The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/internet-future-about-to-get-weird-1234938403/

by rickcarlino • 3 years ago

40 28 3 years ago

semolino2• 3 years ago

The Internet's been weird again. Cool, fresh stuff has always been available on the web. The author fails to address the inherent problem with obscure personal/artist sites (discoverability), and neglects to mention the best way to keep up with niche projects (RSS). Until use of personal aggregators becomes widespread again, users will opt for the default, algorithmically-driven drip that prioritizes popular content masking itself as "relevant to you". You can lead a horse to water, but you can't compel it to mindfully curate its media intake.

rodentflamingo• 3 years ago

what one should be using nowadays to discover cool fresh stuff?

broscillator6• 3 years ago

I think considering RSS as the solution ignores the upsides that algorithms do have, that of analyzing behavior, it's almost interactive.

The problem of course is what the algorithms are generally tuned towards. Imagine instead a sort of open source algorithm where you're in control of how you want to tune your goals.

I often dream of this, the highest technology with in depth behavior analysis, but in service of each individual user instead of the tech overlords and its army of advertisers.

rthomas6• 3 years ago

That's basically what StumbleUpon was, and it was great while it lasted. You clicked like on stuff you liked, and it would show you more stuff that other people who liked similar things liked. If someone could make something like that again for 2023, I would use it.

semolino2• 3 years ago

Agreed; hopefully it will soon be easy to deploy intelligent, locally-run/configurable user agents to crawl the web on our behalf and find our personal gold.

I still think RSS is a great way of encapsulating data in a format that's almost equally human- and machine-readable, regardless of how "smart" you want your aggregation to be.

api• 3 years ago

Who would pay for it? That’s always the problem with nice things in software and online. Advertisers pay for the lobotomy engines that drive social media.

IIAOPSW• 3 years ago

I'm going to take a moment to pitch an experimental service / pet project on my back burner. I call it "the hourly drip". Its a content feed, but you have to pay to post content. I know that sounds like a feed of pure advertisement but here's the catch: the price of posting is algorithmically adjusted to keep the rate of new posts fixed at an average of 1 per hour. In other words, the pricing mechanism isn't about profit (in fact, its bad at maximizing profits). Rather, its a form of quality filter that reduces the feed down to a digestible amount of content per day.

stolenmerch• 3 years ago

"an off-putting nerd named Elon Musk won’t stop talking about an “everything app” called X that will help him manifest his extremist views"
Twitter’s slide into irrelevance and extremism as it decays into X has hastened the explosive growth of a whole host of newer social networks. There’s the nerdy vibes of the noncommercial Mastodon communities (each one with its own set of Dungeons and Dragons rules to play by), the raucous hedonism of Bluesky (like your old Tumblr timeline at its most scandalous), and the at-least-it’s-not-LinkedIn noisiness of Threads, brought to you by Instagram, meaning Facebook, meaning Meta.

A completely unserious take. It's fine if you hate Musk, you can hate anyone you want, but to slop praise on tiny little social media sites like Bluesky while demonizing new Twitter/X shows me you are completely prepared to lie and distort reality to fit your political agenda.

xhkkffbf• 3 years ago

I have to agree. If anything, it's the anti-Musk people who are sliding in extremism and foolishness. Twitter seems to be doing just fine. I miss some of the people who've left out of some political agenda, but the rest is fine. There's a great mix of people and it's much less curated than it used to be. (It's not completely unmoderated-- and that's why I'm happy that other options like Mastadon are doing fine.)

mydogcanpurr• 3 years ago

If anything, it's the anti-Musk people who are sliding in extremism and foolishness.

I’m not convinced the anti-Musk people are as monolithic as this comment would imply.

dpig_• 3 years ago

My experience is very different to yours. The feed is full of AI fact-of-the-day accounts, whose post replies are kilometers of smaller AI accounts attempting to add more low-effort content to the original (or just plain non-sequiturs).

You have to wade through so much shit to see human tweets in replies to most popular tweets now. It's a demonstrable deterioration in quality.

hasty_pudding• 3 years ago

The state of modern journalism.

davesque2• 3 years ago

Isn't it reasonable to question the future of a platform run by a man who recently hosted a conversation between Andrew Tate and Alex Jones and also one whose advertisers are jumping ship by the day (while he tells them to go f*ck themselves)?

lazyeye2• 3 years ago

Its called "free speech", that is what he is promoting. The opposite of this is the extreme position (or at least used to be).

1905• 3 years ago

The internet is about to get more censored

The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

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