Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/12/internet-information-trends-virality-tracking/676888/

by furrowedbrow • 3 years ago

302 467 3 years ago

theatlantic.com

panarky• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/wyoId

neonate• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20231219190051/https://www.theat...

segasaturn3• 3 years ago

Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.

steveBK1236• 3 years ago

Would agree. Some old school journalists from NYT wrote about that phenomenon. Colleagues doing a lot of stories that were basically the groupthink of their friend group or what they saw on Twitter.

Part of it is economics/incentives leading journalists to have to churn out a lot of content. Part of it is laziness as it's a lot easier than going out into the field and actually talking to people.

steveBK1236• 3 years ago

One sourcing was this interview with NYT publisher - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a...

From this part:

Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case.

Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism.

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

That sounds a lot like how "news" were sourced before that, with random interviews at street corners near the newspaper's office, stuff they heard at parties and from friends.

I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.

mattmanser• 3 years ago

You used to get the same phenomena in broadsheets before that though. I saw it frequently in the Sunday (maybe Saturday?) magazine included in the big UK papers.

I remember coming to the realization when reading a fluff piece that the author had basically interviewed their mates and made it a story. I think the specific article was about marrying later, and they'd just interviewed a bunch of uni-educated people of a certain socio-economic wealth. No stats, no experts, just 'gut' feeling about what was happening. And once you saw it, you realized a significant chunk of the non-news stories were like that. This was in the 90s/00s.

I think a lot of lifestyle articles have been that way for a long time, pre-internet, it's just that the lifestyle articles are more prominent now.

rvba• 3 years ago

Sometimes those looked like sock puppet accounts of the journalist.

1. Make few accounts on twitter

2. Post some bullshit

3. Quote it

mckern• 3 years ago

In fact, The Economist published a 17,000 word un-paywalled piece [0] recently about the NYT's group think problem.

[0] https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...

jeanchen• 3 years ago

As the old saying goes, "news is what happens to the editor."

cogman10• 3 years ago

I tend to agree. Far too many "journalists" are publishing articles like "here's what one reddit user discovered about xyz".

yamazakiwi• 3 years ago

I've seen websites that automate all article creation from social media posts where they don't even check if the title generated makes sense.

liveoneggs2• 3 years ago

at least in that case they credit reddit instead of "Now that everyone..." or "People outraged..."

robotsquidward• 3 years ago

The article goes into that in depth, and how that hasn't really changed even on newer platforms like TikTok, just gotten harder to follow and understand.

Dig1t2• 3 years ago

Traffic is up on X 22% YoY

Not quite death, but certainly agree about news outlets no longer seeing it as okay to say that “The internet is freaking out about X”

https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitte...

Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and his official purchase of the platform, just over one year on from his taking of the reins.

kurthr• 3 years ago

Man, those are some terrible statistics... 142.86% of nothing is still nothing.

   For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent, 
   while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period. 
   While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets 
   still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this 
   data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely.
   Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86 
   per cent.

conradfr2• 3 years ago

These days the only persons who start to follow me, like my tweets or even advertise in my feed are those onlyfans, digital prostitutes or whatever. In fact it's the first time I have to use the block function on Twitter.

Is this the growth?

fo76yo• 3 years ago

Traffic is up on X 22% YoY

Bots gonna bot. So far they’ve not caught any of mine I setup this last year.

Each bot sticks to a context, simulates some time wasting doom scrolling at random to look human, posts affiliate links otherwise with AI generating the message payload in response to a Tweet by its mark.

I love how easy the internet made it to fleece potato brains

Lewton• 3 years ago

actual usage by humans is down

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/26/x-twitter-usage-statistics-...

paxys• 3 years ago

Yup, and it was even worse because you could drive any narrative and reinforce any bias that way. Make up a story, search 3 random Tweets that support it, and now you can report on anything to an audience that will eat it up, no real evidence needed. It is still happening of course, but at least now people rightfully look at Twitter with a little more suspicion.

tqi• 3 years ago

This coincided with a reevaluation of the role of objectivity in journalism, and the rise in the number of journalists who also self identified as activists. While I don't think The View From Nowhere was every really possible, I do think that this reflected a shift in norms that resulted in more blatant cherry picking of facts and backfilling of narratives to support predetermined conclusions.

[1] https://mediaengagement.org/research/can-journalists-also-be... [2] https://archives.cjr.org/editorial/the_right_debate.php

jojojaf• 3 years ago

This comment uses 'X' as a variable, which I found confusing to parse given the recent rebranding of Twitter to X

salad-tycoon• 3 years ago

One of the benefits of being so incredibly unbelievably wealthy, pay no rent to live in many people’s heads AND buy a letter of the alphabet. Personally I would have chosen Z but with the line through the middle. X is too edgey for me. X is associated with sex, drugs, rock and roll and death. Z is my favorite, calm, pleasant to pronounce and rarified. I enjoy seeing it out in the wild when it decides to make a foray.

I know he’s owned the domain for a while but still now X is becoming his. Side note; I only started understanding Twitter after musk bought it. Can’t say my life is for the better but I can see some of the use of it. - Z

cbozeman• 3 years ago

X isn't dead, nor is it dying.

Elon Musk took away a bunch of people's status, people who thought they were important somebodies because some nerds in an office met them in person and/or they paid some money to get a verification mark.

That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it.

Well same fucking thing about Twitter / X. A bunch of journalists - a profession generally and historically associated with the lower and middle class - have been / are being absorbed into the elite social classes of America, and they had a special widdle mark that gave them abilities the rest of the hoi polloi didn't have... and Elon Musk came around and he didn't just take it away from them - he did something worse. Same for the academics. Same for the so-called "thought leaders".

He gave it to the common people. He put the elites and the commoners on equal footing... and they freaked the fuck out about it.

X is not dying. It just isn't lorded over by the elites any longer. And they can't fucking stand it.

Good.

The Internet was supposed to be The Great Leveler anyway. We weren't supposed to have gigantic centralized platforms where only approved speech from the Party is allowed. The sooner the rest of these enormous social media platforms either die or radically change, the better.

X didn't die, isn't dying, and won't die. The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it.

And yes, the "you" in the above refers to me too... a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.

wharvle3• 3 years ago

Musk said a couple weeks back that the loss of advertisers will “kill” Twitter, but it’s ok because “the world will judge them” (the advertisers)

But maybe he was joking. Sure didn’t seem to be, but who knows. Or he’s wrong.

gpspake• 3 years ago

Who are the nebulous "elites" and are you suggesting that Musk and Trump don't belong in that number? It seems like the argument is that the sheep got one over on the _maybe_ wolves by... rallying behind a couple of _definitely_ wolves who threw on some crummy sheep costumes?

jpalawaga• 3 years ago

I’m not sure I agree that this is close to reality.

The reality is much more benign. Musk isn’t the savior of free speech, he inserts rules against it constantly, like throttling nyt or saying they’ll comply with authoritarian states. He’s complains about spam and bots (despite claiming it’s an easy problem to solve) then changes verification in a way the makes it difficult know who is actually who.

Separately, you seem very bitter toward people who have left twitter after Elon changed it. Perhaps because with the voices of the elite (a politically loaded term you’re using to describe experts or people at the top of their fields) departing, the platform is less valuable and interesting.

The sad thing is, I think Elon could have been a good steward for the platform, but instead he’d rather antagonize advertisers and a subset of his users. That’s not being the great leveler though—if people select out, it’s no longer a common/shared space for everyone.

segasaturn3• 3 years ago

I feel like you may be overvaluing the importance of the blue checkmark icon.

mcphage4• 3 years ago

a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.

That's a weird take. The people whose posts you wanted to read no longer post on X, but also nothing has changed? It would seem you're describing a personally significant change right there.

chankstein383• 3 years ago

I only have a few anecdotal pieces of evidence but I know of two people, who didn't give a damn about checkmarks, who have stopped using twitter because it's unusable now. They were die-hard twitter users who were on it every day but now they don't even open it. They were also the only two twitter-obsessed folks I know and now both of them have no interest.

Again, just anecdotes but I feel like that's more evidence than you're sharing in this comment.

smeagull• 3 years ago

Okay, let's go visit X to see how alive it is.

Oh, a login screen.

Yeah they're dead.

wkat42422• 3 years ago

Voting for one of the elites does not really make you get one over on the elites. For all Trump's yapping about draining the swamp, his swamp was a lot smellier.

And guess how billionaires become billionaires? By screwing over poorer people as much they can.

They just fell for the trap, that's all.

