32 ms·

Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

302 points by furrowedbrow 3y ago

panarky 3y ago
https://archive.is/wyoId https://archive.is/wyoId
- neonate 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20231219190051/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/12/internet-information-trends-virality-tracking/676888/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231219190051/https://www.theat...
r3trohack3r 3y ago
[flagged]
- mark242 3y ago
  > I don't want content aggregated by 3rd parties and drip-fed to me telling me what I should believe, what is important, and what I should focus on. > I want my AIs to give me a morning newspaper of content from across the internet (...) Please make this make sense.
  - r3trohack3r 3y ago
    I want to fine-tune AIs on my own decision-making in an auditable way where I can review their decisions and course correct their decision-making when they get it wrong. Where I don't need to read every letter I receive in the mail, and every text message delivered to my phone. I want to fine-tune AIs that can make approximately the same decisions I would about what is worth spending my time on, and what can safely be sent to the rubbish bin. I want an army of executive assistants, an org chart of AIs, working on managing my information on my behalf in a way that is aligned with me. I do not want a neutral aggregator. I want a biased aggregator whose bias is intentionally aligned with my own. An aggregator who is accountable and aligned only with me, not a 3rd party who happens to run the servers my communication is flowing through. I don't think this is a novel desire. Secretaries and executive assistants have existed for a long time, and have filled this role. But I can't afford to pay someone a livable wage to sort through my email for me.
    - panarky 3y ago
      I'd be happy with a site like HN where thoughtful people gather to share what they know, to both provide and consume information and insight, to amplify our collective understanding and capability. A site that is self-moderated by the community to suppress spam and trolls while surfacing quality material. And a site where there are consequences when community members abuse their moderation privileges by downranking and flagging legitimate ideas, submitted in good faith, that is neither spam nor troll.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Right, the myth of the neutral aggregator. The aggregator is going to generally have some opinion on it, whether it be your own opinion fed back to you, or those of the author. Whether that opinion is "right" or "wrong" is in the eye of beholder.. In some ways the recommendation engines feeding you your own preferences is the easiest thing to implement that satisfies the most people at once.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- hscontinuity 3y ago
  I think many people would relate in some fashion to your sentiments. However, your sentiments are ironically what spurred how we got where we are. The eviscerating 'me' movement has underpinned all other movements and social interactions. It's everywhere. Individualized everything. This started sometime in the late 1990's early 2000's. It made observational journalism briefly a few times over the last two decades, but not enough nor deep. No longer is it just material items - no it's worse - fully digital and everything everywhere. I speak for myself from the US but I can only assume it's prevalent everywhere else in world, at least to some extent.
- StreetChief 3y ago
  LLM is an unthinking parrot with randomness injected in...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
segasaturn 3y 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.
- steveBK123 3y 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.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    One sourcing was this interview with NYT publisher - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times 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.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - anileated 3y ago
      In the day when a lot happens online, purely sitting in front of a screen it’s possible to produce excellent and deep investigative stories. You do own open-source intelligence, you interview sources, etc., all while in front of the screen. Bellingcat does it on a regular basis, for example. You do not need to step out of your room to spot lies and discrepancies.
JohnMakin 3y 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- actionfromafar 3y 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 3y 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
boredumb 3y ago
Reads like an out of touch journalist with a vendetta against elon musk before I got pay walled.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Maybe, but that's the point. Who knows who's out of touch anymore? Is there any general "touch" left?
- jsbisviewtiful 3y 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.
- conradfr 3y 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 3y 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 https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared
- notfed 3y ago
  > "if you're lonely, anxious, or depressed, it's because the world has become increasingly fragmented" - https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared 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 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.
Pxtl 3y 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.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  They even mention it > the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, t
- hotpotamus 3y 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.
  - Pxtl 3y 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 3y 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.
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38699204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38699204
5350-uiop-1130 3y 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.
- scottyah 3y 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 3y 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.
maerF0x0 3y 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.
- keybored 3y ago
  People have been telling sci-fi stories about society evolving/devolving into people locked into their individual pleasure boxes for decades, friend.
  - haswell 3y 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.
    - 3y ago
happytiger 3y 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 3y ago
Reddit is a good way of knowing
- scottyah 3y 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.
  - lmm 3y 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.
  - TMWNN 3y 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_lived_though_his_childhood_and/c23u4gq?context=3 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 3y 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 3y ago
