How we lost communication to entertainment

Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are

- from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else

- incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value

In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough.

(e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)

Or, subscribe to America’s Test Kitchen. Search their website for a spinach salad recipe.

But you’d rather have a free spinach salad recipe - you want the Internet indexed for free, and you want someone to deliver the recipe for free. And you don’t want ads to pay their bills. In other words, you want something for nothing.

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.

There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.

There is group chat software that implements social networking features, like discord, and most social networks implement a group chat feature, so the distinction is messy but they are not the same.

"opiate of the masses... heart of the heartless world"

Marx was despairing at the heartlessness of the condition of working class people in industrial slums, people one generation or less removed from the flight from rural landless dispossession and starvation to a flight into the city and factories in search of survival. He saw religion as one tool people used to salve the pain, to reduce the suffering.

Far more complicated than "religion bad, we should ban it, mmkay"

;-)

1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”

2. For every social media account you have: close it.

3. Profit

My suggestion was much more modest. Put down the phone and delete your socials. Disengagement is the ultimate act of rebellion.

When I google search "why is the sky blue" , it spins up an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful for simple, known answers.

When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again. Google was a pioneer of search indexing, and now it seems like we don't attempt to index answers at all. They're spinning up an LLM every time because they're trying to run up the AI "adoption" metrics.

I'd love to be able to ask for simple things, like the address of the local restaurant 3 blocks away, without firing up a GPU in an AI data center.

I don't always want to "talk with" a computer. Sometimes I just want to "use" a computer. Maybe that makes me a fool. Or an old man yelling at clouds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

This isn't new. We've been doing it for a long time with booze, porn, drugs, sexual excess, gambling, pointless consumerism, certain kinds of religious fervor, endless things.

But almost all of those things are self-limiting. They're either costly, dangerous, in limited supply, or physically harmful enough to our health that we shy away from them and taboos develop around them.

Addictive digital media may actually be more dangerous than those things precisely because it is cheap, always available, endless, and physically harmless. As a result it has no built-in mechanism that limits it. We can scroll and scroll and chase social media feedback loops forever until we die.

AI slop feeds are going to supercharge this even more. Instead of human creators we will have AI models that can work off immediate engagement feedback and fine tune themselves for each individual user in real time. I'm quite certain all the antisocial media companies are working on this right now. Won't be long before they start explicitly removing human creators from the loop and just generating endless customized chum with ad placement embedded into it.

Some people have the discipline to push back, but many do not either for psychological/neurological reasons or because they are exhausted and stressed and unable to summon the energy. Humans do not have infinite willpower. So I've been predicting for a while that eventually we're going to heavily regulate or tax this space.

This concerns me too due to the free speech implications. It'll be tempting for politicians to regulate or tax only the platforms they don't like, or to use the regulatory mechanism to crack down on legitimate speech by grouping it in with addictive chum. We've seen similar things with attempts to regulate porn or hate speech. But it's coming. I have little doubt. The social harm is becoming too extreme to ignore, especially when children are given unlimited access to these things. Ask teachers and psychologists about extreme "iPad kids" who literally do nothing but stare at screens and scroll and are unable to function otherwise. This is a real phenomenon. I'm sure some kids are more vulnerable to it than others, probably kids who are somewhat non-neurotypical (ADD/ADHD, autism, etc.).

It's really still shocking to me. If you went back in time and told me in, say, 2006, that our engagement-hacking would be so successful that it became an X-risk to humanity, I'm not sure I'd believe you. I never would have believed how effective this stuff could be. It's just a damn screen!

We thrive in small groups where there is high trust social networks and generally being around people with the same culture and belief system.

When I hear "there's nothing good available," I assume the person is a dullard. Like where are you looking that you can't throw a rock and hit something worth watching?!