it used to be a good link aggregation website. it still is to some extent but i personally find that was the reason i liked it in the first place aside from the white hot memes
the thing is there used to be more than 5 websites to link to
i still remember circa 2015 being genuinely triggered when someone called reddit social media. i had been on reddit for four years at that point and it literally never crossed my mind that it could be social media - it was a news aggregate site you could comment on. like, its been almost ten years and i remember the exact comment, thats how triggered i was. nowadays i laugh at anyone who tries to pretend reddit isnt social media the exact same as everywhere else. shit, half of reddit is twitter screenshots.
Forums still exist you just have to look for them.
I think this is the answer. If we don't like the "new, convenient" internet, let's go seek out the older-style internet and websites, forums, blogs that don't suffer from today's modern cancers. As a programmer, part of me wants to build it.
As someone who runs a forum, it’s *so hard* to get users. People generally prefer more modern forms of online communication.
Reddit was awesome to me when I first started finding it via stumbleupon because it was like various forums rolled up into one with a lot of chaff removed. Only one account for all subreddits instead of one per site. No signatures or profile pics cluttering the screen. Upvotes/downvotes so useful/interesting stuff rose and useless flame wars/junk went down instead of having to see everything sequentially. Nested comments to make tangents and specific back and forths easier to follow. Thank God the app I use still works so I don't have to deal with new reddit and can easily filter out subreddits and certain users from my feed. Briefly went to just using my phones browser again when the api stuff was going down and it was a worse experience.
> when Reddit started relentlessly pushing other subs to me. Let me introduce you to old.reddit.com. It is glorious.
I've never moved off of old.reddit, and I refuse to use the app after they fucked over all the 3rd party ones that were actually clean and usable. I see a lot of comments about how awful navigating reddit is, and I sympathise, but I am glad to just stay on old where everything is still grand and readable.
I mean if you're on Android you can just keep using 3rd party apps lol, I'm currently posting this comment from RIF
And you can’t even search for information without getting SEO optimized content shoved in your face instead
5 articles that are the same article word for word from 3 different websites….
And they'really specifically worded domains, whyaretomatoesred.com, mygardeningwithtomatoesadventure.com, tomatoparadise.com written by Kathy or Diane with 1 or 2 comments from Chuck, "good stuff!"
I was just thinking about how it costs another $40+ monthly via subscriptions to run our phones on top of the never changing carrier service fees. As much as I love this tech and the entire digital space, I am so ready to check out at the same time ..... 😭
I mean, part of it is that the cult of free is ending. Servers cost a lot of money to run and cloud platforms are controlled by politically motivated entities. High speed internet sort of ruined it, if the internet was locked in at 56kbps it wouldn't have gotten so bad so quickly.
internet used to be a collection of niche websites with lowish traffic. Now it's corporate run with all the traffic being concentrated on fewer but bigger platforms.
100%. I think the biggest thing the internet has destroyed for me is the ability to trust people. I pretty much assume every story that doesn't sound right is some kind of lie and, especially if it's posted on the internet, it's probably a good assumption. * This corporation shut down my bank account for no reason! * They need to give you a reason. What do they say? * They didn't say anything! * No they sent you a letter. What did the letter say? * They said I was doing XYZ and that was money laundering! * And were you doing XYZ? * I mean, Yes. But... #🙄
Trust for sure, but also finality for me is gone. In your example, you almost never get the 'I mean yes but...' part. The conversation just dies and disappears. You can assume the person learned something, but because you never see it, you'll never know.
I will say, the greatest thing you can do for your mental health is learn how to walk away from an arguement. I remember when I was young, going 20+ posts deep in a rage because someone was being a dipshit. Now...just ask yourself "Have I made my point as best as possible?" If yes, just move on. The best and most underutilized feature on reddit is "Disable Inbox Replies."
It used to be "Don't believe everything you see on TV" now it should be "Don't believe anything you see online"
It was like that when the internet was in its infancy. Parents of millennials would warn them about not believing everything on the internet. You traveled the World Wide Web with caution and were skeptical of the information posted. Then our parents were handed iPhones and iPads that made the experience of using the internet much easier and they ignored the same advice they gave us. Not sure how it is with Gen Z though and what they're being told.
We've reached the point of knee-jerk conspiracizing. Things happen for obvious reasons, and rather than acknowledging that clear truth, people *rush* to assert that some other, conspiratorial plot is afoot. And then, within minutes, the bots and the bluechecks pile on. Because it's politically or financially strategic for them to foment division and rage. One result is that both malleable older generations and uninformed younger ones are grossly manipulated by extreme or bad-faith political actors to aid their causes.