  I know of so many communities that are banned from reddit and that had to move to other hosts...
chrisallenlane 3y ago
I can't read the "Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore" article because it's behind a paywall.
- gavin_gee 3y ago
  bravo
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- layer8 3y ago
  Sounds like an accurate title then.
- objectivetruth 3y ago
  [dead]
gorgoiler 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  What is pizza rat?
  - s3p 3y ago
    It's a video of a NYC rat carrying a delicious slice of pizza! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPXUG8q4jKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPXUG8q4jKU
- kredd 3y 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
liotier 3y 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 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
photochemsyn 3y 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.
keybored 3y 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 3y 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 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.
- notfed 3y ago
  > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory 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.
haswell 3y 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.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  [flagged]
- mikrotikker 3y 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.
javier_e06 3y 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.
- JohnFen 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- balder1991 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  Arthur C Clarke said at least the first half: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/05/books/the-science-fiction-boom-a-shared-passion-for-what-if.html 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 3y 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/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tik...
vfclists 3y ago
How can people know whats happening on the internet if its all behind a paywalls, such as this article itself?
- s3p 3y ago
  I love how the article mentions this too. >the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one Lol.
pavon 3y 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.
- dsgnr 3y ago
  [dead]
- mhb 3y ago
  Reddit has a "front page"?
  - kaidon 3y ago
    Reddit IS the front page!
    - InCityDreams 3y ago
      Who's on page 3? (British joke, nod to Abbot and Costello).
  - purpleflame1257 3y ago
midtake 3y 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_otp 3y 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 3y 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_otp 3y 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 3y 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.
autoexec 3y 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 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.
- AlbertCory 3y 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 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1399664/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_14_act
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Was that worth watching at least?
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      well, Hugh Laurie's always good. But I didn't find it compelling.
nuker 3y ago
Summary: We have no real engagement data, so no idea whats going on.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
janalsncm 3y 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-are-living https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
throwaway892238 3y ago
I don't know what's happening in The Atlantic anymore either, because paywall
heurist 3y ago
No one knows what's happening across the real world either. But we're all okay with it.
djhope99 3y 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.
progrus 3y ago
[flagged]
vibrolax 3y 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.
- staunton 3y 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 3y 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.
DougEiffel 3y 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_ https://youtu.be/xUqDb-p-Ksw?si=kOLnSXlXgfc6wad_
- broscillator 3y ago
  So that one episode of Atlanta with Yodel Kid was pretty much reality.
- peter_l_downs 3y ago
  BLP Kosher dings in the whip, no cap
- aspenmayer 3y 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.
  - DougEiffel 3y ago
    I love rap and hip hop in general. I find Kosher to be odd. That's all.
    - aspenmayer 3y ago
      I wasn’t trying to be disparaging to you, and I guess I was responding to what I perceived as a slight against him on your part. If I made unreasonable assumptions based on word choice/context clues, I apologize. What about him strikes you as odd compared to rap artists you’re a fan of, or odd in what respect? I’d be inclined to agree, as I don't typically assume Jews are big in rap, but there’s definitely a huge precedent in Beastie Boys.
romusha 3y ago
This only freaks out journalists, public figures, celebs, not the concern of laymen, if anything the laymen benefit from it
superfrank 3y 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 3y 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 .
liveoneggs 3y 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 3y 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/ https://social-protocols.org/social-network/
- dt3ft 3y 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.
zephrx1111 3y 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.
guerrilla 3y 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.
leke 3y ago
I like how the title of the article is "Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore" which is behind a paywall.
- dt3ft 3y 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_toad 3y ago
A quarter of the US population didn’t watch the Moon landing. Monoculture has always been a myth.
bitwize 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 https://x.com/xDaily/status/1736737544597840353?s=20
isaacfrond 3y 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 3y ago
Made me think of https://gwern.net/subculture https://gwern.net/subculture
hoseja 3y ago
Oh they know. But that knowledge is power and they'd rather keep that power for themselves.
_xnmw 3y 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 3y 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.
Gud 3y 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 3y 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.
  - Gud 3y ago
    I am 37. I am encouraged by your words, it makes sense the phone just replaced behaviour that was already there.
oglop 3y ago
Strange. I see monoculture all over. So I guess I disagree with this person.
mediumsmart 3y ago
I am nobody, but I don’t even know what is happening in real life anymore.
cx42net 3y 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 3y 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).

