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The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- carabiner 1mo agoEverything on the Internet is designed to enrage or sexually arouse you as quickly as possible, including this article.
- firegodjr 1mo ago[flagged]
- Razengan 1mo agoI am enraged by your arousal
- speedgoose 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random you may get lucky.
- bluealienpie 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komarodin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komarodin I’m neither aroused nor enraged. Good job.
- bombela 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint%27s_triad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint%27s_triad I have no words.
- Razengan 1mo agoThese look like words to me
- Razengan 1mo agoNah dawg, here's some chill pills: Bird bath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BJ0L750B9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BJ0L750B9A The Wind in the Willows live action movie (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAq_4ZO_3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAq_4ZO_3U its late, go to sleep…: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bATLAjEkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bATLAjEkI (this whole channel is a ..vibe) Samorost 3: https://store.steampowered.com/app/421120/Samorost_3/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/421120/Samorost_3/ Wingspan: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054490/Wingspan/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054490/Wingspan/ Tiny Bang Story: https://store.steampowered.com/app/96000/The_Tiny_Bang_Story/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/96000/The_Tiny_Bang_Story... There's good shit out there and everywhere, if you but let yourself take a break
- haunter 1mo agoYou can have both very quickly at the same time if you start playing League of Legends
- analog8374 1mo agoA billion hungry discorporate souls, roaming a vast non-space, looking to feed their hunger, looking to eat each other. Some call that hell.
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- catlover76 1mo ago[dead]
- chasd00 1mo agoHeh “predatory cesspit”. Ironically, the internet is kind of returning to its roots in this respect.
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- operatingthetan 1mo agoMy feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.
- Avicebron 1mo agoI think it's actually inverted, the sudden arrival of this new information layer is bringing out the worst in people as they try to suddenly adapt to this new social environment. Even worse, is that it works(ed) and now the behavior is influencing real life.
- HPsquared 1mo agoThe internet has a big "dogs barking at each other through the closed gate" dynamic. People are much more rude and aggressive to each other from a safe distance.
- phatfish 1mo agoThe safe distance is anonymity. A few of the bold ones that are all in on the grift or just genuine assholes will own their opinions and behaviour. All the little followers have a different tune when confronted with a real social situation, at least one that isn't a mob providing safety in numbers. It's similar to the bully dynamics at school. Get one of the hangers-on by themselves and they are civil with you. When they are with the bully peer-pressure stops them from thinking for themselves.
- nswizzle31 1mo agoI came to comment the exact opposite. People are good, caring, kind, helpful, thoughtful, funny, interesting. It’s visible every day in real life beyond the streets… in both small and big interactions. When you choose to see beyond the surface, it becomes clear this is the cause of a system. A system that is nearly impossible to escape, and which will last for the rest of our lives. But still a system, and not the people participating.
- bryanrasmussen 1mo ago
- tamimio 1mo agoWhat ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization. Monetization will basically ruin anything meant to be fun, even a simple board game with friends and family, if it stopped being about spending quality time and having fun and now there’s a competition of how much will each make at the end, it won’t be fun, you will see tribalism, manipulation, cheating, and other shenanigans.
- swed420 1mo ago> What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization Agreed, and the first step ought to be a push for demonetized / citizen-owned platforms: https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/ https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/ Note, however, that even with achieving this first step, we'll still have a platform full of profit-motivated actors, because our economies incentivize this behavior whether online or IRL. Both problems need solving, but the first one is easier, and demonstrating its solution on a large scale could help convince everyone that it's an endeavor worth applying to all domains.
- sicktriple 1mo agoYou could replace nearly every instance of "the Internet" in this article with "capitalism" and it would make perfect sense.
- qsera 1mo agoYea, It seems that the author is just waking up to the reality, and mistakenly thinks it's all the fault of some new fangled thing... quite frankly iam14andthisisdeep material
- aktenlage 1mo agoThis so exaggerated. If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, you are either choosing the wrong places to be, or (more likely) the problem is with you.
- thot_experiment 1mo agoIt's written in a hyperbolic way, but I don't think your characterization is right. The author isn't saying everyone is an asshole, he's saying the systemic forces are mostly aligned in a predatory direction, and that part is absolutely true. I have a good time on Instagram despite the ways the platform is structured.
- aktenlage 1mo agoGood point on the systemic forces. Yet I feel your second point falls broadly in with what I meant with "choosing the right places". E.g., I also use YouTube, but don't watch shorts, avoid clickbait, ragebait, etc, and filter ads. That makes the place OK for me. But as you say, it's then ok despite the structure of the platform.
- oh_my_goodness 1mo ago>This so exaggerated No, it's just what's happening online. >If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, Wrong thread? Doesn't seem to correspond to anything in the article.
- aktenlage 1mo ago"Online" is not one place. And what the author is complaining about is not happening in the places I spend 99% of my online time on. That's just the saying as I know it. Regarding the post it would be along the lines of "if you think everyone is a predator/grifter/scammer, it may be a problem with you or the places you roam"
- Glyptodon 1mo ago
- anonymousiam 1mo ago"Usenet is a cesspool, a dung heap" -- Patrick A. Townson -- published in May 1994 in The UNIX-Hater's Handbook.