TMWNN5• 3 years ago

That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it.

Some people get it. From before the 2016 election:

<http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...>

<http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...> (so, so prophetic in why the Rust Belt broke for Trump)

and after:

<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugne...>

The New York Times pointed out after Trump's election stunned the press that <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/media-trump...>

Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.

In other words, it isn't just a question of The New York Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.

dorkwood• 3 years ago

The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it.

Not quite. I used to get work through Twitter until Elon made it so you need a subscription to DM people. I used to get about one DM per week, but I haven't had any for about 3 months.

Always_Anon• 3 years ago

Watching leftists flip flop on free speech in real time after Elon took over gave me whiplash.

the_doctah4• 3 years ago

"Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's censorship?

Retr0id• 3 years ago

"Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

JohnFen11• 3 years ago

Twitter was a dumpster fire before Musk, but Musk has decided to pour gasoline in that dumpster.

I don't care if Twitter succeeds or fails, but I think that if the media and other entities stop using Twitter as their sole method of communication, that can only be a great thing for everybody.

If people stopped using Twitter as a source for reporting, that would also be a great thing. Twitter is a unique world, not representative of the larger world.

segasaturn3• 3 years ago

I've never been a Twitter user, never have and never will, so I can't comment on whatever the previous regime was doing, but I see people talking about Twitter much less than they did a year ago, which is kind of what the headline article is about.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I'm eager for Twitter to fail because I think it's been a net negative influence on the world almost since its inception, but it has not seemed realistic to hope that it could go away until now. Certainly, it will be replaced by something, and that thing may be just as bad, but I'm happy for the possibility that it might be better too.

dj_gitmo• 3 years ago

There was some data that suggested twitter was already in a decline before Musk. People have just been souring on social media in general.

highspeedbus• 3 years ago

I think this is a bad thing for the way it was implemented.

Twitter for a brief moment used to work like a Global Broadcast Radio, where everyone could hang out to get a sense of What Is Going On, even if results skewed towards the interests of terminally online people.

Current siloed content feels more like hyper-personalized newspaper. The content is there, but there is limited opportunity or common ground to share and discuss it with friends.

That siloing, along with Instagram's discouragement of user generated content, appears to suggest that Big Tech don't want to deal with opposing users (or any user at all) interacting with each other. IMHO.

emodendroket2• 3 years ago

They got so sick of hearing about political bias they decided they didn’t want to be news sources after all, is my impression. Too bad they only came to their conclusion after getting news publishers to totally reorient themselves around social media though.

emodendroket2• 3 years ago

So you think that the fragmentation of Web communities is going to lead to people having a LESS blinkered perspective?

zebomon• 3 years ago

Maybe not the fragmentation itself, but the general awareness of that fragmentation, yes. It sounds like a healthy thing for none of us to feel like we have a sense of "the internet" as a whole. I for one look forward to again being genuinely surprised to learn people's batshit insane opinions and theories, as I was in the early 2000s the first time I stumbled upon AboveTopSecret.

dylan604• 3 years ago

I can't decide if I dislike these more than the articles that just list items on Amazon where they just quote the reviews like they interviewed them. I assume they generate enough money through the link click throughs that make these articles worth while? I find these more repugnant than listicles. But twitter quotes, amazon review summaries, and listicles have to be the top 3 least favorite for me.

kredd5• 3 years ago

The problem I notice is even though we might create niche interest groups online, they're hard to translate into real life. Makes it hard to connect with others when you meet them for drinks, find a movie to watch or some other sort of entertainment.

I feel very lucky I was already out of university by the time algo-feeds became mainstream, otherwise it would be hard to chat about "latest episode of Game of Thrones". Or just generally chit-chat about "some stuff that everyone saw online".

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

They are not at all. You just need to establish some inclusion criteria, go through one cycle of rejecting people who don't meet it, and the people who remain following a purge tend to have elevated levels of group loyalty. Astroturfing is not that hard, and there's a lot of literature on how to engineer the outcomes you want.

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

20 years ago, we’d talk each Monday about this week’s Simpson or X-Files, and we knew that 95-100% of the people in our group watched it on Sunday. We don’t have that today.

I think Sportsball news is the last vestige of “shared culture” you can talk about over beer after work and be reasonably confident 30% or so of your mates can follow along. It’s so weird. 10 people who work together, around the same age, same social and economic class, and nobody can think of a topic that more than one of them know anything about, until someone says “How about those Warriors?”

silexia• 3 years ago

I argue that Twitter is far superior now to it's previous incarnation. It's no longer controlled by a certain political viewpoint and now encourages all free speech. I find it extremely useful, much more so than any other source now.

JohnMakin2• 3 years ago

The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet?

This is exactly it.

Consider a scenario that's likely fairly common given experiments I've done in the last several years. Say a site people still use to talk to/keep in touch with friends sometimes like IG/FB decides a user is "toxic" and either shadowbans them, or starts hiding their posts from friends. Maybe it isn't even because of a bad interaction, maybe the algorithm just decided their "content" wasn't suitable to be towards the top of this user's followers' feeds.

What would that look like to this user? It'd look like their friends were ignoring them, weren't interested in them, etc., possibly leading to depression (which has been proven pretty undeniably that high levels of social media use in teens results in higher levels of anxiety and depression).

The fact that people en masse are not pointing out how ridiculous this is, that a social media site can have such enormous influence on one's perception of "reality" is staggering and it should die and die quickly.

actionfromafar2• 3 years ago

The trick is to auto-tune the algorithm just short of total depression, and give them a glimmer of hope and interaction with friends. Then it's back to the ads for a new cycle. What's great about AI is that the we don't even need anyone to code this explicitly, it will just happen automatically.

This way it's not malicious at all! /s

terminous• 3 years ago

that a social media site can have such enormous influence on one's perception of "reality" is staggering and it should die and die quickly.

You say this as if humanity has not been fighting over the long-distance communication of information for literally the entire history of human civilization since the invention of language. Even before written language, storytellers decided what oral traditions they would or would not pass on, changing it each time they told it. Replace "social media" with "broadcast networks" or "newspapers" or "scientific journals" and it is the same issue.

You don't have a world in which 8 billion people are connected (or even 1 billion, or even 1 million, or even 1000) without a few intermediaries whose purpose is to distribute some but not all descriptions of reality to a public audience, and who gain immense power through that.

JakeAl• 3 years ago

On this note, the invention of the printing press led to The Reformation with the first printing of the Bible, which up until that point had been duplicated by monks by hand, and The Word controlled and interpreted by the Church, who wielded their power like modern governments and institutions deciding what is or is not mis- or disinformation.

dogcomplex• 3 years ago

Yep and the solution then is the same as it is now - democratizing the means of production and communication, insulating it from the influences of capital and profit. Socialism is the boring age-old answer to every one of these.

zamfi• 3 years ago

Even before written language, storytellers decided what oral traditions they would or would not pass on, changing it each time they told it. Replace "social media" with "broadcast networks" or "newspapers" or "scientific journals" and it is the same issue.

This is not the same thing. Pre-social media/pre-Internet I was not clueless about whether my communications with my "friends" were being received because almost every channel I had available to me was synchronous and there was much less noise.

Now, social media presents a broadcast interface and many people assume that their posts are being displayed to their friends. This is not actually the case. When your friends don't respond, you don't know if it's because your friends have stopped caring about you, they're just not interested in what you said, or some algorithm decided to hide you from them---and most people probably do not seriously consider the latter most of the time.

Whether we need intermediaries or not is one question, but whether we need feedback in our communication is settled: we do, and we leave it to the whims of algorithms optimized for engagement to our peril.

specialist2• 3 years ago

Akhenaten was 99.9% memory holed.

Socrates was canceled for wrongthink.

Even today, books teaching witchcraft and other pagan lore are banned from children's libraries.

1970-01-012• 3 years ago

I'm coming around to just ignoring the Atlantic. Their opinions have a rambling and stream of consciousness flow because they attempt to make something big out of something very small. Amplification of problems can be important, however when it's done in this style, you still have lots of disconnected problems and overall garbage as output.

Lamad1234• 3 years ago

I don't know. I think it's a really good article. The most watched Netflix show that nobody's heard of is such an thought-provoking thing to bring up.

jeremyjh• 3 years ago

They should be teaching about algorithmic social media feeds in health class.

kody• 3 years ago

I taught a Middle School class on digital citizenship and found Common Sense's lesson plans helpful: https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship

The kids engaged most with lessons about privacy and least with lessons about social media addiction and influence.

