• @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    The old internet died when we started gamifying human interaction.

    Get rid of up/down votes. Get rid of reputation points. Get rid of Emojis. Get rid of all that shit. That shit has lead to dopamine overload, and the extremism in human interaction both on and offline… cause people don’t just talk to each other anymore. Humans, on the whole, just regurgitate ideas and comments back and forth that previously got high marks, thus getting them high marks. People tend to be afraid to speak unpopular but necessary truths because they are scared of their magic fairy points being reduced by an onslaught of downvotes/dislikes/whatevers, Or god forbid something you said be misconstrued and a whole hate train pile on you because you have 30 downvotes so obviously you are wrong and evil and bad, thus resulting in interaction being skewed ever further towards more and more extremes in content because of the incessant need to fish for that next hit of the gamified reward systems.

    Its toxic as fuck.

    Human interaction shouldnt be gamified. It should just…exist.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      Have an… Errr… Upvote.

      You’re right, it also highly goes against a lot of small groups, neurodivergent with different understanding etc.

      It’s literally out of control with no corrective.

      But yay internet points.

    • @[email protected]
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      113 months ago

      Voting is great though. It helps sort wheat from chaff.

      … Is what i would like to say, but maybe that only works in smaller communities. I know a YouTuber who is currently getting baselessly harassed by popular assholes and she probably has an insane number of dislikes.

      • @[email protected]
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        133 months ago

        Voting is great though. It helps sort wheat from chaff.

        Except it doesnt.

        It just reinforces blind group think, no thought or reason. Upvotes don’t make people more right, downvotes don’t make people more wrong. Its just thoughtless highschool cliquey shit, that was intentionally created to manipulate users into conflict to provoke more engagement… Theres a reason this upvote/downvote shit started on ad driven social media… Only you get to do it all hidden behind the anonymity of a button.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          it’s not for right and wrong. just a different perspective from sorting by new. unless someone has a better idea. still have to keep a finger on the block button, not just for the terrible and awful stuff, but all that you don’t care about. No omniscient god swooping in to curate the content fairly and truely, and AI is not that.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    Twice this week I’ve looked up some song lyrics origins/meanings, and it’s obvious the old sites are just running LLM summaries of every song they have in their DB.

    Wikipedia has notoriously been vague on this, only covering it with a couple sentences for some interview source etc. But those couple of sentences said so much more than the 20 paragraph essay of an LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.

    It used to be fans chimed in with their ideas and sources, establishing a solid lyrics origin or meaning. But apparently that’s dead now for the big services and the blogs that exist buried under SEO.

    Seriously, do it now and see what I’m talking about. It’s absolute spew.

    • Ethanol
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      73 months ago

      I also hate how ChatGPT infected the web nowadays is, though I usually look up song lyrics on genius. They sometimes have user generated comments with interesting tid bits. Akin to the old forums would be a lemmy community for interpreting song lyrics :)

    • Cethin
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      13 months ago

      I looked up something recently, I think it was about some game, and the top result (and probably several after) were just total gibberish that didn’t help at all. Just generative nonsense based on the words it was provided.

      I really hope we get a solution to this. I know this is the most profitable to these people, but it’s far from the most useful. It’s just so cheap to make that anything else existing becomes near impossible. No matter what else is created, once the rules for optimizing it are figured out it’ll be flooded with AI nonsense. It honestly feels like the death of information right now, and I don’t see an ending.

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)
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      323 months ago

      LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.

      They aren’t even that capable. They simply try to predict the words that would meet a naïve observer’s expectations.

    • @[email protected]
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      133 months ago

      It’s depressing because I’d rather read someone being completely wrong about a song than for some LLM to summarise the “correct” answer

  • @[email protected]
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    343 months ago

    We need to reject web3 and create web 1.5. a modern version of web 1.0, without the bullshit and platforms.

  • ivanafterall ☑️
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    63 months ago

    Guess I’m the only old-school ThrottleMail user who used to follow The Dopamine Fiend on Xanga.

    • @[email protected]
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      123 months ago

      As does everything else in the list. It’s just that almost no one uses it, because people don’t mind the not owning in exchange of the content.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        It’s just that almost no one uses it, because people eternal September phone users don’t mind the not owning in exchange of the content.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          Maybe for work, and even that is being overtaken in volume by slack, teams and others. Email is for inter-company communication mostly. The volume of imessage, Snapchat, WhatsApp, signal, reddit and Co dwarves email.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    Absolutely miss that old internet.

    It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.

    I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 months ago

      It is easier than it’s ever been to host your own website. You could have what most personal websites were like in the 00s without ever once coming out of the free tier in Azure. Domains are still gonna cost you, but actual hosting is pennies.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        Yes, I don’t disagree that it’s not hard, especially with all the free templates available. Today, however, the odds of anyone ever randomly finding your personal self-hosted website are essentially zero. You don’t have any SEO, no adspace to earn higher search engine priority, nothing. Someone would have to specifically search for you/your site to find you. That’s unlike the early web where your site might randomly show up in a search for whatever hobby/business/interest that you might have included in site text or “about” in the HTML.

    • @[email protected]
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      133 months ago

      Actually, it was probably kind of a boon for us nerds, because cool people would come to us and ask us to make their webpages for them. Now Zuck etc. does it for them…

      • @[email protected]
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        43 months ago

        No, there weren’t. But that wasn’t a problem because they could be avoided, or they were curiosities. Not like today, where social media keeps shoving them in front of you at every opportunity.

  • Lovable Sidekick
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    3 months ago

    The Internet was once called “the Wild West” when lack of scrutiny was enabling all kinds of things like rampant copyright infringement and thinly veiled pedophilia (see “lolita”). As in the actual wild west, pioneers were inventing new tools to survive and thrive. Brief periods like this are probably normal before entrenched players - whether they’re railroads or media giants - roll in and lay down an organizational layer that makes it a lot easier for typical people to participate. In doing so they also tell the government how to regulate the new world to make sure their profit models still work. Then they take credit for the whole thing.

    • ...m...
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      3 months ago

      temporary autonomous zone

      …it’s been the frontier of human condition for as long as we’ve wrought civilisation from the wild; always ephemeral; always pollinating, seeding anew, and burgeoning along the fresh meadowlands of social intercourse…

  • @[email protected]
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    73 months ago

    Pocket is shutting down on July 8th, but you can retake control of your reading with Wallabag, a self-hostable read-it-later app.

    For RSS, try FreshRSS–simple, private, and available to run however you’d like.

    The tools are out there. The web can still be yours.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      rss2email is great also… simple concept- run the program as a scheduled task, it checks for any updated css feeds, then sends you an email with the new ones.

    • @[email protected]
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      43 months ago

      I recently set up freshrss and have been digging it. It’s not perfect, but definitely as good as Google reader was.

  • @[email protected]
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    43 months ago

    Where do you find cool blogs? I run a blog myself, and have come across a few cool ones, but is there a place where people promote their blogs and where I can find blogs I might like?

  • @[email protected]
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    73 months ago

    Pretty sure podcasts “tracked" you RSS usage since there’s an entire analytics industry around podcasts driven through RSS but you agree with the sentiment.