Cory Doctorow knocks it out of the park with his piece "Tiktok's enshittification". It's a 5 minute read and it explores why the internet has gone to hell over the last decade and how there is little hope it will recover and why that is not a bad thing. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.
Derivative article on how ChatGPT is going to destroy the knowledge of the internet and destroy expertise. (38 minute read per author) https://castlebridge.ie/insights/chatgpt-and-the-enshittening-of-knowledge/
Very good and depressing read. TL;DR version, Amazon, Google, FB, and Tiktok are just like any other company. They start providing a good service at a fair value and through greed they eventually destroy themselves by getting away from what made them popular. Instead they alienate viewers by forcing them to content they don’t want and siphon money from content creators who have to pay for the privilege for clicks.
Weird. Safaris reader says 30 mins while the other reader extension i use on desktop said 16. I let it read to me on 1.5x. First article was well written and had many footnotes to insights I've longed missed in a "journalistic" op/ed. On the topic of the quality of media analysis, corporate news and punditry are a couple steps shy of becoming a faceless AI hydra. Instead of feeds, they regurgitate talking point slop with a garnish of hot takes. Hot takes makes your blood boil while the slop cools you down enough to discourage you from disengaging (Stephen AI Smith). Maybe autopopulate a 80/20 comments section to boot. That's the enshittified state and not the original bait product. Speaking of chatAI, it reminds me of Oracles from Greek myths. Visit the church of Zuck, Bezos, or Alphabet for your unique tailored answer. Could be gift or curse, but spurn the Gods at your peril! Is societal enlightenment cyclical? Our foundations of democracy were written by dead folks 2000 years ago. Maybe nannybot is needed to prop it all up.
Three years later and this article rings as true as ever. Now there is so much AI slop and bots driving “engagement” that the Internet as a whole feels like late 90s/early 2000s cable TV where there were 500 channels and nothing to watch. The entire Internet is one giant tabloid with Clickbait nonsense as the default. It is the fault of the average Internet user because if it wasn’t profitable, major Internet sites wouldn’t do it. Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all laser focused on pushing an endless stream of short form video slop. Google search is nearly unusable.
Here is the thing. Life’s fun is unpredictability. Not unlike sports. But when you use stats and science to optimize. You reach a point of predictability. (3>2) While it may be successful. Goals maybe accomplished. But it’s not “fun”. we have complained about this with the Morey Rockets. but we were winning. I say that to say this. generalize this social media. we will get what we want as much as we want but the fun is diminishing returns. But we have trained the algorithm and that is all you get. So we have echo chambers. We are rarely surprised. Basically it’s like we have our own person matrixes. What happens when my rules dont work on your platform. After a while are we driving the algorithm or is it driving us Rocket River
