I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight:
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
We are destroying ourselves; the very core of what it is to be human. I say this acknowledging the irony of writing this on my phone, on a Sunday morning, when I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.
Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.
Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.
Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!
The Great Filter is just bullshit until we come across space ruins to prove that something has been filtering out civilizations. It is possible that we are just the "precursors" without any giants to stand upon the shoulders of.
Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
It is in the distant future still (if we ever get there without apocalypse first) but I think the goal was set out to be, from the very first bits of digital data, is to completely transition ourselves to a digital world. Living it in parallel will make less sense if Earth conditions get worse, and even less in space or on a hostile planet. In a digital world possibilities become limitless, disabilities, distances, shortcomings of the mind eliminated. Once you can't see a difference, will it matter if something is "real"? Sure, it can also become a hell and inhumane much easier, but this doesn't make it a less compelling dimension.
Looking through this lens, fighting, limiting internet usage is akin to moving to the rainforest to avoid capitalism - lone rebelling acts in the wrong direction of history, a temporary, partial victory for the few who dare this hassle.
Time is better spent to make this emerging space better, for everyone.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed with a measure of a restraint. It needs to be clear we can be reasoned with.
So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
> is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.
> Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume?
The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.
Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.
By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.
AI achieves many things for these platforms:
1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)
2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)
3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers
4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections
Communication was mostly lost before the rise of social media—assuming we ever had anything more than isolated pockets of actual communication, which I am not convinced we have. Literature has been exploring this for a good many decades, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good example and even shows how our relation to it has changed in the 80 odd years since its release; these days when it comes up the interpretation/discussion about it is more often than not about social causes, which is depressingly ironic, it is using the novel in the same way the characters of the novel use Singer.
> Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.
Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.
> Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.
Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill.
There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.
> But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social!
Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry.
I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most heavily populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.
Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries.
For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)
That was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh.
Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?
Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.
Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?
> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
Ma Bell was never profitable without government cheese. And her offspring can’t do much but complain about how every one else is making huge margins over “their” infrastructure.
I think the desire to not centralize identity has more to do with it than anything. We present different facets to different communities. The pseudo-indelible nature of internet commentary means saying something to anyone potentially means saying it to everyone, in any context.
That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back.
At some point I realized those people were just like that.
I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.
We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
I think I somewhat agree with the author but I find the idea of a single account completely unappealing. My view on the benefits of federation is that you don't have a single entity gating your access. Having multiple accounts is a benefit.
The thing about the Fediverse is that no one person gets to decide how the network is used: This guy seems to like bending sentences that other people wrote into supporting his narrow ideas of what the network should be. People can use it for whatever they want, just cause the AP spec says its designed for one thing doesn't mean its constrained to it.
Also, even though I'm an active Fediverse user, the side of fedi that I call home is quite different from his, a stick out being that we tend to use a different set of software (Pleroma instead of Mastodon, usually). Having and using alts on several different instances running the same software is very common. I can't say I've ever interacted with a Pixelfed account from my side of Fedi, though.
Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.
On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.
I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
We lost civilization to advertising IMO. It feels like the majority of all technology is built around monetizing clicks. Astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix.
We need a Caesar who will ban all advertising. Lacking a Caesar, we could start with publicly funded NFL stadiums e.g. MetLife to get a foot in the door and go from there. Something must be done.
This is one of those articles that is too obsessed with amusing itself with its own pretentiousness to communicate anything interesting - which is ironic given the author seems thinks they prefer communications to entertainment.
I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight:
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
We are destroying ourselves; the very core of what it is to be human. I say this acknowledging the irony of writing this on my phone, on a Sunday morning, when I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.
Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.
Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.
Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!
Maybe the very core of what it is to be human is to destroy ourselves.
Would be funny if the "great filter" is not nukes or some other weapon, but social media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
The Great Filter is just bullshit until we come across space ruins to prove that something has been filtering out civilizations. It is possible that we are just the "precursors" without any giants to stand upon the shoulders of.
Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
It is in the distant future still (if we ever get there without apocalypse first) but I think the goal was set out to be, from the very first bits of digital data, is to completely transition ourselves to a digital world. Living it in parallel will make less sense if Earth conditions get worse, and even less in space or on a hostile planet. In a digital world possibilities become limitless, disabilities, distances, shortcomings of the mind eliminated. Once you can't see a difference, will it matter if something is "real"? Sure, it can also become a hell and inhumane much easier, but this doesn't make it a less compelling dimension.