JohnFen11• 3 years ago

It'd look like their friends were ignoring them, weren't interested in them, etc., possibly leading to depression

If my friends seemed to be ignoring my tweets, I'd certainly ask them what's up with that through a different mechanism (in person, through texting, whatever). If the only interaction I have with a person is through Twitter, then it's a real stretch to call them "friends" in the first place.

JohnMakin2• 3 years ago

Ok, sure, but the parent comment doesn't really mention twitter at all. It's entirely normal for friends to communicate mostly via IG/FB, especially when separated by distance.

darkerside2• 3 years ago

You would really ask your friends why they are ignoring your tweets? I would feel a little ridiculous doing that.

saiya-jin• 3 years ago

That's... desperate. I mean good friends will be honest with you, but you will look really desperate for validation, and actually behave like it.

I'd say most folks who are not actually earning cash from being an 'influencer' seek some form of validation, but most will deny it, and most of those will actually believe their words. We humans are sometimes a bit weird, aren't we.

boredumb• 3 years ago

Reads like an out of touch journalist with a vendetta against elon musk before I got pay walled.

actionfromafar2• 3 years ago

Maybe, but that's the point. Who knows who's out of touch anymore? Is there any general "touch" left?

jsbisviewtiful• 3 years ago

with a vendetta against elon musk

I am assuming I was paywalled in the exact same spot as you and it's baffling from that small snippet that you came up with this claim. This is the exact quote and the only mention of that clown:

the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk,

Arguably, Twitter collapsed into... X?... and X's value has tanked in the last 12 months. That less than 10 word phrase is not the focus of the intro - It's the overall collapse of the centralized-on-social-media internet.

conradfr2• 3 years ago

I thought it was a good article.

One aspect no touched is how it seems on TikTok an artist/band can have a song getting very popular for a limited amount of time and that's it, it doesn't lead to anything else for him/her/them. No really new fanbase, etc.

M4v3R• 3 years ago

There’s an awesome recent Film Theory episode called „How YouTube broke your brain” that covers a very similar topic that I highly recommend watching: https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared

notfed2• 3 years ago

"if you're lonely, anxious, or depressed, it's because the world has become increasingly fragmented" - https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared

IMHO this video was hard to watch.

There is no "loneliness epidemic" [1] *, and blaming every listener's anxiety+depression on X (the oldest snake oil tactic), where X is YouTube's personalization algorithm, is cringeworthy. The rest of this video was full of loose correlations. It reminded me of watching the "pizza gate" conspiracy video.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/loneliness-epidemic

* Or rather, there was none before 2020. Obviously, in 2020+, the COVID quarantine was a massive drive of loneliness poll results, and we must assume that effect might still linger a few years later. The only way to rule this out is to look at pre-2020 polls.

maerF0x03• 3 years ago

Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to be blissfully unaware of things that other people are consuming.

I've long been trying to communicate this trend to anyone who will listen, once needs are saturated the trend becomes building specialization that produces the most hedonism/value for the individual (per unit of inputs). Taken to the limit the outcome is a product perfectly attuned to your feel good chemical receptors in your body and brain.

Given a download of your brain, the future looks like generated content that is attuned to you alone, and is suboptimal for everyone else (relative to their own generated content). There will be a minor amount of novelty added to stimulate those circuits (and check the gradient for optima), but will mostly be a remix of what you already respond to.

So instead of Nike choosing to produce 10, err 100, colors of shoes, they will simply make exactly the color you want, just for you (and whoever collides).

Part of this will be an explosion in creativity because as an individual you will be able to express what you want and create it without the years/decades of training required to learn Script writing, or film, or the guitar, or how to sew etc.

Will it be good for us or society? That's a moral argument I'm not making here. Just an observation and extrapolation of what seems to be happening.

keybored3• 3 years ago

People have been telling sci-fi stories about society evolving/devolving into people locked into their individual pleasure boxes for decades, friend.

haswell3• 3 years ago

And for the first time in the history of those stories, reality is extremely close to that fiction.

The reasons those stories are told over and over is because we're highly susceptible to things that use our pleasure centers in ways that lead to maladaptive outcomes. You could reframe this to say we've collectively warned ourselves about this for decades, and we're still plunging headlong towards this future despite realizing how badly it can turn out in a worst case.

maerF0x03• 3 years ago

correct, but few people seem able to grok it.

JohnFen11• 3 years ago

Will it be good for us or society?

It would be the end of society. Society requires a common understanding of reality, and the things you're talking about are deliberately destroying a common understanding of reality.

akomtu• 3 years ago

The machines that manage the Matrix towers believe that it's the optimal human society because it maximizes the engagement metrics (measured by dopamine levels).

latency-guy24• 3 years ago

Reminder that most people consume content, very few curate, and even fewer create.

Responding to your comment directly: I would argue that the opposite is happening. Things are becoming more samey. An individuals interests may be an unique amalgamation, but the pieces that make up the whole definitely are not unique.

Will it be good for us or society?

I would say that it would be mundane or not as impactful. Not everything in life is going to be a pivotal moment for humanity. I would even argue that too many things in life are treated as if they are.

happytiger3• 3 years ago

Perhaps the problem is that most of the “news” on the Internet is now behind a paywall. Audience fragmentation is the inevitable result of steady audience segmentation. What we are looking at is the inevitable result of incredible amounts of monetization effort, which inevitably empties the commons so that audiences can be properly extracted.

This very article about the phenomenon is unreadable by the majorly of Earth because it’s behind a paywall.

lloydatkinson• 3 years ago

Reddit is a good way of knowing

scottyah2• 3 years ago

Reddit is just another segregated community, it is one that just somehow attracts the type who perplexingly think they can understand and speak for everyone.

lmm3• 3 years ago

Reddit has a structure that's uniquely suited to capturing the whole of the internet. There is no mirror of Reddit here, but there is /r/HackerNews and /r/TheAtlantic. And while I'm pretty active on Reddit, the "most popular" posts on Reddit are as alien to me as the "most popular" TikTok videos mentioned in the article.

TMWNN5• 3 years ago

The best description of Reddit that I've ever read:

[maladjusted 19 year old desperate to prove that he is smarter than his parents](http://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ihk09/iama_cuban_who_li...)

Bonus:

On 4chan, smart people pretend to be stupid. On Reddit, stupid people pretend to be smart.

s1artibartfast• 3 years ago

Reddit is a good way to know what is happening on Reddit, but this feeds into the point.

there are lots of things happening online but off reddit, and also lots of people that actively don't care what is happening on Reddit.

dfgfek• 3 years ago

I know of so many communities that are banned from reddit and that had to move to other hosts...

Pxtl3• 3 years ago

The paywall on the article is ironic since the collapse of free reputable news is likely another aspect of that.

I keep hoping the Fediverse will win. After what's happened to Twitter and Reddit and Facebook, it seems self-evident that our main means of public discourse needs to be something decentralized.

But the Fediverse is struggling. UX is a disaster, every instance admin is holding on by their fingernails to stay solvent and sane, product development is comparatively slow, and bad actors have only barely gotten started attacking them.

maerF0x03• 3 years ago

They even mention it

the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, t

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

Why would reputable news be free? Would you expect anyone reputable to just give away their product? I have no doubt propaganda will remain free at least.

Pxtl3• 3 years ago

When did I say I expected it to be free? Obviously, it's paywalled because that's their only economically viable option now that advertising revenues have lowered too far for them.

I'm just stating reality: reputable news sources used to have free access to their articles on their websites. Now they do not.

bobsmooth• 3 years ago

You can either have free or you can have reputable. Real journalism costs money. You know people used to buy the newspaper for a few bucks everyday right? Now people can't be bothered to spend the same amount for a whole month's worth of news.

Pxtl3• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38699204

tropicalfruit• 3 years ago

"Consider TikTok....Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East....Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend....Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips...aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man."

so the normies finally won.

i think it makes sense that virality now is totally controlled by algorithms. there's revenues to be made. such a thing can't be left to chance, that was a blip of early internet history.

to me its all become boring, too much content and all of it seems the same, bland and unoriginal. i know there's good stuff but it's not easy to find among the noise.

scottyah2• 3 years ago

I'm beginning to like the revenue driven algorithms. I rarely get the BigCo ads anymore, it's usually small scrappy startups building niche products for the niche activities I enjoy. "Sponsored athletes" are now "influencers" and they're getting paid even more money to push the boundaries of the sports/lifestyles that I dream of, and now I get to experience them both viscerally during the week, and now the barriers to entry are lowered during the weekend now that the ecosystems are growing.