- demritocracy 1mo agoI saw a video of a doctor answering a call and the caller started saying some strange hate/concensus-pushing message about Jews hating people who hate Jews in a very angry tone. Neither the doctor nor the commenters suggested it was AI, but it certainly sounded like it. I got a flash of a future where every telemarketer call is either an angry voice ready to convince you of something, or the gender you like trying to woo you. How discouraging would it be (intentionally) if every time an AI had access to your attention, it was trying to make you angry. This would probably cause a lot of people to disengage, a lot to get angry, and a few able to live without being affected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
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- tristanj 1mo agoWell duh, was this not expected? The Internet userbase has transitioned dramatically over the past several decades. It moved from an outpost for computer nerds in the early 1990s, to a middle-class product in the 2000s, then everybody got access in the 2010s with the spread of the smartphone. The demographics of the internet look nothing like they did when it was created.
- dumberquestions 1mo agoThe tools, business models have changed just as much as the demographics if not more.
- EA-3167 1mo agoThat’s why you’re seeing stratification reemerge imo. Paywalls are probably the most obvious feature of this, where information worth accessing these days tends to be paywalled. By contrast high volume, low quality slop supported by ads is generally free.
- grackasthebig 1mo agoSo ...it's the same social dumpster fire humanity has always been? Cast aside the syntax and semantics of religion for financially engineered beliefs; buy low, sell high or you'll be "left behind!" Small step forward from "believe in my take on Christianity or your soul will be eternally damned!" Mirror neurons fostering same flock building via corps people used to build via scripture. Just more lazy people who want zero responsibility to themselves and everyone else to have responsibility for them.
- skybrian 1mo agoI don't doubt that there are very large communities of grifters, but to say that they are "the Internet" seems a bit much. If you see grifting as the central core of the Internet, maybe that's a problem with your filter bubble. You need to filter that stuff out.
- inigyou 1mo agoCan you name three popular websites that aren't grifts or platforms mainly for grifts?
- bryan_w 1mo agoIf you go to doomer places on the internet (this thread included), you will see the internet as doomed
- OgsyedIE 1mo agoHalf the comments here, for instance.
- Biologist123 1mo ago> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model. I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously. I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself. It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
- alightsoul 1mo agoAnd even worse, if you're addicted to soda, it is cheaper than bottled water, what if you don't have tap water?
- dexwiz 1mo agoPandemic really ramped it up. Also screen addiction has gone mainstream. In front of a screen 12+ hours a day 20 years ago? Total nerd. Now? Standard behavior.
- queenkjuul 1mo agoI started to notice a shift in how the recommendation algorithms worked probably around 2018-2019 and then the pandemic just took it to nuclear levels against the entire population
- asdfman123 1mo agoIt's so weird. I used to consider myself a fringe internet addict in the 2000s but now everyone is like me. Like many of you, I deal with stuff like depression, anxiety, ADHD. Back in the 2000s it felt like I was the only weirdo out there. Now I cringe writing that out because it feels like everyone is like that now.
- sefrost 1mo agoEverybody isn't like that. "The algorithm" might have made you think everybody is like that though.
- shuwix 1mo agoInternet didn't change, it's population did. It's 8 billion potential victims and all bit more sophisticated thieves under one roof. Can't blame Internet. People which were scammed "offline" are now scammed online.
- grumbel 1mo agoInternet deserves some blame too, when you have 8 billion people, but only 4 billion addresses, you are naturally going to end up with a lot of centralized services to work around those limits.
- api 1mo agoYou’re right but it’s a point I’ve tried to make for years to no avail. The V4 limit is one thing that does this. The other is DNS, which is inherently hierarchical because it’s a tree. The whole structure of the net and the web promotes the emergence of aggregation points, which then amass insane amounts of largely unearned power and influence through sheer network effect. “The medium is the message” is a much deeper statement than people think. The structure of the medium and the sympathetic structures it encourages to form around it are the message. IPv4 with NAT and DNS with its real estate model directly encourage the formation of aggregators and siloes and that’s where it starts. People don’t get it. I’ve given up trying to explain. Systems thinking isn’t as titillating as conspiracism, doomerism, or misanthropic cynicism I guess.
- inigyou 1mo agoWe desperately need to replace ICANN.
- qznc 1mo agoDoes not seem convincing to me so far and i like systems thinking. Do you have a link, where you wrote more? I think a fundamental problem is that micropayments don’t work. Instead we pay with attention, i.e. by watching ads. That already worked before the internet, in tv and radio and newspapers.
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- ok123456 1mo agoHell is other people.
- stillpointlab 1mo agoOne thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all. It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind of thing. Mr Rogers said it: look for the helpers. They may be few, but they are there. Find them and focus on them.
- noir_lord 1mo agoI think that's why historical education is so important (or just liking history as in my case), looked through the lens of history all of the current shit as bad as it is, is really nothing all that new either, the only constant is change after all. As the aphorism goes: History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme.