Looking through this lens, fighting, limiting internet usage is akin to moving to the rainforest to avoid capitalism - lone rebelling acts in the wrong direction of history, a temporary, partial victory for the few who dare this hassle.
Time is better spent to make this emerging space better, for everyone.
Given to the direction we're going, I don't believe this digital world will be one in which we're free either.
Perhaps one could frame it as "The Self under Siege".
https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed with a measure of a restraint. It needs to be clear we can be reasoned with.
So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
The original opiate for the people criticism was leveled against religion by Karl Marx:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/6pontu/wha...
;-)
... This is relevant how?
That sounds like work.
Maybe what I need is an AI agent to consume AI generated content on my behalf.
Then I can continue with my strong preference to direct my time and attention toward content generated, mostly, by my fellow humans.
> is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.
They only dislike it when they can tell it’s AI, but that’s becoming less and less of a possibility.
They don't have to like it they just need to engage with it.
Which users? I typically dislike TikTok and other shorts but the platforms seem to be wildly popular even despite my opinions.
> Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume?
The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.
Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.
By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.
AI achieves many things for these platforms:
1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)
2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)
3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers
4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections
Communication was mostly lost before the rise of social media—assuming we ever had anything more than isolated pockets of actual communication, which I am not convinced we have. Literature has been exploring this for a good many decades, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good example and even shows how our relation to it has changed in the 80 odd years since its release; these days when it comes up the interpretation/discussion about it is more often than not about social causes, which is depressingly ironic, it is using the novel in the same way the characters of the novel use Singer.
Text and chat (and the voice forms) are alive and well for communication.
Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
That's not communication being lost, it's media.
What is lost is social networking. Texting or calling people you already know isn't networking.
Every social network experiences convergent evolutionary pressure driving it to become social media instead.
> Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.
Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.
Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.
But especially if you allow audio/video then your moderation costs can get very high if you're aiming for more "broadcast" and less "community."
> Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.
Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill.
There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.
> But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social!
Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry.
I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most heavily populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.
Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries.
For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)
That was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh.
> I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology
Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?
Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.
Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?
> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
But what about the joy of deleting 112 messages from the trash folder every day?
>Communication networks are not profitable.
Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.
Ma Bell was never profitable without government cheese. And her offspring can’t do much but complain about how every one else is making huge margins over “their” infrastructure.
Telecom is very very broken.
I think the desire to not centralize identity has more to do with it than anything. We present different facets to different communities. The pseudo-indelible nature of internet commentary means saying something to anyone potentially means saying it to everyone, in any context.
That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back.
At some point I realized those people were just like that.
I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.
We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
Docker for humans!
I think I somewhat agree with the author but I find the idea of a single account completely unappealing. My view on the benefits of federation is that you don't have a single entity gating your access. Having multiple accounts is a benefit.
The thing about the Fediverse is that no one person gets to decide how the network is used: This guy seems to like bending sentences that other people wrote into supporting his narrow ideas of what the network should be. People can use it for whatever they want, just cause the AP spec says its designed for one thing doesn't mean its constrained to it.
Also, even though I'm an active Fediverse user, the side of fedi that I call home is quite different from his, a stick out being that we tend to use a different set of software (Pleroma instead of Mastodon, usually). Having and using alts on several different instances running the same software is very common. I can't say I've ever interacted with a Pixelfed account from my side of Fedi, though.
We lost communication to advertising.
It's kinda weird.
Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.
On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.
I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
We lost civilization to advertising IMO. It feels like the majority of all technology is built around monetizing clicks. Astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix.
We need a Caesar who will ban all advertising. Lacking a Caesar, we could start with publicly funded NFL stadiums e.g. MetLife to get a foot in the door and go from there. Something must be done.
>A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post
and
>When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago,
I am confused.
Bloggers don't always publish immediately after writing a post, the start of the prior post explains the time line and the delay: https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
hmm ok, I thought it might be that, but then I would have expected "I did" to have been "I published"
This is one of those articles that is too obsessed with amusing itself with its own pretentiousness to communicate anything interesting - which is ironic given the author seems thinks they prefer communications to entertainment.