The pace at which hobbies like paragliding, base jumping, foil boarding, mountain biking, hiking, etc are growing is incredible to watch. Engineering talent dedicated towards "fun stuff" (aka top of Maslow's hierarchy and not influential on human survival (in my case the sports are very against raising the rates of survival lol))gets rewarded at paces never before seen.

gglitch• 3 years ago

> makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man
so the normies finally won.

I think I get your general point and I think I agree with it; but I have to point out that when I compare "food ASMR" and "a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man," to what was broadcast back when we only had three channels, it makes me think the "normies," have either most definitely not won, or that I'm way, way out of touch on what "normal," is now.

rnd0• 3 years ago

"normie" is another way of saying "joe sixpack" -a derisive term for the average person.

I'm not sure if that effects your point or not, but thought it was worth pointing out.

mikrotikker2• 3 years ago

According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.

Maybe better to wait for an independent actor to verify that (if thats even possible). It would not be in tiktoks best interests for instance to have in that list, people reading out Osama Bin Ladens letter and exclaiming him to be correct.

latency-guy24• 3 years ago

I'd mostly agree. But we can verify that particular instance's popularity by proxy through political content popularity. I would make the bet that it was not anywhere nearly as effective as Crunchy Cat Luna at getting views.

chrisallenlane• 3 years ago

I can't read the "Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore" article because it's behind a paywall.

gavin_gee• 3 years ago

bravo

layer8• 3 years ago

Sounds like an accurate title then.

gorgoiler• 3 years ago

The peak of this, for me, was pizza rat (late 2015) which felt like the last time everyone on the internet had seen the same thing. Kind of like the old days of TV where the whole nation would watch the same episode of something in the same evening.

Dat boi (early 2016) was the first time I missed out on the meme zeitgeist and it’s been slipping further from my grasp ever since.

I suspect I am also getting old.

mattlondon• 3 years ago

Never heard of pizza rat, so there you go: not everyone.

I think the internet - and just life in general - has always been what this article is fretting about. Stuff happens, some people see it, some don't. Nothing to see here.

supportengineer• 3 years ago

I've never heard of "pizza rat" or "dat boi". I probably spend around an hour on Reddit every day since maybe 2006.

AlienRobot• 3 years ago

What is pizza rat?

s3p2• 3 years ago

It's a video of a NYC rat carrying a delicious slice of pizza!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPXUG8q4jKU

kredd5• 3 years ago

Pizza rat was still fairly niche. From my personal memories, the "global unified virality" peaked with Ice Bucket Challenge, Gangnam Style and maybe Harlem Shake. I have a feeling as recommendation algorithms became more prominent, it started to silo every "trend" rather than showing "most viewed things" to the people.

dgellow• 3 years ago

Never heard of pizza rat or dat boi.

liotier• 3 years ago

What is happening online ? Easy answer: everything. The online world is now just as complex, both globalized and fragmented at the same time in different dimensions, as humanity itself... The tools of our social interactions, public and private, can only be homomorphic to them.

blueridge• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU

keybored3• 3 years ago

Popularity and virality aren’t the only metrics to determine what’s important, but without an understanding of what is happening online, we’re much more likely to let others take advantage of us or to waste precious time thinking about, debunking, and debating issues and controversies that are actually insignificant or have little impact on the world around us.

Believe that something trending is significant? Fake News because it is overblown and was only chuckled at for five seconds by two million people—most of whom housewives in New England—and then promptly forgotten. Don’t believe that something trending is significant? Same deal.

The “people are saying” headlines are already a thing. The ones where you find out that it’s three tweets with a cumulative like (or retweets? idk) of 57. Of course now they can justify them since it might be hundreds of thousands.

A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable monoculture may feel, especially to those who’ve been continuously plugged into trending topics and viral culture, like a relief. But this new era of the internet is also one that entrenches tech giants and any forthcoming emergent platforms as the sole gatekeepers when it comes to tracking the way that information travels. We already know them to be unreliable narrators and poor stewards, but on a fragmented internet, where recommendation algorithms beat out the older follower model, we rely on these corporations to give us a sense of scale. This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.

No self-aware closing joke about how a media writer pines for a time when they had a clear role as a meta-commentator? Ugh, too sincere.

night-rider• 3 years ago

Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web.

Relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity.[1][2][3][4] Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers.[5]

This is not a new thing. SEO types have been running 'spinner' tools for a long time. A spinner is a tool/technique to make copied content look fresh and new, and non-verbatim. Then we have the advent of LLMs which I have no doubt is being leveraged right now to spam the web with synthetic content.

notfed2• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

I find it distasteful that this article frames it as a fringe (conspiracy) theory of the present, rather than simply a theory of the future.

Is the Internet dead now? I mean no, that's pretty fringe.

Will it become so in the future? It's a very reasonable and thought-provoking hypothesis.

IMO the article should be reframed to take this into account, or a new term should be coined.

haswell3• 3 years ago

Regarding "Is that trend really viral?", I also think some people have stopped assigning value to things that go viral. It's not just a question of whether or not something went viral, but whether or not I should care even if it did.

People are starting to understand that engagement for the sake of it isn't necessarily desirable. The virality of something doesn't indicate its importance, just that it went viral. In some cases, it's a negative signal.

Over the last 1.5 years, I've intentionally reduced my interaction with social media significantly. I've become less and less aware of the viral trends of the week. I've stopped going to most of the content aggregators (HN is one of the last holdouts), and I've spent more time reading books and doing things in person.

My life is much better for it, and as someone who found tremendous value in Internet communities and credit them for helping me navigate a tumultuous childhood in the 90s, it now feels like the time to leave it mostly behind.

Not just because the Internet has changed, but because it is changing the people who use it. For all the good in the beginning, it was changing me in ways that I did not like. I was becoming more reactionary, less tolerant, and more pessimistic about other humans.

It seems to me that we're just not mentally equipped (or at least I'm not) to handle the Internet in its current form in the long run. It's fine for awhile, but degrades rapidly. I hope the next generation of web technology and communities will find ways to solve this, but I'm starting to think that part of the solution is to stop using it for the important stuff.

It turns out to be very possible, and very pleasant.

mikrotikker2• 3 years ago

Totally feel you on this.

I skipped IRC but I was all over Direct Connect and attended hub LAN parties.

I loved digg, but that ended.

I was on facebook for 3 months when it came out before deciding it was toxic trash and deleting it.

I had a twitter but never understood it, never used it, seemed toxic too so deleted that.

Reddit became a hub of underhanded advertising and bad faith arguments by toxic actors, not to mention the restrictions that were applied to make it corporate friendly so that went in the bin too.

Like you, HN is one of the last places I visit, and discord is still scratching my Direct Connect itch with a few technology focused servers and people on the otherside of the world I've never met that I call friends.

The people in real life that I am close with can be found either in Signal, Telegram or over plain old SMS.

Recently my partners friend was visiting and she was on Tiktok the entire time. Sometimes spending time in her room on Tiktok rather than hanging out. She complained about Israels bombing runs, but had zero knowledge of the Oct 7 atrocities.

I really enjoy not being Algoritmically Assimilated like I see and hear many people are. Touching grass is good for us.

dualogy• 3 years ago

I had similar perceptions about "the modern web" affecting me like you describe, and it was quickly remedied by cutting out or always-swiftly-opting-out-from wherever the topic was "not at all pertinent to my current pursuits". If all your net use is in "utility form", then it is a pure wealth for work, side-project / hobby stuff, study, play, bureaucratic/coordination chores, communication with the folks you know (in my case it's just emails for arranging a meet or a call — don't grok "chatting", neither do my closest relations).

What's out then? What's out is all the opinion bloggeries and microbloggings, the whole feuilletonistic/debate spectrum, everything by "journalists", the reddits and chans, the economic or political or culture/zeitgeist doom or boom spectrums. Anything "news" that isn't specific-niche-or-thing news. It was only ever the lure of entertainment, spice, novelty, tickling-of-intellect in there anyway, but yeah it can leave unwanted engravements in mind over prolonged exposure. And for entertainment, spice, and novelty, there's a dozen thousand movies and a million games I and everyone else hasn't yet given play time for that hour-or-two a day of wind-down and the occasional "slow-mo day", from the past 60 years alone, let alone new stuff. They somehow seem oddly, innocently harmless in comparison, are self-contained and obviously not hellbent on "changing your path".

Of course that's what the article is alarmed about, but this way "the web" is a friendly, generously you-serving infrastructure offering of modernity and if you don't need it to be any more than that, there's just no such complication of "we aren't evolved/equipped for what we made" here..