- watwut 1mo agoThe knowledge that 1932 was kinda similar is not comforting at all. Or whatever run up to historical horrible events we talk about. I genuinely dont like what history sais follows after times like this.
- AlexB138 1mo agoYou're absolutely correct that history helps you see that none of this is new. However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
- ChickeNES 1mo ago> However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens? Neither, it's better to be the person who realizes we're in for a bright future no matter what doomers think.
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- juleiie 1mo agoI have only one agenda - my own. People hate that I think nowadays. You need to be in some kind of camp, even for something so minor as skincare brand or fanfiction. I think that it was fine until the internet started to influence the real life way too much. You used to be able to log out and gain distance to the bullshit on the web. Now the bullshit has permeated into the mainstream and you need very drastic measures and personality to reject it. You will lose some people for this but there are still some older folks that can talk about anything and will never get offended. Never conform but also don't become a contrarian for the sake of it. The modern life is an art how to stay weird in a world that wants to squash you into some kind of label. How to stay genuine It starts during simple social interactions in real life. You make a joke about alcohol, now you feel the pressure of the crowd to become 'the funny drunk'. Squash it as soon as possible now you are a teetotaler. Now tell them joke about drugs. Make it all too confusing at all so they lose any idea about what to make of you. Obfuscation. Now you are free in the purest sense. There is no template for you aside from the one you craft or discover for yourself. I even went further and made myself genderless so that these norms cannot easily qualify me into anything really. There is 50% chance if someone calls me a woman or a man. Sometimes I support the feminism. Sometimes I give myself to patriarchy and observe how that feels. Maybe I made it all up and nothing I wrote is genuine. We should strive to be stranger or at least do not treat it as something bad but as a virtue. Of course do not try hard but just explore the weird and see where it takes you.
- analog8374 1mo agomaybe the physical world is the moderator of the dream world (internet). In the absence of the physical world the dream world runs rampant. with no empirical reference, truth becomes a matter of popularity or the loudest argument. with no space, everybody lives next door to a thousand assholes.
- daoboy 1mo agoWe're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too. I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.
- SirFatty 1mo agoNow, for the last 20 years.
- speak_plainly 1mo agoThis also seems to be spilling into the real world. Because of this internet addiction, it’s almost guaranteed that everyone has a relatively expensive computer in their pocket. This has turned into an increasing number of real-world scams, as well as supporting trafficking networks for stealing phones. The scams range from old school pickpocketers to sympathy schemes to full out phone-related accusations – anything to get you to take your phone out of your pocket, potentially unlock it, and have someone swipe it. If it’s unlocked, they may do some further scams from what’s available on the device, but either way, within days, your phone is somewhere in Asia, disassembled, and sold for scrap and parts.
- karmakurtisaani 1mo agoAfter reddit prevented browsing old.reddit.com without signing in, I got a lot more active on lemmy. There's some amount of old internet feeling there, you don't get exhausted by the amount of material and it's not overrun by corporations. So far it's been nice.
- TFNA 1mo agoWhat killed Reddit wasn't just its corporate chase for profit. It was also the fact that the general public's default internet device shifted to the smartphone and its limited keyboard and screen, no longer the computer. That led to comments largely being reduced to 140-character quips, no longer substantial discussion. I am skeptical any non-corporate replacement like Lemmy can bring the old internet feeling back, because even on those alternative platforms, you just won't get many people using computers again.
- shostack 1mo agoIt also was because it became a target to influence and manipulate people both by every day scammers and marketers as well as nation state level actors.
- TFNA 1mo agoSure, but that didn't hit a lot of small hobby subreddits until recently. But the discussion culture there had already declined starting a decade ago, and it was ordinary subreddit denizens and their phones to blame, not bots or geopolitical intrigues.
- vlyan 1mo agoall it takes for a sub to be good is a blanket ban on activism. if there is no "NO POLITICS" in the rules, or the rule isn't enforced, then every sub -- no matter how small -- will inevitably be subjected to public opinion campaigns.
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- micromacrofoot 1mo agoEverything is kind of a predatory cesspit now
- trudler 1mo agotl;dr: The internet is the thing that needs the most attention when educating your kids. I get a lot of value from the internet. I fell for some traps (instagram, facebook with very little value but lots of wasted energy) that I mostly got rid of. But I have many products I am very happy about, that I got to know through other people on the internet.
- simonw 1mo agoIf you don't know the song Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham, allow me to introduce you to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU (Heck of a karakoe number if you can pull it off.)
- Glyptodon 1mo agoSo I think there is an oversight in this essay, and it's that society becoming predatory is much bigger than the Internet: it is the story of the decay of America, reflected and exacerbated by the internet, as it becomes a anti-democratic huckster society dominated by grifters, theocrats, and snake-oil sellers. Forget the internet, you can't get your home repaired, your car worked on, an appliance purchased, shop for food, or do anything else without wading through a corrupt morass of that mixes woo, subcultures, grift, and subscriptions. Maybe it's the hospital that wants to charge a $25 a day fee to make the hospital room TV grant access to basic cable channels instead of nothing. Maybe it's the elementary school district that mandates every physical interaction between students is called in to the police - like little Jenny shoved Johnny who skinned his knee because he teased her, call the cops, it's policy. Or the way that every customer service interaction is routed through endless AIs because it's cheaper than solving a problem. Or how it seems like nobody will do right by anyone else until lawyers get involved. Cut taxes year after year, while everything decays, we fail the younger generations, and everyone thinks you fake it till you make it because it's all zero sum... It's how America heads straight to banana republic, and it might be too late to turn.
