4 ms·

The biggest problem is that you can make money from the internet. The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then people realized they can sell thing

by dayvid 4y ago

The biggest problem is that you can make money from the internet. The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then people realized they can sell things or themselves (being a "content-creator", "thought-leader", etc.). As a result the most active people are tailoring their actions towards increasing engagement, getting you to buy something, getting you to think a certain way, etc. and we have a divide between "content-creator" influencers/producers and passive consumers who like or retweet things they haven't thought through but sound catchy and provide the same opinions. It's not 100% bad; content is more polished and organized, but you have to be discerning in order to get good value and a lot of people don't have those abilities.

hinkley 4y ago
The Internet is television with lower production value and longer commercials.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I spend far less time subjected to advertisements on the internet than when I used to watch TV. Near zero time, actually. Now it is a game of figuring out the shills that are advertising, but trying to disguise their content as not advertising.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    That is exactly what “spending your time dealing with advertising” means. See also cigarettes and food products with the labels turned out. Soap operas are literally named after advertising. At least they’re honest about it.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      TV is minimum 1/3 time advertising, 2/3 content, but that is ignoring shilling and product placement in the content. I do not spend anywhere near 1/3rd of my time on the internet figuring out what is and is not advertising. Mostly by avoiding content with images and video.
      - hinkley 4y ago
        I'd say 1/4 advertising, 2/3 content and 1/12 opening and closing credits but I take your point. I don't know if you've tried to search for anything on the internet lately, but I've found that any time I'm trying to be an active rather than a passive consumer of the internet, it's getting damned hard to avoid things that are 'SEO optimized' and relevant content pessimized.
  - dayvid 4y ago
    A lot of internet advertising comes in different forms. For example, with Search Engine Optimization, businesses will create "content" or pages with information for keywords to get their pages ranked higher. This also applies to social media and youtube. In order to be popular or remained ranked, you have to put out video content or stream almost daily. This is essentially "junk" content which shows itself as reaction videos and related content. If you want engagement, then it turns into having a strong opinion about something the creators probably don't care that much about because it will get people who agree or disagree with the stance to comment and get into comment battles, etc. It's definitely not as annoying as TV commercials, but it's not good for people unaware of it who get anxiety or waste a lot of time feeling upset about things designed to push views to someone's platform, or in worst cases push their agenda.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  >The Internet is television with lower production value and longer commercials. This is upside-down. In the old days stuff went to you: you had to tune in at 8p to see your show, you had to sit through or mute the commercial breaks every 8 or whatever minutes, which by the way are synced across every channel to punish people who try to tune it out. It was a nightmare. There were no podcasts, 2 hours of unedited conversation; you had people wearing a ton of makeup screaming at each other and interrupting with one-liner quips. You had no ad blockers. No. Way. If you suffer ads online and getting mediocre content then the good news is it's under your control.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
Money does this to everything. Radio used to be cool, now it's mostly ads. Circulating pamphlets was once a potent political tool, now they come sandwiched between ads in a newspaper that nobody reads. Evaluate a randomly chosen NFT-referent for artistic merit and see how it stack up to a randomly chosen pre-nft art. I'm still optimistic about the web though. It's more configurable than the other media. We may yet find a way to wall off the advertising cancer and make some space for cool stuff to survive.
- tux 4y ago
  There are many online radio stations without ads, and you can already wall off advertising with something like PiHole or extensions like uBlockO. I never hear or see ads anymore :)
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    If you're looking at a blog that might've been presented with ads, but you're not seeing those ads, well that's nice. I also rarely see those ads. But how do you know whether the blog itself is an ad? That's the more insidious problem.
  - wilsonnb3 4y ago
    There are also many very good publicly funded radio stations out there. Shout out to WNRN in central Virginia.
Nextgrid 4y ago
I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free" but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and the actual objective is to get you to look at an ad or think a certain way for commercial gain. Worse, this "free" stuff being out there means there's not enough pressure to build a good, universal micropayments system to displace advertising, so the problem remains.
- creeble 4y ago
  Pushing like button on this.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  I would hazard a guess to say that the best micropayment service in the world is going to have trouble competing with "free" for the average user.
- TchoBeer 4y ago
  I've said this for so long. The horrible mismatched incentives that ad money has wrought is disasterous.
- HD103720b 4y ago
  Not just advertising, its the ad networks that have been silently putting their finger on the scale to coax/trick the major corporate customers to support certain issues.
  - genghisjahn 4y ago
    Wait, so the ad networks are the puppet masters pulling the strings of the major corporations to support...what certain issues?
    - clippablematt 4y ago
zackmorris 4y ago
To expand on Parkinson's Law: capitalism grows to fill the space allotted to it. The 90s internet was great because it was built by academia. Post Dot Bomb, the internet got saturated by big business. Everything evolves so quickly on the web that we're already finding ourselves living under the eventualities of late-stage capitalism and ultimate wealth inequality (slavery). I've come to view tech as an ever-tightening noose that solves every problem except how to get out of it. Loosely that means that whatever goal each of us has for going into tech will be the one that gets us in the end. We get older, conditions change and we find ourselves becoming the villain of our own story. Even if we succeed, we fail. Stepping outside of that, I've decided to embrace magical thinking in my own life. I believe that ultimately tech will bring magic back into the world and we'll find ourselves confronting the ethical dilemmas of fairy tails. In the New Age, when everyone has the ability to change the world for better or worse, wisdom becomes more important than knowledge. The status quo is threatened by that, so there's already a backlash against stuff like wokeism. Socialism becomes the bogeyman to keep us distracted so we don't turn our attention away from systems of control in general. And so on. How to protect ourselves from that? I think it's helpful to meditate on what the opposite of all this might look like. What's the opposite of profit? Or power? Softer questions might be: what's our individual definition of success? Why are we doing this? Now to get back to watching superhero movies on New Year's Day..
Eleison23 4y ago
[dead]

