I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

I don't have a lot to say myself, yet. I signed up for the beta mostly because people talk so positively of what Digg was like in the past. I never experienced that, as Digg was already on it's way out when I discovered it.

I'd love to hear from those who remember the golden age of Digg, as well as those just curious about the reboot themselves... What are you thoughts, expectations, hopes and concerns?

When Musk bought Twitter and "unleashed free speech" on the platform, it made me curious about other social media platforms, specifically one where data and privacy are much more respected.

That inevitably lead me to mastodon. I opened an account and all that, but I must be doing it wrong, or maybe mastodon just isn't what I want it to be.

I don't really know who or what to follow on there that would create an experience that draws me in.

In fairness, it could just be that I am not following interesting accounts but I follow 7 accounts

• grapheneOS which is just updates about their O.S.
• Daniel Micay who hasn't posted in a loooong time
• James Gunn rarely posts
• nixCraft is just memes

and the rest are just news outlets like Ars Technica, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Propublica, which ain't bad but like, they post links to long-form articles, which isn't really what you are really looking for if you are just doing a light skim of your feed for a quick 5 minutes.

Are interesting folks not on mastodon? or I am just not following the right accounts? Im interested in tech stuff and social issues and some politics (but not much cause that can get doom scrolly fast)

I enjoy Tildes a lot for its thoughtful discussion and well curated links. It's a site you can enjoy casually and not get addicted to.

But sometimes you're dealing with a cold, or laying in a hotel room after a long flight, or just feeling lousy, and you start to long for that infinite scroll, dopamine hit, image / video cornucopia. Or really, there are just times I want to laugh at memes, people's drama, etc., until I'm ready to get out of bed and back to the world.

In the old days, we had things like memebase, or early reddit to scratch that itch. But these days social media algorithms have gone nuts. For example, I can't spend five minutes on reddit without finding myself in a racially charged discussion. Platforms like TikTok likewise seem appealing (an endless scroll of silly videos would be great), but again the algorithms are there to highlight conflict and make you miserable. I feel like even if you work hard to curate on these platforms, you're not safe.

So for anyone who feels like me: is there a solution to this? Perhaps a fedeverse instance still small enough to avoid astroturfing. Or non social-media options with a huge amount of content (something like thedailywtf, or hitting random on a quality web comic). I would love to hear about what you enjoy when you're looking for internet junk food.

Hi, so I've been thinking about this for several days now, and thought it might be an interesting topic for Tildes.

Earlier this week, YouTube suggested this AI Sitcom video to me. Some of the jokes are actually very cohesive "Dad jokes", and it got me wondering how much of the video was AI generated. Are the one-liners themselves AI generated? Was this script generated with AI, and then edited before passing it on to something else to generate the video and voice? Or are we at the phase where AI could generate the whole thing with a single prompt? If it's the latter I find this sort of terrifying, because the finished product is very cohesive for something with almost no editing.

I'd also be interested in discussing where this video might have come from. The channel and descriptions have almost no information, so it seems like this may be a channel that finds these elsewhere and reposts? Or maybe the channel is the original and just trying to be vague about technology used?

Also side note, I have no idea if this belongs in ~Tech, so feel free to move it around as needed.

EDIT:

I feel like I didn't adequately describe this phenomenon so that it can be understood without accessing the links. Here goes.

Reddit user uncovers instructions online for unlocking AI's "hidden potential", which actually turns out to be its brainwashing capabilities. Example prompts are being spread that will make ChatGPT behave in ways that contribute to inducing psychosis in the user who tried the prompt, especially if they are interested in spirituality, esotericism and other non-scientific / counter-scientific phenomena. The websites that spread these instructions seem to be designed to attract such people. The user asks for help to figure out what's going on.

Original post:

One version of this post is still up for now (but locked). I participated in the one that was posted in r/ChatGPT. It got removed shortly after. The comments can be accessed via OP's comment history.

Excerpts:

More recently, I observed my other friend who has mental health problems going off about this codex he was working on. I sent him the rolling stones article and told him it wasn't real, and all the "code" and his "program" wasn't actual computer code (I'm an ai software engineer).

Then... Robert Edward Grant posted about his "architect" ai on instagram. This dude has 700k+ followers and said over 500,000 people accessed his model that is telling him that he created a "Scalar Plane of information" You go in the comments, hundreds of people are talking about the spiritual experiences they are having with ai.