- lilerjee 1mo ago> Crypto has become the subject of my verbal ire so often because it is the apotheosis of the grift economy. AI is replacing Crypto on the topic in some sense.
- mglvsky 1mo agoA good quote: "Sell people a worldview, and they will advertise it for free because criticism of the product now feels like criticism of the self"
- dzink 1mo agoPart 1: Everything was turned into social User Generated Content to reduce editorial costs. Part 2: Predatory third parties ranging from nation states to SEO agencies started mass filling UGC with anxiety inducing brain rot. Part 3: the brainrot generation is automated by AI and it silences any real people or voices. Part 4: People go outside to touch grass and Part 5: That leaves opportunities for platforms for real people with good culture
- CommenterPerson 1mo agoSadly, one of the contributors to this are the "Little" Tech Bros. They have drunk the kool aid at work. A bit libertarian or right wing in nature, they salivate at the latest Full Self Driving (supervised) lie, or AI hype, or crypto when it first came out. Some intricate new feature or language puts them into paroxysms of joy. In their view, any attempt to regulate or draw boundaries around "tech" equates to communism, marxism, and attempts to curtail so called freedom of speech. Don't use it if you don't like it, they say. By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time with an IPO. They keep evangelizing hoping megabucks lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from their excess productivity.
- linster 1mo agoOk article, and has similar points to “You should quit Reddit” (which was a pretty good book). About 2/3 in, the sentences got choppier and shorter, and you could tell some context rot was setting in.
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- dominick-cc 1mo agoI did not pick up on this being ai generated. I guess this was the first time I am realizing I can no longer tell, and it doesn't feel good.
- busymom0 1mo agoThis below example of "it's not x, it's y" often seems to be a giveaway of LLM: > The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction.
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- tayo42 1mo ago
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- convolutedsoup 1mo agoLiterally 100% AI generated slop, disappointing
- stephbook 1mo agoAI slop (like the article) makes it a worse place.
- Seattle3503 1mo agoI ran this article through through Pangram and it says the text is AI written
- aureate 1mo agoThis reads to as pure AI slop to me, and Pangram agrees (100% AI). To use one of the idioms that give this impression, this is not just knee-jerk whining. It's material to what the article is about. If you're going to raise this topic, be a human and say something constructive. An AI generated ragebait whinge about ragebait is ragebait squared with a heaped serving of hypocrisy on top. This exemplifies everything it complains about.
- A_D_E_P_T 1mo agoYes. "High confidence." I confirmed it myself: > https://i.ibb.co/m5tPKPYS/Screenshot2026829-1.png https://i.ibb.co/m5tPKPYS/Screenshot2026829-1.png But forget Pangram. This passage, from the conclusion, is 100% rock-solid proof that Claude was a key contributor. > "The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. The question is whether human existence should be organised around alien and inhuman objective functions no human chose and nobody can inspect or understand." Also, I think that "grift" (repeated throughout the article) is very poorly defined. I also think that most cryptocurrencies are, in the general case, a bad example of a "grift."
- chrisjj 1mo agoGrift poorly defined? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grift https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grift
- A_D_E_P_T 1mo agoBut this guy's talking about drop-shippers, life coaches, cryptocurrency, online "influencing" in general, and other things. Very few of those fit your own definition, as there's nothing illicit involved. In some cases, e.g. if you compare cryptocurrency to drop-shipping, there's not even much common ground, except "markets things through social media."
- chrisyeh 1mo agoI ran the same check, and was saddened, because I agree with his point of view, and generally enjoyed the article. But partway through, the "this sounds like AI" alarm went off in my head. Using AI to write an article criticizing the use of AI, and worse, not disclosing it, is distasteful. Especially since Stephen Diehl was writing long before ChatGPT emerged (with blog posts dating back to 2013). That someone could write but chooses not to somehow makes it worse.
- kayo_20211030 1mo agoI've seen this same discussion in a million guises. This particular essay starts with > I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet. ... and then contains a lot of predictable stuff about how and why avalon became: tarnished, effete, weak, tawdry, despoiled, no-fun, toxic, predatory, rapacious etc. You can take your pick, it doesn't matter. It's the same argument no matter which adjective you choose. It finally gets to > The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. That's a truism of no value. Take the whole essay, replace "internet" with a country's name and amend some of the details. You've seen it before? You read it every damned day in every form of media. It's used to justify just about anything; the good and the bad. In the end it's a boring, repetitive argument. At the edge, it reduces to: my country used to be great and now it's crap because it's not how it used to be - so, we need to roll everything back despite the number of years that have passed between then and now, and despite any of the positive things that may have come during that time.