This works especially finely nowadays vs. say 2016-2022 as "mostly-utilitarian"/non-blathery contents and discussions (whether thats a distro forum or a fandom wiki or a gaming channel or Github Issues, you get my drift) have healed from over-politization that did quite permeate them for that timeframe.

So maybe it's just really the old classic navigating-modern-mass-media skill building in yet another screamier more-blown-up iteration here.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Legacy corporate media outfit bemoans loss of organized narrative control due to rise of uncontrolled unmonitored information sources, fears future without panoptic observation of popular opinion trends:

"This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify."

Suggested reading: > "The detailed and engrossing 2008 book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford investigates the CIA’s ideological struggle from 1947 to 1967 to win “hearts and minds” for US capitalism and to prosecute the Cold War."

That effort to control the media narratives being fed to the American public did not end in 1967 of course, it's alive and well today (although the organizations responsible are more nebulous, ranging from government bureaucracies to non-profit foundations to corporate ownership umbrellas).

It's true that the siloing of information due to the self-reinforcing effects of social media optimization algorithms (related to the desire to generate captive audiences for targeted advertising) is a problem, but having multiple independent social media accounts devoted to different topics is one way around it.

javier_e06• 3 years ago

Maybe the Internet is becoming the place where good ideas used to thrive and now is where good ideas die. If some info is worth keeping or reading, it belongs in a private network where access implies accountability.

JohnFen11• 3 years ago

I hadn't thought of it that way until I read your comment, but it explains a trend I've noticed in my social circle, too: very little valuable discussion or information sharing is being done by them on the internet anymore. Now, it's mostly happening on private servers.

Apreche• 3 years ago

I think we never knew. There was just an illsuion of knowing with trending tags and such. You could maybe know what some subset of people were doing in a particular community. But there are just so many communities, platforms, and languages out there. We never had, and still don’t have, the capability to know.

workfromspace• 3 years ago

And some part of this is intentional, such as:

- paywalls like in this website

- e-commerce searches (i.e. amazon) increasingly omitting some brands and some other filters

- google, youtube, facebook (i.e. events) searches being crippled

The knowledge is being limited for the sake of advertisers and marketing

zem• 3 years ago

i feel like this is simply due to the increasing ubiquity of the internet, such that it isn't "the internet" any more but a bunch of people doing a bunch of things, some of which happen to use the internet. replace "online" with "in the world" and the absurdity of trying to keep up with it all as though it's a single entity becomes more obvious.

balder19912• 3 years ago

I’ve given up on “news” for a long time, as I’ve recognized that most of it brings no value to myself. Because of that, I feel no guilt about reading silly stuff about subjects I simply enjoy because it has something to do with my personality.

Wanting it or not the actual important news will reach you, and we’re already overloaded with information like never before, so accepting that most of what’s happening has no value to you (especially considering the toxic nature of online news and comments) is maybe the healthiest approach.

h0l0cube• 3 years ago

What’s interesting is going from cultural scarcity to the cultural abundance of the internet has led to silos. But this time on subcultural lines instead of geography.

daveslash• 3 years ago

I'm going to get this quote wrong, but there was an author (Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov? one of those folks) who said something along the lines of "We were lucky to be the last generation to be able to read all science fiction that was published. But considering that 80% of what is written is garbage, perhaps we weren't so lucky"

mkl• 3 years ago

Arthur C Clarke said at least the first half: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/05/books/the-science-fiction...

"We old-timers," Arthur C. Clarke remarked recently, "were able to accomplish something unique. We were the last generation able to read everything in the science-fiction field. No one will ever be able to do that again."

Havoc• 3 years ago

Viral is entirely useless as indicator anyway given since platforms are known to not just use organic signals. They put their finger on the scale for advertisers etc. e.g.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tik...

vfclists• 3 years ago

How can people know whats happening on the internet if its all behind a paywalls, such as this article itself?

s3p2• 3 years ago

I love how the article mentions this too.

the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one

Lol.

pavon• 3 years ago

Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about. Today, I know what Spotify is trying to push, but I have no idea if that is what is actually popular. Even if I were to install TikTok I probably wouldn't see the same things they are. I have no idea if the garbage on the front page of reddit is really reflective of how younger people think, or if it just an engagement algorithm feedback loop gone wrong where everyone reasonable has long since checked out.

I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.

I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.

mhb• 3 years ago

Reddit has a "front page"?

kaidon• 3 years ago

Reddit IS the front page!

purpleflame1257• 3 years ago

He means the default things you see if you don't log in and just hit reddit.com in the browser.

FWIW, it changes based on your IP location at the very least.

dist-epoch• 3 years ago

Up until about 2016 it was pretty good and a popular reddit destination.

autoexec5• 3 years ago

I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.

I like it. Instead of sitting around talking about whatever the big media gatekeepers shoved down our throats we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.

We have fewer cultural touchstones, but they still exist in the form of things like major events (like Covid) or heavily advertised media.

tayo42• 3 years ago

I think that's a little too cynical about culture in the past decades and also underestimating how much curated stuff is being shoved down our throats now. It's not really discovering, it's consuming what ever some ml model from one of the few big tech companies decides you should see.

Aerbil313• 3 years ago

The bonds between people are diminishing while the bonds between people and the institutions / technology is strengthening. The normal course of technological progress. This will and is already leading to widespread unhappiness and mental illness, as bonding with others is a biological need.

JohnFen11• 3 years ago

we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.

That's the theory, yes, but what I've been seeing is people increasingly just staying in their own little world and not talking about those things with each other much at all.

jeegsy• 3 years ago

The older I get, the more I realize that I didnt so much have a problem with the 'gatekeeping' as the 'gatekeepers'

mbb70• 3 years ago

The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation.

I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".

chiefalchemist• 3 years ago

I'm not sure the official name for that is but I call it the "shared experience." Obviously something that pulls us together, but recently with less and less of it we're becoming islands in a sea of nothingness.

wkat42422• 3 years ago

You mean .. like going to the cinema?

ClumsyPilot4• 3 years ago

The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation.

The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc.

But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.

gniv• 3 years ago

I’m surprised people preferred watching the plane movie over whatever they had saved on Netflix on their phone.

donatj• 3 years ago

I was honestly kind of shocked to find out a coworker watched a couple of the same YouTubers I do.

It's probably just because my interests are obscure but my assumption has always been I live in my own bubble. Even my friends don't consume anything like the same media I do, going back to the early aughts.

About once a month I'll be watching a YouTube Short and my wife will yell out "Hey, I saw that on Tiktok"

jdksmdbtbdnmsm• 3 years ago

That comraderie used to be everyday life. The atomization that capitalism makes inevitable is the most agonizing pain for a reason.

toss1• 3 years ago

Contrast that with the account I read about the 1930s-40s: The major media was radio, and on summer afternoons when President Franklin Roosevelt was speaking, you could apparently walk down the street and not miss a word of the speech, because every radio in every house was tuned to the same broadcast.

Unimaginable today.

aragilar• 3 years ago

Planes used to be like this, and I'm noticing more and more they're expecting you to bring your own device, so it wouldn't shock me if they went back to having no inflight entertainment.

kelipso• 3 years ago

Feels like a move in the right direction. For a long while now, subcultures a have been getting publicized and subsequently commercialized so quickly that the subcultures die before they mature. Maybe something interesting will come out of this, who knows.

Loughla• 3 years ago

Even faster monetization. Hyper-commercialization at a level never experienced.

Subcultures created first and foremost for likes and shares to sell clothes and feed the algorithm.

That's what will come out of this, in my opinion.

wernercd2• 3 years ago

sure but... commercialized? Where do you think these hyperconnected subcultures live? Online... if not inside of TikTok, Youtube, Instagram or other large entity then they'll exist on someone else's servers.

You think those servers are free and those subcultures aren't going to get commercialized by companies that need $$$ to live?

jvm• 3 years ago

Welcome to the atomized mode! https://meaningness.com/atomized-mode

zx8080• 3 years ago

AI probably already makes it possible to create a whole separate reality (in an online web form) for each of us. A trial version of it have been the facebook feed.

0xDEAFBEAD2• 3 years ago

I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names. This was a bit of a surprise to me, because she volunteers for the Democrats and is openly lesbian, so I would have thought her opinions are generally a great match for the current cultural milieu.

I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan:

Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.

https://betonit.substack.com/p/leave-anger-behind

In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class.

Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)

frabbit3• 3 years ago

Suggest to her that she voices an anti-Israeli genocide position and see how she reacts to the trucks driving around with her face on them after she's doxxed. That'll make her feel better about your fear of the left.

drevil-v2• 3 years ago

Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.

chromatin• 3 years ago

Interesting anecdote, and entirely rational.

Time and time again, the leftist vanguard eventually find themselves on the wrong end of ideological purity. Remember that Lenin was on the outs with Stalin at the time of his death, and Trotsky met an unfortunate end.

"like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children", Jacques Mallet du Pan said of the French Revolution.

ClumsyPilot4• 3 years ago

I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names

I dont know anyone who does. I think most of the 'online' is bots talking to each-other

For a time after Ukraine war began, everyone was accised of being a russian bot, and I was like 'do you think noone else has bots? Lobbyists, think tanks, dictators, secret services?

Russian bots were just low quality, and so they were obvious. The good ones would not be

smcin• 3 years ago

very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names

You mean non-conforming opinions on totem topics of the (US) left. aka "purity spiral", groupthink, echo chamber.

Also true of the US right, to less extent.

int_19h2• 3 years ago

"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."

This was written by a socialist (George Orwell) in 1945.

TMWNN5• 3 years ago

>In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.

I saw a good description (on /r/4chan, no less) of leftist NPCs: People who constantly check in on each other to see what the latest things are to embrace/avoid. What a miserable way to live.

Caplan's quote sums up the logical conclusion of such living, and the consequent omnipresent fear of one day being on the outs from an errant word, thought, or deed.

randomdata6• 3 years ago

she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online

I'm old, but feel the same reluctance (it slips sometimes; I am only human). Not because I fear any particular reprisal, but because I cannot comprehend that that someone else gives a rat's ass about whatever random firing of neurons happens to be going on in my mind. I certainly couldn't care less about theirs.

watwut2• 3 years ago

Being openly lesbian means being target of right wing in quite a lot of instances.

iorrus• 3 years ago

I can’t imagine communists were too comfortable around other committed communists, being sent to the gulag was always a latent possibility if you were determined to be an ideological enemy.

rightbyte3• 3 years ago

From a non American perspective describing the Dem. as left or leftists is hilarious.

nitwit005• 3 years ago

It may have been easier in the past, but most things aren't as obvious as music or fashion. Many trends often start out literally underground. How would you have found out kids were playing dungeons and dragons in their basement?

foobarian• 3 years ago

Why in church of course! When the pastor would condemn the practice and warn of eternal damnation. /s

standardUser• 3 years ago

In my early-40's, I've found that the massive gap between youth culture and adult culture has, thankfully, shrunk. While it's still the case that no 16-year-olds are going to want to hang out with us, their language and activities and perspectives don't feel as foreign as Boomers purported to feel about, well, everything. Because unlike previous generations, who fetishized leaving behind childish things and creating stark barriers between kid world and adult world, many of us have continued to do what we like as we've grown older. And it turns out, the reason kids like to do things like play video games or obsess over anime or take drugs is because these things are fun. And because we're still "in the game", so to speak, we don't balk and criticize and feign outrage like previous generations. That leaves a tremendous amount of space for connections, because we all play games and have niche interests and like our weird TV shows, even if the specifics vary greatly (and more than ever before).

I recently bought my nephew a box of Pokémon cards. I don't play Pokémon, I have no interest in it and frankly it seems kind of dumb. But I would never say that because all I wanted at age 12 were boxes of comic book cards and Magic the Gathering cards. Equally dumb, at least! So I 'get' it, unlike my mother who, though sometimes obliging, thought all of these hobbies were incomprehensible nonsense.

This doesn't seem to be a passing phenomenon. Once you've established a perspective that respects and expects change, there's no law of nature that will magically revert that. That doesn't mean it will be frictionless. And it does require some conscious effort to keep up. I have TikTok on my phone. I rarely use it, but I'm familiar with it and it's not foreign to me. I see it as my task to refuse to let changes in technology or culture become foreign to me. And that task seems vastly easier today compared to the pre-internet era of scarce information, overwhelming monoculture and insular, defensive subcultures.

nradov• 3 years ago

Are video games actually fun? I used to spend a lot of time playing, until I had an epiphany and realized that it was more like working an unpaid part-time job. I was playing because I sort of felt obligated to reach the next level or finish the campaign or whatever, but I wasn't actually enjoying it and no one else cared about my achievements. So, I just quit and never looked back.

Maybe I was just playing the wrong games.

chrisweekly2• 3 years ago

"it's still the case that no 16-year-olds are going to want to hang out with us"

That's a broad brush you're painting with, amigo. As a 49yo father w/ two teen daughters (17 and 15), I've been surprised and delighted at the strong bonds I have w/ each of them (esp. my 17yo). We "hang out", and seek each others' company, to our mutual enjoyment -- it's absolutely nothing like my relationship w/ my own parents at their age.

Edit: PS I think I agree w/ your main point; it was this one bit I wanted to counter.

imetatroll• 3 years ago

I too enjoy video games but I also think they are a massive waste of time. If I could rewire my brain to have the endurance required to constantly try to learn new things, that would be my preferred mode of existence. Unfortunately, I often seem to need to "turn off" at the end of the day, watching something lame on netflix, switching on a game, reading a forgettable piece of fiction. It is actually pretty frustrating but I have done it my entire life so I don't see this ever changing.

"Fun". Well if you have a family you need to support, I think it becomes a lot more obvious why "fun" is something that should often be dropped. There are other things that need to be done and they are definitely not "fun". You will, however, be rewarded in other ways that entertainment simply cannot.

MonaroVXR• 3 years ago

I mean, I can literally see with younger peopler are doing in my country and my environment. I'm not really participating in it, so if I'm searching for good and fun date spots I'll TikTok, watching motorsports on Facebook, cool highlights on Instagram and more.

kbaker• 3 years ago

I really enjoy the Garbage Day email newsletter. (disclaimer, I am a paid subscriber.)

Distills the cesspool of the algorithmic feeds to present up-to-date trends, popular memes, etc. as well as a general commentary of the sad state of the modern Internet and our engagement-driven AI-training future.

I don't have a desire to join all the 'socials' myself, but it is nice to try and view at arm's length what 'the new generation' is seeing and thinks is popular.

nebula88042• 3 years ago

Hell Yeah! Fellow Garbage Day subscriber!! Ironically this was "recommended" to me by substack in the same manner that other internet sites dictate what you should see lol

nebula88042• 3 years ago

Do what I do: have someone else spend their day surfing the web and then have them tell you about it.

I subscribe the the "Garbage Day" substack by author Ryan Broadrick.

Through this I recently discovered what many consider the first major Gen-Alpha meme: Skibidi toilet

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KrlkXOxlvCk

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet#Reception_and_i...

[3] https://garbageday.email/about

He also had an event in NYC recently and I went in terrified that i'd be the only millennial in the room (vs Gen Z) but it turns out the majority of the people there were millennial which was a surprise. Thinking back on it,I guess millennials were unique in that they saw the "old internet" before capital took over and they remember a time when computers weren't just walled gardens serving up what others want you to see. As a result, events that talk about the internet, what it was like and where its going appeals to that generation I guess?

nraford• 3 years ago

Garbage Day is great, BTW

viraptor3• 3 years ago

That almost feels like the reaction channels or the tv shows that are summaries of some people watching other shows.

pdonis• 3 years ago

now it's all balkanized

It was even more balkanized in the days before the Internet. It's much easier now for a meme to go viral (for good or for bad) because everyone on the Internet is potentially connected to everyone else. You didn't know how many kids were actually listening to that loud radio station in the past, any more than you know how many people are actually listening to what's trending on Spotify. But Spotify gives you access to the work of many, many more people than you could possibly get access to in the past.

rightbyte3• 3 years ago

Balkanized is the wrong analogy. It would imply some sort of common "sub-culture" in the context of a common culture.

Mosaication? Atomication?

_the_inflator• 3 years ago

> I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.

Sorry to say, but this is the akin to the “We are all different” meme. The quintessence of the internet and social apps is to organize individual and hence form large quantities. This is called a bubble.

Honestly, we all still get up in the morning, eat, drink, sleep and nowadays you have to draw distinctions by what kind of apps the kids use, what values they share.

> I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.

You may be tricked by the phenomenon called media. Only because it is shown on TV doesn’t necessarily mean changes in behavior. Same goes for apps nowadays. Perceived importance vs actual is an old phenomenon.

