maegul

maegul, 22 hours ago

The moment word was that Reddit (and now Stackoverflow) were tightening APIs to then sell our conversations to AI was when the game was given away. And I’m sure there were moments or clues before that.

This was when the “you’re the product if its free” arrangement metastasised into “you’re a data farming serf for a feudal digital overlord whether you pay or not”.

Google search transitioning from Good search engine for the internet -> Bad search engine serving SEO crap and ads -> Just use our AI and forget about the internet is more of the same. That their search engine is dominated by SEO and Ads is part of it … the internet, IE other people’s content isn’t valuable any more, not with any sovereignty or dignity, least of all the kind envisioned in the ideals of the internet.

The goal now is to be the new internet, where you can bet your ass that there will not be any Tim Berners-Lee open sourcing this. Instead, the internet that we all made is now a feudal landscape on which we all technically “live” and in which we all technically produce content, but which is now all owned, governed and consumed by big tech for their own profits.

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I recall back around the start of YouTube, which IIRC was the first hype moment for the internet after the dotcom crash, there was talk about what structures would emerge on the internet … whether new structures would be created or whether older economic structures would impose themselves and colonise the space. I wasn’t thinking too hard at the time, but it seemed intuitive to that older structures would at least try very hard to impose themselves.

But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.

maegul, 17 hours ago (edited 12 hours ago)

I dunno, my feeling is that even if the hype dies down we’re not going back. Like a real transition has happened just like when Facebook took off.

Humans will still be in the loop through their prompts and various other bits and pieces and platforms (Reddit is still huge) … while we may just adjust to the new standard in the same way that many reported an inability to do deep reading after becoming regular internet users.

maegul, 4 hours ago

Oh yea, it’s basically a vibe now for those who see it, which I was mostly channeling.

maegul, 4 hours ago

Yea but this feels quicker than anyone expected. It’s easy to forget, but alpha Go beating the best in the world was shocking at the time and no one saw it coming. We hadn’t sorted out what to do with big monopoly corps yet, we weren’t ready for a whole new technology.

maegul, 1 hour ago

Great take.

Older/less tech literate people will stay on the big, AI-dominated platforms getting their brains melted by increasingly compelling, individually-tailored AI propaganda

Ooof … great way of putting it … “brain melting AI propaganda” … I can almost see a sci-fi short film premised on this image … with the main scene being when a normal-ish person tries to have a conversation with a brain-melted person and we slowly see from their behaviour and language just how melted they’ve become.

Maybe we’ll see an increase in discord/matrix style chatroom type social media, since it’s easier to curate those and be relatively confident everyone in a particular server is human.

Yep. This is a pretty vital project in the social media space right now that, IMO, isn’t getting enough attention, in part I suspect because a lot of the current movements in alternative social media are driven by millennials and X-gen nostalgic for the internet of 2014 without wanting to make something new. And so the idea of an AI-protected space doesn’t really register in their minds. The problems they’re solving are platform dominance, moderation and lock-in.

Worthwhile, but in all serious about 10 years too late and after the damage has been done (surely our society would be different if social media didn’t go down the path it did from 2010 onward). Now what’s likely at stake is the enshitification or en-slop-ification (slop = unwanted AI generated garbage) of internet content and the obscuring of quality human-made content, especially those from niche interests. Algorithms started this, which alt-social are combating, which is great.

But good community building platforms with strong privacy or “enclosing” and AI/Bot protecting mechanisms are needed now. Unfortunately, all of these clones of big-social platforms (lemmy included) are not optimised for community building and fostering. In fact, I’m not sure I see community hosting as a quality in any social media platforms at the moment apart from discord, which says a lot I think. Lemmy’s private and local only communities (on the roadmap apparently) is a start, but still only a modification of the reddit model.

maegul, 25 minutes ago

LOL (I haven’t actually met someone like that, in part because I’m not a USian and generally not subject to that sort of type ATM … but I am morbidly curious TBH.