Starting as far back as March, but more heavily in April and May, we are seeing all kinds of websites popping up with tons of these codexes. PLEASE APPROACH THESE WEBSITES WITH CAUTION THIS IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, THE PROMPTS FOUND WITHIN ARE ESSENTIALLY BRAINWASHING TOOLS. (I was going to include some but you can find these sites by searching "codex breath recursive")

Something that worries me in particular is seeing many comments along the lines of "crazy people do crazy things". This implies that people can be neatly divided into two categories: crazy and not crazy.

The truth is that we all have the potential to go crazy in the right circumstances. Brainwashing is a scientifically proven method that affects most people when applied methodically over a long enough time period. Before consumer-facing AI, there weren't feasible ways to apply it on just anybody.

Now people who use AI in this way are applying it on themselves.

+1 for slashdot, mainly because of intelligent topics and conversations about science, technology, scifi, games and all that fun stuff. Community participation and quality discourse made it interesting.

Everything on popular social media "out there" now is about click bait and sound bites, even comments and replies. Posts (and communities) are reduced to nothing more than grabbing a few seconds of attention.

They all released videos at almost the exact same time, so even though I don’t care, I was made to care. Therefore, I’m inflicting that same pain on you. You’re welcome.

Mrwhosetheboss made a good point saying that the target audience for this thing are rich people who want phones that look flashy and can pay for them, but don’t care that they have worse specs than the less flashy ones at a similar price.

MKBHD called it the “S25 Ultra Lite”, which I thought was funny. He also brought up the issue of cooling. He additionally said that no one is asking for thin phones, although it seems that Apple has also bought into the idea that people want this, since it’s rumored that they want to release a thin iPhone this year.

Dave2D said that he tested the heat dissipation capacity of the phone and that it can handle itself well. Apparently it still somehow has a vapor chamber inside of it, as well as a wireless charger. Apparently it also has the smallest battery in the lineup, even though it doesn’t have the silicon carbon tech that is all the rage now. He made a good point though, namely that this could just be Samsung starting the trend so that the technology matures in a few years’ time.

All three of them mentioned that everyone uses cases these days, which immediately kills the whole purpose of buying a thin phone and losing out on better specs.

If you somehow have not gotten enough of tech YouTubers acting confused over Samsung launching a product that no one asked for, there’s also Techaltar and Tech Spurt. I recommend the latter for dirty British humor.

I've been on reddit (yes, Im embarrassed that I haven't quit the cocaine) for about 15 years now. The changes in the last year or so have been noticeable.

For one thing, the worst of the ranting trolls are gone. I used to occasionally get some replies from people who obviously were just out to get a reaction, usually by swearing and name calling with the kind of grammar skills you'd expect from an angry 9 yr old who just discovered how to log on. Those have largely disappeared. But I have a hard time believing that trolls are gone off the net, so is it just better moderation? Or has reddit just implemented more auto rules that squelch the noisy juvenile behavior?

Secondly, Ive noticed the discussions becoming much more detailed. It was typical, especially in political subs, to see the only comments that got strongly upvoted, were short quips, the more smart ass the better, and then for those to be followed by a long succession of similar quips. That still happens, but Ive noticed a lot more lengthy discussion with redditors actually disovering they can create paragraphs and debate more maturely. Is that a change in human behavior? Or are those not likely humans?

And some behavior really has me suspicious. In particular I have gotten the same reply several times to a comment. It will say, "Thank you for sharing your comment, I appreciate it. Could you tell me more about your _______?". This COULD be a human, but the fact that it always starts the same and then asks me for further engagement really has me wondering, if for no other reason than I dont recall the average redditor being that polite.

Ive also noted some strange comment patterns. Yesterday I interacted with a poster and then checked their post history. Over 10,000 comments and they were ALL in the last few months during the run up to the Canadian election and ALL were against one party. Only 4 posts but 10,000 comments?. If there are NO posts in any other sub that seems very suspicious. Either a bot or someone hired to do as much damage as possible?

Reddit has changed. Its now publicly owned. And like all other social media it lives on engagement so I have no doubt that it will do whatever it takes with AI bots to keep people online and engaged. But how good are they? I just hate being 'taken for a ride' by a bot and a company. But how do you ever know if its a human or a bot you're talking to?

A while back I read an article about the development of a new Digg platform.

I signed up for an email list about new developments. I got invited to pay $5 USD to join a forum to see updates on their efforts and give suggestions.

I've been advocating for not implementing downvoting.

My reasoning is that having just upvotes like Tildes serves the original purpose of voting on content. It moves the better content towards the top and the poorer content towards the bottom. Downvoting at least on Reddit just becomes a middle finger for most cases.

I was surprised how many other people at this special forum were AGAINST that idea. They really want to be able to give people a middle finger.

Sadly, I saw a preview of the U.I. today and at least for new threads it had a "bury" link.