302 points by furrowedbrow 3y ago

panarky 3y ago

https://archive.is/wyoId https://archive.is/wyoId

neonate 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20231219190051/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/12/internet-information-trends-virality-tracking/676888/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231219190051/https://www.theat...

r3trohack3r 3y ago

[flagged]

mark242 3y ago
> I don't want content aggregated by 3rd parties and drip-fed to me telling me what I should believe, what is important, and what I should focus on. > I want my AIs to give me a morning newspaper of content from across the internet (...) Please make this make sense.
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  I want to fine-tune AIs on my own decision-making in an auditable way where I can review their decisions and course correct their decision-making when they get it wrong. Where I don't need to read every letter I receive in the mail, and every text message delivered to my phone. I want to fine-tune AIs that can make approximately the same decisions I would about what is worth spending my time on, and what can safely be sent to the rubbish bin. I want an army of executive assistants, an org chart of AIs, working on managing my information on my behalf in a way that is aligned with me. I do not want a neutral aggregator. I want a biased aggregator whose bias is intentionally aligned with my own. An aggregator who is accountable and aligned only with me, not a 3rd party who happens to run the servers my communication is flowing through. I don't think this is a novel desire. Secretaries and executive assistants have existed for a long time, and have filled this role. But I can't afford to pay someone a livable wage to sort through my email for me.
  - panarky 3y ago
    I'd be happy with a site like HN where thoughtful people gather to share what they know, to both provide and consume information and insight, to amplify our collective understanding and capability. A site that is self-moderated by the community to suppress spam and trolls while surfacing quality material. And a site where there are consequences when community members abuse their moderation privileges by downranking and flagging legitimate ideas, submitted in good faith, that is neither spam nor troll.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Right, the myth of the neutral aggregator. The aggregator is going to generally have some opinion on it, whether it be your own opinion fed back to you, or those of the author. Whether that opinion is "right" or "wrong" is in the eye of beholder.. In some ways the recommendation engines feeding you your own preferences is the easiest thing to implement that satisfies the most people at once.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
hscontinuity 3y ago
I think many people would relate in some fashion to your sentiments. However, your sentiments are ironically what spurred how we got where we are. The eviscerating 'me' movement has underpinned all other movements and social interactions. It's everywhere. Individualized everything. This started sometime in the late 1990's early 2000's. It made observational journalism briefly a few times over the last two decades, but not enough nor deep. No longer is it just material items - no it's worse - fully digital and everything everywhere. I speak for myself from the US but I can only assume it's prevalent everywhere else in world, at least to some extent.
StreetChief 3y ago
LLM is an unthinking parrot with randomness injected in...
deleted 3y ago
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segasaturn 3y 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.

steveBK123 3y 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.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  One sourcing was this interview with NYT publisher - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - anileated 3y ago
    In the day when a lot happens online, purely sitting in front of a screen it’s possible to produce excellent and deep investigative stories. You do own open-source intelligence, you interview sources, etc., all while in front of the screen. Bellingcat does it on a regular basis, for example. You do not need to step out of your room to spot lies and discrepancies.

JohnMakin 3y 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.

deleted 3y ago
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actionfromafar 3y 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 3y 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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

boredumb 3y ago

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

actionfromafar 3y ago
Maybe, but that's the point. Who knows who's out of touch anymore? Is there any general "touch" left?
jsbisviewtiful 3y 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.
conradfr 3y 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 3y 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 https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared

notfed 3y ago
> "if you're lonely, anxious, or depressed, it's because the world has become increasingly fragmented" - https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared 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 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.