In Germany for example at the height of the so called student revolution in 1968 a maximum of 10% was actively engaging in protest activities. Imagine that. These “revolutionary people” tried to engage with media and organize accordingly.

watwut2• 3 years ago

10% of population engaging in revolutionary activities is a lot.

Eisenstein17• 3 years ago

In Germany for example at the height of the so called student revolution in 1968 a maximum of 10% was actively engaging in protest activities.

I am curious to find out how many people voted and correlate them with protestors.

ametrau• 3 years ago

Are you very young?

irrational2• 3 years ago

Bet

(I have no idea what the slang word “bet” actually means, but I choose to believe it is the appropriate response here.)

_lvbh• 3 years ago

Funnily enough, I had to spend a few minutes reading up on it yesterday. I think it’s akin to “you bet” or “of course”

bamboozled• 3 years ago

In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about.

I agree in some ways but also just look at music festival lineups and associated set lists ?

hbs18• 3 years ago

Today, I know what Spotify is trying to push, but I have no idea if that is what is actually popular. Even if I were to install TikTok I probably wouldn't see the same things they are. I have no idea if the garbage on the front page of reddit is really reflective of how younger people think, or if it just an engagement algorithm feedback loop gone wrong where everyone reasonable has long since checked out.

In the case of youtube, you can just open the front page in an incognito tab. There's also the trending category which isn't catered to you specifically but to what's popular in your country/area around you.

mydriasis• 3 years ago

I have given up in the fight for relevance. Now I am grandpa even at age 29. My nephews think it's hilarious, at least. I know a couple of their slang terms, and I abuse them.

me: "Hey, nephew! Scooby doo Ohio rizz!"

nephew: "Holy shit uncle Sam."

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

This seems like a persistent illusion to me. As access to the Internet and telecommunications reach has expanded, and language barriers or at least translation barriers decreased, any culture whatsoever, including whatever you might call "youth culture," is broader reaching and more uniform than ever. Hell, I'm not that old, last being a minor in 1997, but even then I barely knew what kids in the next school district were into. Radio was not national. I grew up in California and my wife in New Jersey and what was popular to us was often quite regional to the point I had never even heard of bands that were huge to her and vice versa. Television was more national but even that is only "national." Whatever got broadcast in the US was not broadcast in any other country that I'm aware of. Hollywood films were exported but not to the extent they are today. A few very popular, usually English-speaking bands became international hits, but again, that was exceedingly rare. The vast majority of what got popular in Germany or India I'd have never been aware existed.

Even Reddit was never really the front page of the Internet. That's a marketing slogan. I was pretty heavily online from at least 2003 to 2010 or so and never visited Reddit at all. I have no idea if any of my friends and other acquaintances did, but it was nothing they ever talked about to the point that I felt like I was missing out, and that includes friends I only knew from the Internet.

Go back before film and television existed and then what? You think there was any kind of meaningful cultural similarities between young people in Russia and young people in Argentina in 1890?

Where I think the disconnect you feel is very much real is that communities that cut across generations have largely disappeared. In the past, they may have been hyperlocalized, but they were real. 80 year-olds and 16 year-olds regularly interacted with each other, whether that be at church, service jobs, multigenerational housing, or simply that people visited each other in-person more often, if only because those visits were often only around the block. An old person in 1780 may not have had any clue what anyone was up to in another country or even another subnational district, but they probably felt like they knew their own grandchildren. I certainly spent quite a bit more time in the 80s hanging out with and talking to my aunts and uncles than I currently spend with any of my nephews and nieces.

The "pretty distinct cultural trends and identity" you're thinking of are what happened to get recorded by historians and/or make it into a popular Hollywood movie. It's very far from everything. As just a simply example I can think of from my own childhood, it became huge for a few years in the late 80s for kids to pull the magnets out of large speakers and use them to sift iron from sandboxes at playgrounds and schools. The idea was to trade in the metal to hobby shops for cash. Talk about it to any kid from my school district in 1989 and I guarantee they'd know what you were talking about. This wasn't obscure middle of nowhere. I lived 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Yet I have never seen this depicted in extant media, can find no evidence on the Internet it ever happened, and have never talked to anyone I didn't grow up with that would know what I'm talking about if I mentioned it.

midtake• 3 years ago

The author sounds out of touch. It has always been chaos, and whether something was viral has always been a curated reality. Throwing "AI" into an old narrative does not make it new and interesting. The internet has always been a twist on a gossipy book club, it's just that it has become so big it's not recognizable as such.

In comparison, those holding the most data know more than ever. That is how they built the AI tools to begin with. And in the chaos they will dictate what we get out of the internet.

im_down_w_otp2• 3 years ago

For the last ~7 years or so for me, the Internet has been specialty, curated online communities like Hacker News, Pinkbike, 68kMLA, /r/DestinyTheGame, and AudioScienceReview. It’s been absolutely great. It’s the real intersection of my real life & interests with a broader group of people than my local environment would otherwise enable.

I don’t participate in much social media. Facebook’s entire purpose to me is classified ads for furniture and bike parts. Instagram exists purely as an augmentation to Pinterest. Both of which exist simply to keep me and my partner from arguing endlessly about entirely imaginary design & decorating details. I don’t get the appeal of TikTok, and Twitter is mostly a place to make #dadjokes that I don’t want to subject my actual family to.

There was no positive value in being too online and participating in platforms and venues of the be all things to everybody variety.

3abiton• 3 years ago

But I feel that's the central argument of the article. There is no dominent culture or obvious trends, only groups and groups of intersections of interests.

im_down_w_otp2• 3 years ago

I guess so, but that’s also how it’s always been. Not everyone was a hippie. Not everyone was a yuppie. Not everyone was grunge. Not everyone was Johnny Football.

The prevailing zeitgeist narrative about any given era is all at once revisionist, simplistic, and projected onto it after the fact.

One could assign some characteristic to the preset era like the dominance of influencers and gurus or something of that sort. It will be easy 15 years from now to look back at how everything from makeup to IT infrastructure culture became hitched to “influencers”.

rumblerock• 3 years ago

I made a similar change just this year. Dialed back my Reddit usage to a few select subs, quit Instagram, tuned my YouTube recommendations to focus more on my hobbies, and get my news / commentary from NYT + podcasts.

I'm not missing out on anything by being out of the loop on the outrage of the day or meme of the week. I still kill time online but it's less mindless and aligns more with my interests.

Looking back, the mind shift was gradual but quite profound. It feels like I've reclaimed control over what I deem important, and my opinions actually feel like my own rather than being swayed by algorithmic feeds and comments.

The more time I spend detached from the internet hive mind, the more it looks like a zeitgeist of compounded absurdity.

autoexec5• 3 years ago

The article says we probably haven't heard of the most popular show on netflix (and I hadn't), but it's important to note that they're defining "popularity" as the show most often viewed, and not by how much people enjoyed the content.

Reviews for the show (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Agent) suggest that it's mediocre and forgettable. You've very likely heard of, and watched, the most popular shows on netflix when defined as the shows most people consider to be the best on the platform.

As long as I'm able to find out about the good shows on netflix, it really doesn't matter to me if some random netflix original disappointed more people within a specific time span.

AlbertCory2• 3 years ago

Damn. I was thinking I was ahead of this dude, since I have seen that.

But no, it was The Night Manager. Sigh.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1399664/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_14_act

autoexec5• 3 years ago

Was that worth watching at least?

nuker• 3 years ago

Summary: We have no real engagement data, so no idea whats going on.

janalsncm• 3 years ago

Note that this is the exact opposite thesis of this article[1], which I remember seeing on HN a while ago. Rather than having no counterculture, it seems the mainstream is being eaten by a thousand countercultures.

We now have maybe millions of content creators jostling for views, rather than three letter TV stations showing the same templates shows. What gets you an audience isn’t uniformity, but being different in an interesting way.

[1] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...

throwaway892238• 3 years ago

I don't know what's happening in The Atlantic anymore either, because paywall

heurist• 3 years ago

No one knows what's happening across the real world either. But we're all okay with it.

djhope99• 3 years ago

I’ve certainly been noticing this recently, the problem I have with it is that it’s hard to get a frame of reference.

I get offered content on X and I don’t get where it’s coming from or why and I’m not sure if it’s actually something I should be concerned about. It’s all gotten a bit “weird” if you ask me.

vibrolax• 3 years ago

I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in, to see what YouTube is pushing to the unidentified. It's just like TV used to be, aimed at a pretty low target. And that's nearly all American TV had. At least YouTube still has a longer tail of genuinely good work.

staunton3• 3 years ago

I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in

I wonder if that actually works... It still tracks location, obviously Cookies (which you probably delete for this) and possibly a lot of other things. Maybe YouTube even maps your IP address to previous logins and uses that information "just slightly" in order to not throw you off...

turquoisevar• 3 years ago

It’s seems to work pretty well, based on some non-scientific testing most of the suggestions is content similar to what’s on their trending page, which is what I’d expect.

