đź’¬ OT Dead Internet Theory
- Thread starter Mr_Roboto
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Yes, or "dying" at least. Once something can be monetized, people will find increasingly more efficient ways to monetize it.
Social websites, stripping out the bots/automation aspect, there is an echo-chamber problem that is diminishing the capacity of calm discourse or debate. Every controversial point is "proved" by the "thousands of people in my echo chamber that say I'm right!" and the counter points use the same thing. And when data is introduced, it's usually data that has been taken out of context, or is used disingenuously. And falls into the videos talks abotu "Digital Brain Drain" effect and (digital) cultural shaping.
As influencers understand what drives these groups, they can start to leverage it, finding a way to steer the group to follow a trend. And when it comes to consuming text to find these traits, there are some great "A.I." platforms that can be used to do this. I put A.I. in quotes because the term has been diluted. To my knowledge nothing has met all of the criteria for an AI, including the Turing test and the ability to generate abstract concepts on it's own (which are not derivatives of other materials or abstract thoughts). I digress.
I agree on the issue with people skimming/scanning. Heck, there are some users here that make frequent use of the TLDR gif if something is more than a paragraph long. lol
This instant gratification/limited patience/short attention span/limited time thing is reducing the absorption of information.
The point the video makes about algorithms breaking trust, and constant updates/revamping for the sake of itself is also incredibly accurate and poignant. Tying back, the "technological monopolies" want to use these algorithms to build those echo chambers, because then they can influence trends, and then can market to them... and that ratio state on the top 10% US users generating 80% of the content?! WOW. I knew there would be a slant, but damn!!
I do like how they focus on the differences between the platforms, like Reddit requirements (and how ... again... it ties back to monetization). This is one of those times I enjoy being an outlier and avoid the major platforms (though answers I need I do sometimes find on Reddit).
I do see a legitimate use for the "malicious downloader bot". Sometimes I find caches of great information on those "Deep web", hard to find sites, and who knows when it might be purged, so I use a ripper program to make a local copy of it. Some features, like clever javascripting instead of HTML linking, make that a little tougher, as the content won't change/load without a click on the javascript that my download can't mimic.
I agree completely with Postman's assumption of the rise to Egocentrics issues, again going back to the echo chambers.... round and round they feed each other.
Social websites, stripping out the bots/automation aspect, there is an echo-chamber problem that is diminishing the capacity of calm discourse or debate. Every controversial point is "proved" by the "thousands of people in my echo chamber that say I'm right!" and the counter points use the same thing. And when data is introduced, it's usually data that has been taken out of context, or is used disingenuously. And falls into the videos talks abotu "Digital Brain Drain" effect and (digital) cultural shaping.
As influencers understand what drives these groups, they can start to leverage it, finding a way to steer the group to follow a trend. And when it comes to consuming text to find these traits, there are some great "A.I." platforms that can be used to do this. I put A.I. in quotes because the term has been diluted. To my knowledge nothing has met all of the criteria for an AI, including the Turing test and the ability to generate abstract concepts on it's own (which are not derivatives of other materials or abstract thoughts). I digress.
I agree on the issue with people skimming/scanning. Heck, there are some users here that make frequent use of the TLDR gif if something is more than a paragraph long. lol
This instant gratification/limited patience/short attention span/limited time thing is reducing the absorption of information.
The point the video makes about algorithms breaking trust, and constant updates/revamping for the sake of itself is also incredibly accurate and poignant. Tying back, the "technological monopolies" want to use these algorithms to build those echo chambers, because then they can influence trends, and then can market to them... and that ratio state on the top 10% US users generating 80% of the content?! WOW. I knew there would be a slant, but damn!!
I do like how they focus on the differences between the platforms, like Reddit requirements (and how ... again... it ties back to monetization). This is one of those times I enjoy being an outlier and avoid the major platforms (though answers I need I do sometimes find on Reddit).
I do see a legitimate use for the "malicious downloader bot". Sometimes I find caches of great information on those "Deep web", hard to find sites, and who knows when it might be purged, so I use a ripper program to make a local copy of it. Some features, like clever javascripting instead of HTML linking, make that a little tougher, as the content won't change/load without a click on the javascript that my download can't mimic.