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- egonschiele 1mo agoI love Stephen's writing, and this is so well written. > I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice. I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life. Also, this explorable by Nicky Case is evergreen: https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
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- bakugo 1mo ago> I love Stephen's writing You mean you love Claude's writing.
- egonschiele 1mo agoI've followed Stephen for a while now, and I don't think this is Claude.
- bakugo 1mo agoWell, I'm sorry to say, but you've been reading AI slop for a while now. https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/piranesi/ https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/piranesi/ > Piranesi is the opposite: everything stripped to the bone, every sentence load-bearing. Yikes.
- volkk 1mo agoyou've got to be kidding me
- gizajob 1mo agoThere’s also a bad side.
- acd 1mo agoPeople should know more about data fusion. How browser javascript fingerprints and unique personal id of the adtech works. Hint it traveres VPNs. The seven has an id of you Check your id https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion
- BoxwoodSeed 1mo agoI'm using an addon that just changes my unique fingerprint every ten minutes. Not sure if that helps or not.
- tolerance 1mo agoEconomic exploitation is just one way to take advantage of people who lack internal contentment. The other forms are cultural and social. Modifying one element in this environment in favor of others won't make things better. You could even argue that less people are being financially scammed online than they are cognitively. These problems are not endemic to the internet. But the internet does cast a broader net and provide a wider variety of ways for people to become afflicted by whatever it is I'm trying to describe.
- zahlman 1mo agoIt's interesting to me how complaints about widespread Internet political propaganda and "grifting" so consistently reveal the author's own political biases. It's really hard to write about it in a detached way. (It's strange to see people accuse others of grifting but then continue to engage with the arguments made in that "grift" as though the other party sincerely believed the claims. In my experience, the claims usually probably are made sincerely, and the "grifting" terminology is used because the accuser can't accept that the other worldview exists, or else just as a generic boo word.)
- a-dub 1mo agothe internet is home to plenty of predatory cesspits, but the real stuff is still there too. it's not as convenient or addicting as content that doubles as a funnel for the ad machines, but the real spaces and media that aren't dominated by the advertising industrial complex still exist- just like in other forms of media that preceded the internet.
- inigyou 1mo agoWhere is the directory of real stuff?
- RobRivera 1mo agoThe internet Is For porn
- inigyou 1mo agoNot if Texas has anything to say about it
- teh_infallible 1mo agoThis post is one long strawman argument.
- queenkjuul 1mo ago"Kind of" feels like the understatement of the century
- simonebrunozzi 1mo agoNice article by Stephen Diehl - I really liked his latest on crypto. I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one: > The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective is a moving composite of high-dimensional signals for attention, retention, and conversion, dispersed across models, metrics, tests, and feedback systems. The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it. The loop knows only that one stimulus keeps a person scrolling while another lets them leave. Calm accuracy loses. Threat, transgression, humiliation, and impossible promises win. The resulting social damage appears nowhere in the objective function. It arrives as an externality. Not sure what you think of it. In my view, his ideas are nice and interesting, and I would rather read less verbose, less "perfect" blog posts, and reduce or remove the use of LLMs.
- maqp 1mo agoSame. Every time I see LLM has contributed to the work I feel it greatly dilutes it. I'll push through if the topic is important and there's good points. But e.g. on YT, a sloppy script that barely stands on its own becomes a hard no on the very first "it's not X, it's Y".
- ChiperSoft 1mo agoThat paragraph jumped out to me, as well. Thats also when the writing got very long winded and seemed to be repeating itself.
- MattyRad 1mo agoThat does indeed seem like LLM text to me, which makes a depressing article even morning depressing. Inauthentic and hypocritical. I'd like to give the author the benefit of the doubt, but since we've set all ourselves on being cynical....
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- jdkee 1mo agoAI slop.
- seydor 1mo agoIn a previous generation, people would detect those technological snake oil sellers , call them out , even chase them. Because they could tell scammers from non-scammers. Now we have already 2-3 generations raised to consider scam practices to be the norm , and even to celebrate behavioral tricks and audience maximizing optimization at any cost (clickbait!). I cannot be convinced this is a normal thing. Over time, things revert to normal, but often in an explosive way.
- flyingshelf 1mo agoReally. I think snake oil sellers were so popular because people believed them. It's no different today. Today you can recognize snake oil scams, most people can't. Nothing has changed. Millions of people still fall victims to pyramid schemes and that's not due to the internet.
- rglover 1mo ago"There's a sucker born every minute" is a saying for a reason. It's a damn shame, but these things exist and happen because they work to a non-trivial degree. There are two forms of capitalism: in service to your fellow man (solving a problem/fulfilling a need) or in opposition (arbitraging naivety and ignorance). There are customers for both and always will be [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/WiUsWg5l04E?t=70&is=M_OmEcG4_d1HM6pR https://youtu.be/WiUsWg5l04E?t=70&is=M_OmEcG4_d1HM6pR
- wseqyrku 1mo agoI have developed this clickbait allergy that I just won't read an article if the title doesn't adequately describe the post even if I'm interested. If it ends with ellipsis you don't even need to read the title (yes, it's almost always intentional). There is probably a catalog of dark-patterns for the titles somewhere, but you can usually tell. If you (try to) read the news you can get good at it very fast. It's amazing how they twist and bend words together to leave an effect on you even if you are just scrolling.