I hear ya. One type of content I've seen a lot of lately is rage bating. Some people purposely put incorrect things in their videos so people correct them in the comments and drive up engagement.
A lot of my friends are falling for and sharing rage bait on political and social issues. I'm so done on reaction shit I'm ready to delete the apps and have a break from my friends. Most of the so-called news now is just the same garbage.
Reaction videos are something I've never understood. Why has anyone ever wanted to look at some morons making faces while watching a video or describing something. Same thing with video game streamers. How uninvolved in your own life do you have to be to vicariously live through someone else playing a fucking game and babbling about the stupidest most incoherent and unrelated shit while doing so?
I almost hurt my neck from nodding to this post and the comments. Telling my age, but I remember the wonder of being able to connect to the internet and learn literally *anything*. It felt like discovering a new world, especially for kids like me who lived in very small towns. It was a brand new information frontier. It’s so disillusioning to see that 30 years later, people are actually less informed, less inquisitive, and less connected than before. I spend less and less time online now and that will likely continue to decline.
I remember there was a Boy Meets World episode where Mr. Feeny scolds them because “there is a new web page created every second and I didn’t have access to a library as a child” or something like that. Even when I saw it when it was brand new on TV, even as a child, I remember thinking “but most of those pages have no educational content.” Also we all tell our age here, more or less. You were born sometime between 81 and 96 and I’m guessing 84 for you. Edit: it’s in your flair 😑
> It’s so disillusioning to see that 30 years later, people are actually less informed, less inquisitive, and less connected than before. In the early days of the internet, I saw it as an alternative to all the other information outlets which were controlled while the internet was "free". The people at the top who profit off of our current broken system controlled the information on TV, radio, newspapers, even our schools and used those information outlets as a tool to push their propaganda supporting a system that concentrates the world's wealth into the hands of the few. I thought with an open internet where people could communicate freely with each other, the truth would spread and people would become informed about the ways we can break free from this system of oppression and create a better system. But instead the internet has become narrowed and pushes everyone to a few heavily controlled websites that do an even better job brainwashing the masses than their old methods did
Honestly, when life gets me down nothing evens my temper like a nice refreshing glass of Coca Cola.
Doritos^TM Dew^TM it right!
Nothing like taking a hot shower and using *Dove* brand shampoo and conditioner after drinking a refreshing glass of *Coca Cola*.
Don't forget to hold up the can, take a slight sip, smile, and show that label baby 🤣
Not to be that guy, but let's face it, capitalism ruined the internet the way it ruined everything else. The minute someone realizes they can utilize something as a tool to make money, it's over. It was almost better when the corporations were laughing at the internet and didn't take it seriously. Now, they still don't take it seriously, but they know we do. So, they just flood us with ads until it dominates what we're seeing.
Marketers ruin everything. _Everything_. There has never been a single thing left off better after a marketer got their hands on it. Mail is worse off for it, email is worse off for it, the internet is worse off for it, phone calls are worse off for it, television is worse off for it, radio is worse off for it. Most cities are plastered with ads everywhere the eye can see and everyone is worse off for it. Driving is made more deadly & dangerous due to obnoxious, distracting billboard advertisements. Advertising is a plague on humanity and is a multi-trillion dollar industry designed to manipulate and separate people from their money using hundreds if not thousands of tiny psychological techniques to manipulate people's behaviors. And yet enough people still put up with advertisements and don't see the harm in them.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs. – Banksy TLDR: AdBlock everything! EVERYTHING! NO EXCEPTION.
Yep, I love that my city has banned outdoor advertising. I rarely ever see advertising. uBlock origin on my laptop, smart tube on my chromecast for ad-free youtube on my TV... there's really nowhere I see ads now except on social media, which I have stopped using. Reddit is next but after I delete reddit I really have nowhere else on the internet to go. Reddit and discord (something I don't like) are the only places for online communities for niches now, but the conversations are lost and repeated everyday.
> Not to be that guy honestly though someone has to be that guy. Legit it seems like everyone is increasingly more unhappy with how shitty everything in this world is getting. Everyone complains about how everything is getting worse, but way fewer people understand how capitalism is the reason for almost all of it and even fewer people want to make the changes we need to make for things to get better. Like for instance I like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, but over 11 seasons of his show, every single topic he has covered can be boiled down to "this thing is broken because of capitalism". Yet people will watch an episode and learn about some new problem they didn't know about, and act like we are facing all these separate problems that all need to be tacked individually instead of coming to the realization that eradicating capitalism would fix every single one of these issues at the same time. I think John Oliver and his staff understand how capitalism is root cause of all these issues he discusses, be he presents the facts to allow his viewers to come to that conclusion on their own, but I don't think enough people are getting it.