Pxtl 3y 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.

maerF0x0 3y ago
They even mention it > the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, t
hotpotamus 3y 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.
- Pxtl 3y 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 3y 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.
- Pxtl 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38699204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38699204

5350-uiop-1130 3y 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.

scottyah 3y 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 3y 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.

maerF0x0 3y 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.

keybored 3y ago
People have been telling sci-fi stories about society evolving/devolving into people locked into their individual pleasure boxes for decades, friend.
- haswell 3y 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.
  - 3y ago

happytiger 3y 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 3y ago

Reddit is a good way of knowing

scottyah 3y 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.
- lmm 3y 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.
- TMWNN 3y 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_lived_though_his_childhood_and/c23u4gq?context=3 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 3y 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 3y ago
I know of so many communities that are banned from reddit and that had to move to other hosts...

chrisallenlane 3y ago

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

gavin_gee 3y ago
bravo
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
layer8 3y ago
Sounds like an accurate title then.
objectivetruth 3y ago
[dead]

gorgoiler 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
What is pizza rat?
- s3p 3y ago
  It's a video of a NYC rat carrying a delicious slice of pizza! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPXUG8q4jKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPXUG8q4jKU
kredd 3y 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

liotier 3y 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 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU

photochemsyn 3y 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.

keybored 3y 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 3y 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 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.

notfed 3y ago
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory 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.

haswell 3y 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.

Aerbil313 3y ago
[flagged]
mikrotikker 3y 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.

javier_e06 3y 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.

JohnFen 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.

balder1991 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Arthur C Clarke said at least the first half: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/05/books/the-science-fiction-boom-a-shared-passion-for-what-if.html 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 3y 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/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tik...

vfclists 3y ago

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

s3p 3y ago
I love how the article mentions this too. >the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one Lol.

pavon 3y 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.

dsgnr 3y ago
[dead]
mhb 3y ago
Reddit has a "front page"?
- kaidon 3y ago
  Reddit IS the front page!
  - InCityDreams 3y ago
    Who's on page 3? (British joke, nod to Abbot and Costello).
- purpleflame1257 3y ago

midtake 3y 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_otp 3y 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 3y 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_otp 3y 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 3y 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.

autoexec 3y 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 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.

AlbertCory 3y 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 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1399664/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_14_act
- autoexec 3y ago
  Was that worth watching at least?
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    well, Hugh Laurie's always good. But I didn't find it compelling.

nuker 3y ago

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

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

janalsncm 3y 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-are-living https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...

throwaway892238 3y ago

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

heurist 3y ago

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

djhope99 3y 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.

progrus 3y ago

[flagged]

vibrolax 3y 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.

staunton 3y 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 3y 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.

DougEiffel 3y 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_ https://youtu.be/xUqDb-p-Ksw?si=kOLnSXlXgfc6wad_

broscillator 3y ago
So that one episode of Atlanta with Yodel Kid was pretty much reality.
peter_l_downs 3y ago
BLP Kosher dings in the whip, no cap
aspenmayer 3y 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.
- DougEiffel 3y ago
  I love rap and hip hop in general. I find Kosher to be odd. That's all.
  - aspenmayer 3y ago
    I wasn’t trying to be disparaging to you, and I guess I was responding to what I perceived as a slight against him on your part. If I made unreasonable assumptions based on word choice/context clues, I apologize. What about him strikes you as odd compared to rap artists you’re a fan of, or odd in what respect? I’d be inclined to agree, as I don't typically assume Jews are big in rap, but there’s definitely a huge precedent in Beastie Boys.

romusha 3y ago

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

superfrank 3y 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 3y 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 .

liveoneggs 3y 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 3y 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/ https://social-protocols.org/social-network/

dt3ft 3y 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.

zephrx1111 3y 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.

guerrilla 3y 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.

leke 3y ago

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

dt3ft 3y 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_toad 3y ago

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

bitwize 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 https://x.com/xDaily/status/1736737544597840353?s=20

isaacfrond 3y 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 3y ago

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

hoseja 3y ago

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

_xnmw 3y 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 3y 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.

Gud 3y 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 3y 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.
- Gud 3y ago
  I am 37. I am encouraged by your words, it makes sense the phone just replaced behaviour that was already there.

oglop 3y ago

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

mediumsmart 3y ago

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

cx42net 3y 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 3y 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).