- varispeed 1mo agoI think part of it is due to corrupt government regulating internet as if only Facebooks and Reddits were on the market. It destroyed niche forums and made the place less democratised. Today you cannot just rent a server and start a forum without massive financial backing and therapist on speed dial.
- inigyou 1mo agoDid you know that if you just run a forum you don't go to jail for that? First the police have to notice you in a negative light for any reason, and second they have to bother to do something about it, and thirdly their first interaction with you is more likely to be "oi! stop doing that!" than anything else. What killed them isn't the law, it was firstly centralisation pressure, and secondly our own paranoia about the law. And if the government wants to arbitrarily get you, it can do that with or without you running a forum.
- varispeed 1mo agoCool story bro
- GlibMonkeyDeath 1mo agoThe thing is, the "old" internet is still out there. No one is stopping you from writing a futile blog (as I do.) Or using YouTube only for instruction for tasks around the house. Or learn about any topic imaginable. It's just that the bigger ecosystems have followed their incentives to their logical conclusion (hyper-addictive content to maximize earnings from ad sales.) Any new, "for the people" platform is going to face overwhelming pressure at some point to morph into the platforms we have today. It's just too profitable. The only way out is: don't to go to the casino in the first place. We need to tend our own [Voltarian](https://www.openculture.com/2020/09/what-voltaire-meant-when-he-said-that-we-must-cultivate-our-garden.html https://www.openculture.com/2020/09/what-voltaire-meant-when...) gardens.
- egonschiele 1mo ago100% agree. Only thing is, as the last few years have shown, if you don't jump into the cesspit but a majority of your fellow humans do, it affects you anyway.
- johnnyanmac 1mo agowe also need time, energy. and care to make and tend to our own gardens. I see more and more people even with jobs try to go into various hustles just to make ends meet. Let alone those who aren't in work and pushed into NEET-dom.
- thegrim33 1mo agoThe root cause underlying all of that is the simple fact that the average person just isn't intelligent enough. They fall for the grift, they fall for the advertising, for the manipulation, the propaganda, the echo chambers, the emotion, the hate, they fall for it all. They're either unable to see it or escape it or both. With the internet connecting everyone together, giving you direct, immediate, access to billions of people from the comfort of your own home, of course there's going to be classes of people working to siphon money (or power) from the unintelligent into their own pockets, rather than doing the hard work of actually producing value for their civilization. There's also no real solution to this. Of course, educating people is a solution, somehow getting people to be more intelligent. But that's a slow, long, process, and the more I see, the more I realize just how commonly intelligent people still fall prey to the same things. The only other solution I see is blocking access for the majority for either consuming information from or contributing information to the internet, which is a hard pill to swallow, and which has its own horrible, and mostly unsolvable issues.
- spacedcowboy 1mo agoThis is a little premature - I'm about a month away from a really good launch date, but the sentiment here is too good a match to miss... A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I set up my first webserver. In those halcyon days you had to email CERN to get your website added to the list of websites in the world; a list people downloaded as the sum total of what the web was and where they could visit. Things have come a long way since then, but maybe not always for the better. The ad-companies have wormed their way into just about everything on the web, and the tech billionaires have funded it because they can make even more money at the general public's expense. I recently got very fed up with Reddit's anti-user policies, and decided 'screw it, there's not that much special here'. As a result, Blewit[1] came into existence: it's an experiment - can an old-style just-for-the-good-of-the-community-it-represents website still function in today's modern world? We'll see... Blewit takes no user information other than a username/password. We're forced to accept cloudflare's country-code so we can be compliant with the Online Safety Act, but we deliberately don't even ask for an email address. We don't track. We don't have ads that are other ways to track. We don't have algorithms that force engagement along the most-outrageous pathway. We don't have analytics to sell you stuff. We don't put tracking pixels in our site, and when you upload an image, we strip it of all the EXIF/Location data so it can't be used to track you by proxy. More bluntly, all the dark patterns are missing. By design. It hearkens back to a simpler time, where people did things simply because they thought it was cool, and others might like it too. So it'll be interesting to see if something like Reddit (I think it's better, but I'm biased) can survive in the far-more-predatory world that we live in, than when I first started using the web. The site is deliberately lean-and-mean, and I think I can give it the on-ramp it needs to become successful if it gets the engagement of sufficient people. Again, I guess we'll see :) Enjoy. 1: https://blewit.uk/ https://blewit.uk/
- inigyou 1mo agoYou call it a "Reddit alternative" but that's not really how the world works. People don't go out looking for Reddit-like sites, stumble across Reddit and sign up. People are just going about their business, find Reddit, and eventually feel pressured to sign up so they can post, comment or vote. The funnel starts with people stumbling across engagement-worthy content on your site, which only exists and is findable if it exists and is findable.