I agree completely with Postman's assumption of the rise to Egocentrics issues, again going back to the echo chambers.... round and round they feed each other.
i only watched like the first 10 minutes of the video. i'm sure it gets wonkier, i don't disagree with things being generated just for people to consume them, whether products or information. seems like that will only get vastly more prevalent with large language models authoring articles, news, scripts, etc.
gpt3 already passed turing and 4 is much more advanced than it. i think google's thing did so last year even. now as far as levels or what is "true" AI or whatever it's surely going to grow even more. really i think it's hard for us to even imagine where it is going to take us in just 10 years let alone the rest of our lives.
I download shit if I think it may disappear. There's stuff on YT that I feel won't be there in a few years that I've been pulling lately.
Dead Internet theory - Wikipedia
Bump because I just read about this finally and it's true.
Seems legit, certainly seems like it became near-impossible to research anything on the internet because google's results are all garbage. The last few years have been particularly bad.
dude i feel like in highschool search engines did better and fuck that was 20 years ago.
it's become insaaaaaaanely frustratingly bad.
it's likely because most people's search engine history is shit like do cats like pancakes
I think it's because the links that generate the most advertising revenue are JUNK (and largely generated by AI if I had to guess), and they get put at the top because revenue. The concept that 99.9% of the internet could be bot & AI generated garbage in the near future seems totally plausible, hell we may already be very close to that.
You gotta wonder if people will just stop using generic search engines to look stuff up.
i think this and then the other issue is lately, google thinking im asking it something totally different.
yesterday i was trying to find the will ferrell doing the film review guy impersonation on snl (jim lipton i now learned) and every fucking way i googled it it thought i was trying to ask about will ferrell's film reviews or night at the roxbury
In the canada thread the other day I just wanted to find average income in canada, and average home prices. The google results are all trash with numbers that aren't even remotely close. That's a perfect example of something that is important and simple, that you can't easily ascertain because today's internet is complete unadulterated garbage.
well and then the better part is that's what AI is going to go off of then for answers like this shit.
brb gonna ask bard/gemini
Some older dude started telling me about tiktok mining data. I'm like "they all do that you know, the difference is the US controls the others." He didn't want to hear that for sure.
Affiliate marketing - there's entire communities dedicated to it. Identifying keywords that they know they can rank on, generating content to target those keywords, and then using Amazon/etc affiliate links to generate revenue. (https://old.reddit.com/r/juststart/) Not that long ago, everybody had to either write their own content or pay cheap copywriters in far away countries to do it. Now ChatGPT makes it pretty easy to knock out 2,500+ word articles that require very little editing.
Any time you try researching products, looking at comparisons, etc - you'll get blasted with these shitty affiliate sites. The affiliate links are popular because they set a cookie that lasts for hours up to a few days - so if you click an amazon affiliate link, don't buy the ting, but then go back and buy something totally unrelated off of Amazon later on, they still make a commission.
Absolutely, and it's garbage with links, pictures and auto-playing vids everywhere. I have a hard time believing that people click on one of those 2500+ word AI articles and don't immediately click the back button.
Chester Copperpot has mentioned it before too...they've completely ruined the internet. How it's used for commerce/industry is one thing, but the version of the internet that's available to everyday people seems like a net negative. It's not a tool you can use to learn anymore, it's a tool that tech giants and big companies use to manipulate you.
Absolutely, and it's garbage with links, pictures and auto-playing vids everywhere. I have a hard time believing that people click on one of those 2500+ word AI articles and don't immediately click the back button.
I think the main way these sites get any clicks on their affiliate links is by using the "Check Price on Amazon" style buttons. So people click through using that affiliate link and then anything they buy off of Amazon for the following 24 hours (or whatever it is), that site gets a commission.
But yeah, modern day searching on Google has become a struggle. Gotta filter out all the bullshit spam sites to find something of actual substance written by a qualified person.
All the big youtubers load their video descriptions with Affiliate links too. "List of gear featured in the video" followed by 25 amazon links.
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