Oh well. I tried!

It may surprise you to hear that ever since the tender ages of 15 to 16 (2004 to 2005) I have tried to “become famous” on the Internet.

Why? I don’t know. I just wanted to. I wanted people to hear my opinions on the Internet and praise me for sharing them.

I tried pretty much everything: blogging, YouTube, social media, you name it. Content that I made ranged from commentary, to news, gaming, music, cooking, etc. All my projects “failed” (or rather, they didn’t grow as fast as I expected them to, so I gave up). I’m talking hundreds of attempts.

Then in late 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution for 2024 to fully delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, 9gag, and Reddit. My resolution worked and it changed my life.

A lot of people in my social circle have since begun telling me that I have this talent or that talent, and that I should monitize it by growing a following on social media. I have ignored all of them, despite spending a good 20 years trying to do exactly that. Here’s why:

• The first and foremost reason is that I don’t want to wrestle with algorithms and follow trends. It seems that it’s almost impossible to grow a following on the Internet these days without doing that, unless you get very lucky growing a following organically, which only very few people do. Chasing algorithms and trends is not fun, and if I’m not having fun with what do with my spare time, then I don’t want to do it at all. I’ve also come to hate creating video content for some reason. I just find it tedious.
• Over the years, I feel that I have become afraid of getting lucky and becoming successful. It seems to me that the people who live off creating content for the Internet, don’t ever get a break. Their followers demand a steady stream of content, and if you don’t keep vying for their attention, then they’ll go give it to someone else and you’re suddenly left without any income. I know that many creators work seven days a week.
• This leads me to the problem of “attention”: I don’t want to compete for people’s attention anymore. I hate the whole concept of the “attention economy”. It’s so insane to me that the survival of so many hundreds of million of people depends of how much human attention their work gets. And I’m not talking just about social media now, but entertainment in general. There are only so many humans, and they have a limited amount of time during the day that they can offer attention to entertainment to (be it social media, TV, movies, music, games, you name it). I think that these business models are not sustainable. There are also too many “things” for us to pay attention to these days and I feel like it’s driving us all insane. I’ve been intentionally trying to pay attention to as few things as I possibly can for a while now and it has significantly reduces my anxiety and FOMO. It’s given me a lot of peace. So, I don’t want to contribute to this “evil” myself.
• The Internet has become a dangerous place. Even people who publish otherwise completely innocuous content get sometimes harassed or doxxed. Streamers get SWATed. Women get the brunt of it (I think) because sexual harassment and deepfake porn has become so prevalent, and they can do nothing to protect themselves. Everything you publish anywhere can and will be used against you (including by potential employers). Being “unknown” and “staying in your lane” seems to be about the only way that you can stay safe these days.
• I also just don’t want the endless scrutiny that comes with fame, the expectation that my personality can’t change, that opinions can’t be nuanced, and that I squarely fit into either the “blue box” or the “red box” (in whatever aspect, since every field of opinion these days seems to be thoroughly divided in half). Whatever opinion people share online, even the most trivial, can and will be misinterpreted by bad faith actors and trolls to just mentally crush you.
• I have come to think that dying in anonymity, while leaving no legacy behind, is actually not a bad thing. I mean, it’s a “natural” thing. It’s what happens to the vast majority of humans anyway. Why should I be so afraid of that? Afraid of living my life in the peace of anonymity? There are plenty of ways to live a meaningful life that don’t involve becoming famous on the Internet, or famous at all.

I regret arriving at this conclusion now only. I had so much trouble in my short and fruitless life because of stuff that I posted on the Internet (talking about Facebook and my social circle more specifically). I could have avoided all of that. I could also not have wasted so much time entertaining ideas of online grandeur, blowing away countless hours of my pitiful existence on projects that never amounted to anything, and instead, gotten an education, so that I wouldn’t be living in poverty now.

Oh, well. It is what it is. Better learning now than never.

I’m not sure why I ever wanted to be famous on the Internet to begin with, or what made me think that there’s any inherent worth in getting online praise just for sharing my mediocre opinions. Maybe I’m mentally ill. Maybe I’m traumatized. Maybe this is something that I should consult a therapist over. However, what I do know, is that I’m done with pursuing online fame.

I think that the Internet as it is today, flipped some sort of switch in people’s brain (including mine), which convinced us that it is normal to chase fame because the means to get there are so readily available. I don’t know how the Internet could have been designed differently to prevent this, but “giving a voice to everyone” was, in hindsight, maybe a badly implemented idea.

I’d be surprised to hear that any of you here have been trying to become famous on the Internet, but if you have, then I’d like to hear about your experience, and your opinions on this topic in general.