by dayvid 4y ago

hinkley 4y ago

The Internet is television with lower production value and longer commercials.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
I spend far less time subjected to advertisements on the internet than when I used to watch TV. Near zero time, actually. Now it is a game of figuring out the shills that are advertising, but trying to disguise their content as not advertising.
- hinkley 4y ago
  That is exactly what “spending your time dealing with advertising” means. See also cigarettes and food products with the labels turned out. Soap operas are literally named after advertising. At least they’re honest about it.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    TV is minimum 1/3 time advertising, 2/3 content, but that is ignoring shilling and product placement in the content. I do not spend anywhere near 1/3rd of my time on the internet figuring out what is and is not advertising. Mostly by avoiding content with images and video.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      I'd say 1/4 advertising, 2/3 content and 1/12 opening and closing credits but I take your point. I don't know if you've tried to search for anything on the internet lately, but I've found that any time I'm trying to be an active rather than a passive consumer of the internet, it's getting damned hard to avoid things that are 'SEO optimized' and relevant content pessimized.
- dayvid 4y ago
  A lot of internet advertising comes in different forms. For example, with Search Engine Optimization, businesses will create "content" or pages with information for keywords to get their pages ranked higher. This also applies to social media and youtube. In order to be popular or remained ranked, you have to put out video content or stream almost daily. This is essentially "junk" content which shows itself as reaction videos and related content. If you want engagement, then it turns into having a strong opinion about something the creators probably don't care that much about because it will get people who agree or disagree with the stance to comment and get into comment battles, etc. It's definitely not as annoying as TV commercials, but it's not good for people unaware of it who get anxiety or waste a lot of time feeling upset about things designed to push views to someone's platform, or in worst cases push their agenda.
mancerayder 4y ago
>The Internet is television with lower production value and longer commercials. This is upside-down. In the old days stuff went to you: you had to tune in at 8p to see your show, you had to sit through or mute the commercial breaks every 8 or whatever minutes, which by the way are synced across every channel to punish people who try to tune it out. It was a nightmare. There were no podcasts, 2 hours of unedited conversation; you had people wearing a ton of makeup screaming at each other and interrupting with one-liner quips. You had no ad blockers. No. Way. If you suffer ads online and getting mediocre content then the good news is it's under your control.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

Money does this to everything. Radio used to be cool, now it's mostly ads. Circulating pamphlets was once a potent political tool, now they come sandwiched between ads in a newspaper that nobody reads. Evaluate a randomly chosen NFT-referent for artistic merit and see how it stack up to a randomly chosen pre-nft art. I'm still optimistic about the web though. It's more configurable than the other media. We may yet find a way to wall off the advertising cancer and make some space for cool stuff to survive.

tux 4y ago
There are many online radio stations without ads, and you can already wall off advertising with something like PiHole or extensions like uBlockO. I never hear or see ads anymore :)
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  If you're looking at a blog that might've been presented with ads, but you're not seeing those ads, well that's nice. I also rarely see those ads. But how do you know whether the blog itself is an ad? That's the more insidious problem.
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  There are also many very good publicly funded radio stations out there. Shout out to WNRN in central Virginia.

Nextgrid 4y ago

I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free" but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and the actual objective is to get you to look at an ad or think a certain way for commercial gain. Worse, this "free" stuff being out there means there's not enough pressure to build a good, universal micropayments system to displace advertising, so the problem remains.

creeble 4y ago
Pushing like button on this.
idiotsecant 4y ago
I would hazard a guess to say that the best micropayment service in the world is going to have trouble competing with "free" for the average user.
TchoBeer 4y ago
I've said this for so long. The horrible mismatched incentives that ad money has wrought is disasterous.
HD103720b 4y ago
Not just advertising, its the ad networks that have been silently putting their finger on the scale to coax/trick the major corporate customers to support certain issues.
- genghisjahn 4y ago
  Wait, so the ad networks are the puppet masters pulling the strings of the major corporations to support...what certain issues?
  - clippablematt 4y ago

zackmorris 4y ago

To expand on Parkinson's Law: capitalism grows to fill the space allotted to it. The 90s internet was great because it was built by academia. Post Dot Bomb, the internet got saturated by big business. Everything evolves so quickly on the web that we're already finding ourselves living under the eventualities of late-stage capitalism and ultimate wealth inequality (slavery). I've come to view tech as an ever-tightening noose that solves every problem except how to get out of it. Loosely that means that whatever goal each of us has for going into tech will be the one that gets us in the end. We get older, conditions change and we find ourselves becoming the villain of our own story. Even if we succeed, we fail. Stepping outside of that, I've decided to embrace magical thinking in my own life. I believe that ultimately tech will bring magic back into the world and we'll find ourselves confronting the ethical dilemmas of fairy tails. In the New Age, when everyone has the ability to change the world for better or worse, wisdom becomes more important than knowledge. The status quo is threatened by that, so there's already a backlash against stuff like wokeism. Socialism becomes the bogeyman to keep us distracted so we don't turn our attention away from systems of control in general. And so on. How to protect ourselves from that? I think it's helpful to meditate on what the opposite of all this might look like. What's the opposite of profit? Or power? Softer questions might be: what's our individual definition of success? Why are we doing this? Now to get back to watching superhero movies on New Year's Day..

Eleison23 4y ago

[dead]