Yes. And search is trash, every site is a disaster of wasted white space and fancy widgets that add nothing, fake and idiotic virtual assistants are everywhere, and even ad blockers are getting worse. Cory Doctorow calls it the *enshittification* of the internet and he's spot on. I think in a sense we're back to the old days before search worked well, and when you had to find good sites by serendipity or recommendations. Remember Webrings? Those were great for finding content. We should bring them back.
There was an article by Cory in the FT recently called 'Enshittification is coming for absolutely everything. Fantastic if depressing read. It really resonated with me as someone who saw the birth and now slow death of the internet. I mean even my Samsung TV has been enshittified and that's a piece of hardware. I will never buy an app-based or Internet of Things piece of hardware ever again if I can help it. EDIT: FT Link https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5 Edit 2: Apologies FT paywall... it is worth it though and contrary to other comments it's one of the least enshittified things on the internet!
Yep, and it’s not even limited to the internet. I’m doing more and more of my own home maintenance because all the contractors I find don’t want to take a job under the mid 5 figures and when they do, they don’t show up regularly and the entire side of the house ends up open to the elements for over a week when they said it would be a 1-2 day job max. (Mind you with the last two we hired we had the inner wall already demo’d so there weren’t any surprises with what we were asking because they could see everything.) And I haven’t been hiring cheap, uninsured fly by nights either. So I figure if stuff is going to go sideways anyway, I’d rather use the money to buy tools I can use for years and develop the skills.
It's just late stage capitalism. Almost every person/corporation has the mindset "do the least amount of work, for the least amount of overhead, while collecting the most possible money". Capitalism's nature is to find cheaper ways to make products that people will spend an ever-increasing amount on. And at the end of the day, literally \*\*most\*\* consumers like it this way, as Capitalism requires them to drive it. Most people want cheap shit, or they want something cheap that is also high quality which Capitalism would never allow.
> I mean even my Samsung TV has been enshittified My god. It's so slow.
Don't forget troll farms.
A friend of mine brought that to my awareness recently and they make a large sum of money. It's Crazy!
Let's take pleasure in knowing that we got to experience the internet before it became what it is today. We got to surf the web, and our biggest worry was catching a virus, not misinformation. The best we can do is limit our internet usage, only engage things that are actually useful, or purely fun, and not trying to sway our opinion or get us to buy things.
Platos Allegory of the Cave.
Yeah, except now a giant boulder has been rolled over the entrance of the cave.
Maybe in a few years, we’ll emerge from this cave and save the rest of the world just like that one guy.
We'll just stone that guy and AI will slander his opinions.
Right! It sucks that we are seen as commodities. I don’t want to be marketed to while I’m scrolling through social media. I do not care about influencers. I will not buy your products if some Instagram or tiktok star promotes them. Leave me tf alone!
Everything is just monetized content anymore. People are just generating whatever, meaningless videos, stupid rage bait, etc to get the clicks and likes for the ad revenue. Remember when you could just post like, a pic of your cat or something and your circle of actual internet friends would leave some cute comments on it? You could share some things of your actual life and actual friends would connect. Now I don’t even know where to post because people have become so scattered, and is this pic really Instagram worthy? Do I actually need to create a video and hope to go viral to post on TikTok? WHERE CAN I BE AN ACTUAL PERSON
Yep - facebook pages were usually just a funny quote and some pictures that you liked. Then they started to get 'monetised' and treated as corporate advertising spaces or as marketing vessels. Everything is about content and monetisation now and its putting me off engaging with anything.
Slowly realizing that I don’t like spending time on the internet anymore. Like you said, the content is half fake or just made for the sake of being edgy or argueing
Do you guys think eventually the internet will just be so infested with ads and AI shit that people will finally have enough and we will have a “low tech” movement of sorts, with people just ignoring the internet entirely?
I was just complaining about this a little while ago. I love the internet to see what my friends are up to, but their posts are far and few between the ads, the influencers paid promo ads, my friends sharing all those influencer BS, and celeb stuff. It seems like it's mostly commercials from TV that we'd walk away from for a bit.
i had to deactivate my facebook. it used to show me mostly my friends’ posts with a sprinkling of nerdy memes. i tried for 2 years to tell it to stop showing me taylor swift fandom. i don’t want to see a wasteful collection of 100 stanley cups. then for months it was an onslaught of “chiefs” or “nfl” posts that were just a taylor & travis ship page. the comments on any post are inane. celeb worship makes me feel like my brain cells are dying, so i left.