But I’m sure YouTube slowly but surely starts building a profile while in incognito to try and capture your eye balls.

DougEiffel3• 3 years ago

Don't worry guys, I teach 8th grade. You're not missing much.

A student recently introduced me to BLP Kosher. That was... an experience.

https://youtu.be/xUqDb-p-Ksw?si=kOLnSXlXgfc6wad_

broscillator• 3 years ago

So that one episode of Atlanta with Yodel Kid was pretty much reality.

peter_l_downs• 3 years ago

BLP Kosher dings in the whip, no cap

aspenmayer3• 3 years ago

Don't worry guys, I teach 8th grade. You're not missing much.
A student recently introduced me to BLP Kosher. That was... an experience.

A lot to unpack here, but it sounds to me like you don’t like or appreciate rap music, which says more about your own individual music taste than the quality of BLP Kosher’s music or this particular track.

I think the production is on point and the track low-key slaps, but that’s just my opinion.

I like rap. In my opinion, rap music embodies the last vestiges of individuality and creativity that rock and roll pioneered. Rock is now just a snake eating its own tail. All the soul is gone.

DougEiffel3• 3 years ago

I love rap and hip hop in general.

I find Kosher to be odd. That's all.

romusha• 3 years ago

This only freaks out journalists, public figures, celebs, not the concern of laymen, if anything the laymen benefit from it

superfrank• 3 years ago

The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate

I can't remember where I read it, but something I read made the claim that this is the reason why TV and Hollywood seem to be stuck in a cycle of remakes, spin offs, and extending already loved franchises for the last 5 or so years. The fact that there is no longer a monoculture means it's harder and harder to guess what media will be popular across a broad spectrum of people. You can make small budget things for a single niche, but it doesn't make sense to spend $100 million on a niche movie. It's riskier than ever to do something novel because our culture is so fragmented, so they're falling back on things that succeeded when we did have more of a monoculture, since they know that has broad appeal (or at least it did at one point).

bluesounddirect• 3 years ago

There is one horrible typo in this article. It should read ‘TikTok’s opaque “Fork You” recommendation system’. It’s as if someone believes TikTok isn’t the Chinese militaries way of winning the war by melting hearts and minds .

liveoneggs2• 3 years ago

I can't tell if this article and its title are satire or not. "Nobody" implies that there was, for a period, a group of "Somebodies" who did, in fact, know what was "happening online". That entire premise is the entire problem with the tweets-as-news culture and obviously false becuase "online" is a HUGE PLACE.

There appears to be a resignation that the "news" will now print whatever tiktok puts in front of them(!) and a cynical confession that drumming up clicks for random nonsense was, actually, the previous strategy.

Those of us who never took it seriously can't wait for it to keep unraveling.

manx• 3 years ago

Is anybody else working on alternative social media algorithms?

I'm part of a small group who does. We would like to get in touch with others.

Or current approach: https://social-protocols.org/social-network/

dt3ft2• 3 years ago

Quoted from your documentation:

The only assumptions are that 1) a vote reflects a users intent to give a post more/less attention (see The Law of Attention) and 2) this intent is caused by underlying beliefs that we cannot observe

The assumption #1 is unlikely to hold. People are generally biased. They will not think twice when casting a vote, will act on impulse and if presented with the opportunity, cast a downvote on things they merely dislike, without having read the article they are voting on.

I doubt this will ever change.

guerrilla• 3 years ago

I'll tell you what this actually is: the overclass has lost the ability to determine what is popular. It was always forced on us by whoever could pay the most and get a bit lucky. Now we have something resembling a democracy where people have some input of their own.

“One reason why there’s so much consternation is that if you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t rig the game anymore,” he said.

Exactly. This is part of it, but the other part is that it's become extremely expensive to rig the game on a regular basis because of how fragmented and distributed everything is.

zephrx1111• 3 years ago

In cosmology, "horizon isolation" refers to the phenomenon where regions of the universe are completely cut off from each other due to the expansion of the universe exceeding the speed of light, preventing any exchange of information or causal interaction.

leke• 3 years ago

I like how the title of the article is "Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore" which is behind a paywall.

dt3ft2• 3 years ago

I like it when they put breaking news/ongoing dangers such as a shooting or a volcano eruption, behind a paywall. I’m earning a decent wage, but I can’t justify paying a dozen subscriptions to stay in the loop. So I disconnect and live in my own bubble. Ignorance is bliss.

mr_toad2• 3 years ago

A quarter of the US population didn’t watch the Moon landing. Monoculture has always been a myth.

bitwize• 3 years ago

For me trying to find out "what's happening online" has been like trying to drink the ocean -- always. "Online" was a big place, even in the 90s, and it's even bigger now. I go to a news site and there's an article about something that "went viral" and I missed it. I go into Target and there are toys based on Really Famous YouTuber that I've never heard of despite spending a lot of time on YouTube.

I don't know "what's going on online" and I probably never have. I only know what's happening in the little corners I visit. I think I like it better that way.

pelasaco• 3 years ago

from the society point of view, not have a shared cultural experience is bad. I remember the time, where we used to watch the same tv shows and, get the same news, and we collectively experienced and discussed it. It is maybe one of the backbones of a society culture. Today because everyone is consuming your own media, news, you have small opportunities to shared cultural experiences, one of them being sports (Soccer World championship, for instance), or going to Kindergarten/School/Army. Work used to be a place where we could somehow have this experience, but with introduction of remote work, for those remote, it was one step away from that..

ETH_start• 3 years ago

the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk

Huh? X traffic is up 22% year over year:

https://x.com/xDaily/status/1736737544597840353?s=20

isaacfrond• 3 years ago

from the article:

Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers (...) Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, (...) “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows - legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.

That was my feel exactly. How is it possible that I'm even on the same platform and have never even heard of it?

gonlad_x• 3 years ago

Made me think of https://gwern.net/subculture

hoseja• 3 years ago

Oh they know. But that knowledge is power and they'd rather keep that power for themselves.

_xnmw• 3 years ago

This is more important than it seems: without a common canon of things in a collective consciousness, you have nothing to talk about.

martinky24• 3 years ago

I'm really not sure this take passes the sniff test. Each and every day I have meaningful conversations with folks who I don't share the same hobbies/interests with, and these conversations typically don't include "what's viral on the internet".

And for those I am closer with, who I do share hobbies and interests with, we obviously have things to talk about as we're following the same topics.

Gud2• 3 years ago

Similar thoughts were shared by Alving Toffler in his excellent book, "Future Shock".

What happens to the human monkey-brain when the rate of technological achievements happen faster and faster?

I am at the airport writing this, on my way home. Everyone who's here alone is on their phone(except me - I'm on my laptop).

A question to you, who is a bit older than me. What did you do when you were alone but in a social setting? Like an airport bar?

Engineering-MD• 3 years ago

Well how old is older than you? People read books, magazines, did crosswords, got drunk and socialised. Probably more sociable than now, but lots of solo activities existed before technology.

Gud2• 3 years ago

I am 37. I am encouraged by your words, it makes sense the phone just replaced behaviour that was already there.

oglop• 3 years ago

Strange. I see monoculture all over. So I guess I disagree with this person.

mediumsmart• 3 years ago

I am nobody, but I don’t even know what is happening in real life anymore.

cx42net• 3 years ago

Social networks definitely created that bubble where what you experience is different than your neighbor. What seems to be trendy is just for you and your related peers, but not for everyone (which can further increase extremist thinking).

The difference with the old web is (was) that it consisted mostly of blogs - public pages - available to everyone, in a way that if a piece became trendy, it would be for a broader set of people.

I miss that.

MrDresden• 3 years ago

Frankly I just don't care anymore what is 'the thing' online these days.

I left the whole Facebook ecosystem years ago, Twitter last year, never used Reddit nor TikTok.

The amount of time and cpu cycles I can rather put towards my own interests and going deep on them, rather than chasing what the mass is interested in, is quite big.

Sure, at times I will sound like the guy who has been living in a forest and doesn't know about the latest happening trends. But most of the time I have deeper and better researched knowledge on the subject matters that are always relevant (rather than the fleeting trends of social media).

Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

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