Posted by Improvement 2 days ago
Reminds me of the last line of R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Song’ (1991)… “Now our children grow up prisoners All their life, radio listeners” < https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Q...>
We are surrounded by examples of sometimes mainstream products and services that reflect the way people are shifting their thinking and swinging the pendulum.
This survey isn't 100% the same exact topic, but I think that it's an illustration of my point that well over half of Americans say that social media has a negative impact. [1]
People know the present state is bad and I think they are starting to take their dollars and eyeballs elsewhere. It's just anecdotal, but the amount of people I know who fully pulled the plug on deleting social media accounts would have seemed incomprehensible 10 years ago.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-ame...
Technology-adept people will always have ways to avoid the prevailing swamp of dark patterns, but that's not corporate America's target anyway -- that target is people who constantly react to things, who don't exercise agency, who don't possess any measurable degree of autonomy.
That fact results from our broken educational system. In school, people are trained to surrender their autonomy early on. People aren't being taught how to think, they're being told what to think. And if we don't fix that problem, no later interventions have any hope of succeeding.
Few things have simple causes, but this is an exception. Most people are brainless consumers because that's public education's goal. It's not an unintended side effect.
Maybe the algorithmic curation that's talked about here is enough on its own to prime the average user to behave a certain way. Or maybe humans are just like that and prefer it that way, and we're returning to the mean now that the internet is owned by average people. Either way, this seems to have a lot more complexity and I'm not sure if it can ever be solved at this point.
But, AI search is here. When you write for hours will it be just to have AI quote or amalgamate it, so you can have a link sit by it that few will click on? Or will you submit it to some old Yahoo-like index, HN, or peer-messaging app that reaches maybe typically 10 people typically or 100,000 once for your 15 minutes of fame?
When you write something fairly long, don’t do it for the clicks, unless you need the money. If you have something to say that’s that you think is important, sure, write it, but don’t bet on anything but making a few people mad. Do it because it’s what you want to do. AI can’t take that away from you, yet.
I’m sure I’ve recently read something great that was written by AI, though. It’s not all slop. It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon.
We'd call that simple plagiarism or copyright violation in any other context.
> unless you need the money
Who doesn't need money? Also shouldn't the people spending the money decide who gets it?
> AI can’t take that away from you, yet.
AI isn't taking anything. Google is. Consciously.
> It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon.
Who told you that? Google? You see the flaw in that strategy?
In this day and age, a blog is like music; if I can’t engage with it for free, I’m probably not going to engage with it at all.
The “small web” is (citation needed) bigger and healthier than ever. Yep, big algorithm feed apps are huge. That doesn’t stop the small stuff from being more huge than it was way back, decades ago, when it was the big game in town.
It’s nice to take off the rose colored glasses and look at the present sometimes. The web is awesome - no hacks needed to make your site look amazing; awesome animations or frosted glass effects in one line of CSS; static site generators desperate for you to use their code to write what you care about; blogs with RSS feeds even though RSS is dead.
If you believe these awesome things don’t exist you’ll live in that world - but it does actually exist, so you’ll be very much missing out.