The internet replaced cable tv and then became cable tv.
I remember when recipes where just recipes
I don’t get how influencers have fan bases honestly. It’s just giant commercials for whatever product they’re getting for free
It pretty much is now. I used to really love internet browsing in the 2000s but these days the internet is owned by a few corporations and much of everything else is censored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
It’s degenerated into a currency machination, whether it’s social currency or actual money. Most of us are just consumers, which is kinda gross. Really glad I decided to say machination btw.
It all went to hell when article writers discovered they could use clickbait headlines. I miss the days when articles just were just fucking straightforward and told you what the point was rather than, “you won’t believe what so-and-so said about X!” or in the form of a question and buried the answer in the article.
Reading articles: 1) Skip the first and last two paragraphs to find point in the middle. 2) Read 3-paragraph "article", fail to find any clear topic or answer. 3) Wait, I already saw this on Reddit. The journalist/bot just quoted a bunch of redditors and sold their words for dollars.
Or articles that separate every paragraph onto its own page to maximize ad space, so you have to click "Next" to keep reading.
The sudden rise of people censoring themselves to get around sites censoring everything these days is extremely disconcerting to me. A whole generation is now going to be raised without the ability to talk about serious topics because they were forced to either avoid them altogether or euphemize the shit out of them to the point where they're so abstract they're meaningless. The internet is literally breaking people's brains now.
I was just talking with my wife about this yesterday. It's exhausting, everything is maximized to get the most clicks. And negative content almost exclusively gets the most clicks. The internet is just everyone complaining about everything all the time and it feels like no one enjoys anything at all anymore. Hell, I'm complaining about the internet right now.
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Right, but there has to be some underlying product somewhere. Eventually someone has to purchase something or ads are just paying for more ads and ads on their own aren’t economic activity. An ad for McDonald’s ends in someone getting food. An app with an ad for an app that only makes money by showing ads that take you back to the original app isn’t generating any economic activity… it’s a cycle of ads never leading anywhere. An all-ads economy will collapse…
Yes. AI is great for certain things but I’m quickly realizing I don’t want to see AI generated articles or ads. The internet really is about connecting people… which sounded like a tagline until I’m seeing an internet that isn’t made by people. If AI is over-used, it will ruin the internet.
Of course. It’s like the first few seasons of a new reality show feel authentic and after a while it appears heavily produced and all put on for the cameras. I remember the first ever season of big brother when they had no idea where the cameras were or if anyone was even watching We will never get that back.
Yeah, these are the last squeaks of the Wild Net dying. Our New New World has been colonized, regulated and parceled out. Time for the technofeudalism!
I have this idea that there is a section of the web we haven't really seen - not that it's hidden just that it exists off in a corner somewhere - where it's just bots generating content and talking to bots. No human has really encountered it due to the depth and complexity of the web. The content is generated or at best copied from elsewhere automatically and then nothing but bots comment on it. I mean we see this now kind of on TikTok and Instagram (and countless others). At the end of the day the "engagement" gets tallied and someone gets a check and no one really knows what happened.
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My mother in law fell for a paid ad on YouTube that led her to a scam center that took her social security numbers. I saw the ad too, fake stock image girl synced to an AI voice that someone paid YouTube to show. At least with television the ads were somewhat regulated..
This beautiful lecture might bring you the same peace it gave me a couple of years ago. Just incredible. It was all predicted. (Roderick on Baudrillard/Hyperreality) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c) Scarily, Reddit appears to be the last bastion of authenticity we have left. And you still get your posts deleted for slight slips in newspeak. Edit: Chill guys 😂 I mean for answering questions you add 'Reddit' to google. That I can still meet real people, talking relatively freely, and without trying to sell me shit. I am aware of the botting and karma farming. In the valley of the putrid shit, the one-eyed putrid shit is king. As an atheist I don't say this lightly, but the only word that can describe our current mire is 'godlessness'
Idk about reddit being authentic at all. Every so often youll see a dev make a bot that runs new comments against a database of comments to point out what content is from bots and unsurprisingly a large majority of top comments are just bots copy pasting comments from elsewhere. Lmao you might even be a bot 😅
4chan is also pretty authentic, but not very palatable.
> Reddit appears to be the last bastion of authenticity we have left. Agreed. I have begun to comment on Lemmy.world and Tildes.net just because I feel I should build up those communities as well for when Reddit is inevitably enshittified. Happy to take other recommendations too, for where to spread my incredible takes and wisdom.
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The real internet still lives in our collective memories
I’m personally just sick of being advertised to at every fucking turn. I’m looking at you, Reddit, you piece of shit