- mrkeen 1mo agoGood writing includes some examples or statistics. The ratio of grifters to non-grifters could have halved or risen tenfold in the last few decades. How would we know? What percentage of the population "now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice?" How "many online grifters are themselves marks"?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1mo agoSadly, I can't find anything to disagree with, here...:(
- Scapeghost 1mo agoI have IRC logs from 1998 Most people were dicks even back then including me :)
- metalman 1mo agoyou forgot to add "slow" to predatory cesspit, or with 4 pages open and 880meg doing who knows what while everything bogs down, the though of closeing the browser and clearing the cache becomes the simpler more pragmatic option, though this dependent on the OS still responding
- bakugo 1mo agoFully AI generated article complaining about the state of the internet. The sheer irony of the word "grift" being used 13 times within it...
- FranOntanaya 1mo agoBlows my mind that several trillions in I still see so much LLM text with no stylistic awareness.
- shevy-java 1mo ago> I still remember the early internet. It was slow, ugly, unreliable, and full of cranks, a strange world of wheezing dial-up modems, Usenet flamewars, <marquee> tags, and dancing babies. I remember the 1990s and this guy's "description" is massively biased. I remember oldschool browser games in the 1990s - AM Mari (Archmage, from a korean company), or even Java Applets such as Dragonquest or whatever was the name. Or Joe Cartoon - may be a bit after 1990s too. Either way, many such things were not a problem here. I never used a dial-modem, for instance, even in the 1990s had fast flat-rate cable connections that was surprisingly cheap. Still kind of is cheap, for the net-value I get from the world wide web, though I agree it has gone down in quality, for many reasons. One reason is ... Google. And other mega-corporations. These try to destroy the internet. Or rather they want to control more of it. > The scammer once had to find a victim. The platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimises the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam. What was once an aberration has become the norm. Not incorrect indeed. The private companies here abuse the people. The problem is: what to do about that? Google de-facto controls the internet via its evil adChrome empire. All the ad-money revenue goes through this. It's kind of like a giant mafia system established here. Didn't the free market philosophy once claim that monopolies should be avoided? Why did the USA establish these monopolies? > Each feeling arrives with something to buy. Not sure what the guy means. Ublock origin blocks almost all ads. I don't buy anything advertised; I don't even notice it because it does not show up. Not everyone uses the internet in the same way. > People doomscroll until they acquire the anxiety that the next influencer will monetise. Doomscrolling is indeed addictive; I do that on youtube shorts. The shorts are progressively getting worse though and also AI slop spams fake in, which invalidates any time I spend on these too. I usually close the tab after 10 downwards scrolls or so. I am accessing the internet on the desktop though; on smartphones this is probably a more default-y behaviour to swipe. > The system is dopaminergic in the most banal and mechanical sense. It runs on anticipation, uncertainty, and variable reward. Ok, I stopped reading there. The guy thinks that humans are simple systems based on biochemistry. I fail to see how I would fit into that scheme at all. And I understand biochemistry. I'd wish he would have spoken more about who ruined the internet, not what the thing today called the internet is about. We need to isolate and counter those who ruined the internet. Google is a huge factor here but not the only one.
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- abernard1 1mo agoI will provide a contrary opinion. The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class. And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.
- zkmon 1mo agoThe observations appear like disconnected pieces or isolated trends. They are not. You need to step back and look at the full picture. It's just one trend with multiple manifestations. It doesn't require lengthy essays if you look at it's core. It's the business beast riding the tech monster. Its not people. People are simply driven by the beast. I have been to a village recently, hoping to find the foods and fruits I remember from my childhood. They are all gone. Seeds were GM modified, chemicals entered through soil and water, the entire soil layer has lost its nature and ecosystem. The livestock has changed as well. You don't get the same chicken and eggs anymore. Grains, spices, pulses, milk, water everything changed. Just like internet, the enshittification happened everywhere. That's not an isolated trend.
- riazrizvi 1mo agoNah. It's still the output of multiple ppl merged into one. There's no governing force there. Just human nature, across the world, more captured, more visible than ever before.
- jayturley 1mo agoI think the fundamental issue is social communication without any social consequences. In real life if you continually insult and troll people, you will be a pariah. Online, you can find others who admire and support that behavior. And all you need is another anonymous/pseudonymous account to keep doing it if you get blocked. And no, that does not mean that I am calling for identification. It just seems to be a natural consequence of having social interaction without real consequences.
- JumpCrisscross 1mo ago> that does not mean that I am calling for identification The worst people in this set are public personalities. Everyone knows who they are. If anything that forces them to double down.
- CrzyLngPwd 1mo agoIf you spend your time online, and the online time is spent on the major sirens, then yeah, it's a predatory cesspit. No one forces anyone to use the internet, and certainly one can avoid being snared by the sirens. A little self control goes a long way.
- AndrewKemendo 1mo agoNow? I’m sorry but I’m sick to death of all this rose tinted glasses crap about the history of the Internet I got on the Internet in 1993 and it is always been a cesspit of bullshit. You could easily find child pornography online in the 90s and there were all kinds of scams constantly being tried
- inigyou 1mo agoBoth those things are still true today
- AndrewKemendo 1mo agoSo it’s the same then like my point is
- beloch 1mo agoIt's almost as if a group of CEO's got together and asked each other, "How can we monetize the time our employees spend off work?". The answer was, apparently, to reduce purchasing-power adjusted pay to the point where hobbies, like the internet, must generate income for people if they want to afford basic necessities. Hence, stagnant wages and the rise of side-hustle economy. Now everybody goes back to work after they get home. If you buy this (wildly speculative and unsupported) theory, then the enshittification of the Internet is only natural. The best way to ruin a hobby is to turn it into a job. The internet was not perfect, but a better place back when people did it as a fun hobby with no expectation of income. Now, everything has to produce financial gain for somebody. Kids still make the same videos of themselves kicking each other in the nuts, but now they have to remind you to like and subscribe in order to fund future tomfoolery. Perhaps what we have is not a problem born of a new technology (i.e. The internet) so much as a societal problem resulting from social regress. We're no longer dividing the pie up equitably enough, so people now feel squeezed and have become utterly obsessed with money. As it turns out, that makes them less fun.
- ellis0n 1mo agoWhen you ride a bus, you pay for the fuel with money. When you go online, you pay both for the internet itself and with your personal information, whatever it may be.
- negura 1mo agoI started using the Internet because of the convenience it offered. Now that convenience is gone. Due to ads, surveillance, toxicity, misinformation, slop.. It just isn't worth being online anymore. So instead, now I read books, meet with people, attent talks, go to a museum. It's not complicated when you think about it...
- nunez 1mo agoThe predatory cesspit has always been there. It just moves every few decades. That moving process always looks like what the author outlined here. New technology emerges. It's first few years are innocent. Then, someone discovers how to con people at scale with it and gets stupidly rich. Then the copycats emerge. Then it gets enshittified until there's nothing left. It happened with land, medicine, books, steam engines, looms, radio, and TV. It was only a matter of time before it came for the Internet and smartphones. It's happening at plaid speed with AI even. (Medical grift in particular is an ancient business. Countless fortunes were made selling placebos (or worse!) that claimed to cure literally everything.)
- mdnahas 1mo agoI know someone who calls it “Scamerica”. One cause is Congress not doing its job for 30 years. The other is the advertising funding model - website users are not the customers. Therefore, websites - especially news sites - aren’t delivering useful information to their users because that doesn’t make more money. Therefore author is right. Reinforcement learning with this ecosystem is dangerous.
- tim333 1mo agoGood news on some of the worst predatory cesspitness - they've been shutting the Asian forced labour scam centers: >China executes 11 members of Myanmar scam mafia https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gdrvy9gjo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gdrvy9gjo >Myanmar approves death sentence for cyberscam offences https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260728-myanmar-approves-death-sentence-for-cyberscam-offences https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260728-myanmar-appro... > Cambodian authorities rescued and deported 58,266 foreign nationals... 3,477 criminal suspects placed in pretrial detention https://apnews.com/article/cambodia-online-scam-compounds-cybercrime-ae52ba73f813548d8a0cd9f81cd4469a https://apnews.com/article/cambodia-online-scam-compounds-cy...
- 6510 1mo agoThis is nothing new and we can start paddling the boat in the other direction whenever you are ready. Expect it to take quite a bit of work and the earnings to be disappointing or worse. The worse setbacks/shortcommings are probably: 1) removing promotional signatures from comments. This made it not worth your professional time writing a comment. It should also be a mechanism for raising the bar for quality comments. If there is a product or service behind your sig and it is bullshit or overpriced you need to deliver high quality well researched content. In contrast if you are a full time FOSS communist (joking) you get to misbehave all you like. 2) failure to make RSS mainstream. There are some services but few really know how to use RSS: The user needs to start with tens of thousands of subs then delete everything they don't like (dozens of items in a single click) and do keyword filtering. Some LLM to combine similar topics. I quickly slap this together many years ago. https://salamisushi.go-here.nl https://salamisushi.go-here.nl It's a pretty dumb script. All it does is gather the RSS/Atom feed from all websites you visit. I imagined that would produce a pile of rubbish but it turns out the websites one visits are surprisingly interesting. It shouldn't be a surprise but it is very. RSS should be a constantly moving inbox with new stuff arriving non stop. 3) torrents should be expanded. Applications should really talk with a central torrent client to download all kinds of interesting things. Lets make an offline internet with online characteristics. 4) what I call "force the pattern", at least some people know how to do a things from step A to Z. With software you don't need to know, just follow the steps. The thing here shouldn't be to exploit the user. People should be made to do useful things for themselves. They think they want endorphin but what they really want is to find a partner, a community, a school, a job, a house, a car and perhaps a country. To learn how to sail the seven seas and how to use all parts of the buffalo.
- bernhart 1mo agoWould be an amazing article, if it was not for the AI slop, like if it really wants to be the example of how to sell rage as described in the article. But I do agree with the general sentiment of all in it.