alt Hacker NewsThe internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now
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One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind of thing.
Mr Rogers said it: look for the helpers. They may be few, but they are there. Find them and focus on them.
Nice article by Stephen Diehl - I really liked his latest on crypto.
I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one:
> The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective is a moving composite of high-dimensional signals for attention, retention, and conversion, dispersed across models, metrics, tests, and feedback systems. The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it. The loop knows only that one stimulus keeps a person scrolling while another lets them leave. Calm accuracy loses. Threat, transgression, humiliation, and impossible promises win. The resulting social damage appears nowhere in the objective function. It arrives as an externality.
Not sure what you think of it.
In my view, his ideas are nice and interesting, and I would rather read less verbose, less "perfect" blog posts, and reduce or remove the use of LLMs.
The thing is, the "old" internet is still out there. No one is stopping you from writing a futile blog (as I do.) Or using YouTube only for instruction for tasks around the house. Or learn about any topic imaginable. It's just that the bigger ecosystems have followed their incentives to their logical conclusion (hyper-addictive content to maximize earnings from ad sales.) Any new, "for the people" platform is going to face overwhelming pressure at some point to morph into the platforms we have today. It's just too profitable.
The only way out is: don't to go to the casino in the first place. We need to tend our own [Voltarian](https://www.openculture.com/2020/09/what-voltaire-meant-when...) gardens.
This also seems to be spilling into the real world. Because of this internet addiction, it’s almost guaranteed that everyone has a relatively expensive computer in their pocket. This has turned into an increasing number of real-world scams, as well as supporting trafficking networks for stealing phones. The scams range from old school pickpocketers to sympathy schemes to full out phone-related accusations – anything to get you to take your phone out of your pocket, potentially unlock it, and have someone swipe it.
If it’s unlocked, they may do some further scams from what’s available on the device, but either way, within days, your phone is somewhere in Asia, disassembled, and sold for scrap and parts.
After reddit prevented browsing old.reddit.com without signing in, I got a lot more active on lemmy. There's some amount of old internet feeling there, you don't get exhausted by the amount of material and it's not overrun by corporations. So far it's been nice.
Ok article, and has similar points to “You should quit Reddit” (which was a pretty good book).
About 2/3 in, the sentences got choppier and shorter, and you could tell some context rot was setting in.
In a previous generation, people would detect those technological snake oil sellers , call them out , even chase them. Because they could tell scammers from non-scammers.
Now we have already 2-3 generations raised to consider scam practices to be the norm , and even to celebrate behavioral tricks and audience maximizing optimization at any cost (clickbait!).
I cannot be convinced this is a normal thing. Over time, things revert to normal, but often in an explosive way.
This so exaggerated. If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, you are either choosing the wrong places to be, or (more likely) the problem is with you.
A good quote: "Sell people a worldview, and they will advertise it for free because criticism of the product now feels like criticism of the self"
Internet didn't change, it's population did. It's 8 billion potential victims and all bit more sophisticated thieves under one roof.
Can't blame Internet. People which were scammed "offline" are now scammed online.
So I think there is an oversight in this essay, and it's that society becoming predatory is much bigger than the Internet: it is the story of the decay of America, reflected and exacerbated by the internet, as it becomes a anti-democratic huckster society dominated by grifters, theocrats, and snake-oil sellers.
Forget the internet, you can't get your home repaired, your car worked on, an appliance purchased, shop for food, or do anything else without wading through a corrupt morass of that mixes woo, subcultures, grift, and subscriptions. Maybe it's the hospital that wants to charge a $25 a day fee to make the hospital room TV grant access to basic cable channels instead of nothing. Maybe it's the elementary school district that mandates every physical interaction between students is called in to the police - like little Jenny shoved Johnny who skinned his knee because he teased her, call the cops, it's policy. Or the way that every customer service interaction is routed through endless AIs because it's cheaper than solving a problem. Or how it seems like nobody will do right by anyone else until lawyers get involved. Cut taxes year after year, while everything decays, we fail the younger generations, and everyone thinks you fake it till you make it because it's all zero sum... It's how America heads straight to banana republic, and it might be too late to turn.
If you spend your time online, and the online time is spent on the major sirens, then yeah, it's a predatory cesspit.
No one forces anyone to use the internet, and certainly one can avoid being snared by the sirens.
A little self control goes a long way.
I think the fundamental issue is social communication without any social consequences. In real life if you continually insult and troll people, you will be a pariah. Online, you can find others who admire and support that behavior. And all you need is another anonymous/pseudonymous account to keep doing it if you get blocked.
And no, that does not mean that I am calling for identification. It just seems to be a natural consequence of having social interaction without real consequences.
Economic exploitation is just one way to take advantage of people who lack internal contentment. The other forms are cultural and social.
Modifying one element in this environment in favor of others won't make things better. You could even argue that less people are being financially scammed online than they are cognitively.
These problems are not endemic to the internet. But the internet does cast a broader net and provide a wider variety of ways for people to become afflicted by whatever it is I'm trying to describe.
People should know more about data fusion. How browser javascript fingerprints and unique personal id of the adtech works. Hint it traveres VPNs. The seven has an id of you
Check your id https://amiunique.org/
When you ride a bus, you pay for the fuel with money. When you go online, you pay both for the internet itself and with your personal information, whatever it may be.
There’s also a bad side.
Nah. It's still the output of multiple ppl merged into one. There's no governing force there. Just human nature, across the world, more captured, more visible than ever before.
What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization. Monetization will basically ruin anything meant to be fun, even a simple board game with friends and family, if it stopped being about spending quality time and having fun and now there’s a competition of how much will each make at the end, it won’t be fun, you will see tribalism, manipulation, cheating, and other shenanigans.
We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because that's the most effective way to capture the eyeballs needed to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because that's the best way to capture your attention. They're really good at it too.
I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.
My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.
the internet is home to plenty of predatory cesspits, but the real stuff is still there too. it's not as convenient or addicting as content that doubles as a funnel for the ad machines, but the real spaces and media that aren't dominated by the advertising industrial complex still exist- just like in other forms of media that preceded the internet.
It's almost as if a group of CEO's got together and asked each other, "How can we monetize the time our employees spend off work?". The answer was, apparently, to reduce purchasing-power adjusted pay to the point where hobbies, like the internet, must generate income for people if they want to afford basic necessities. Hence, stagnant wages and the rise of side-hustle economy. Now everybody goes back to work after they get home.
If you buy this (wildly speculative and unsupported) theory, then the enshittification of the Internet is only natural. The best way to ruin a hobby is to turn it into a job. The internet was not perfect, but a better place back when people did it as a fun hobby with no expectation of income. Now, everything has to produce financial gain for somebody. Kids still make the same videos of themselves kicking each other in the nuts, but now they have to remind you to like and subscribe in order to fund future tomfoolery.
Perhaps what we have is not a problem born of a new technology (i.e. The internet) so much as a societal problem resulting from social regress. We're no longer dividing the pie up equitably enough, so people now feel squeezed and have become utterly obsessed with money. As it turns out, that makes them less fun.
Hell is other people.
I saw a video of a doctor answering a call and the caller started saying some strange hate/concensus-pushing message about Jews hating people who hate Jews in a very angry tone. Neither the doctor nor the commenters suggested it was AI, but it certainly sounded like it. I got a flash of a future where every telemarketer call is either an angry voice ready to convince you of something, or the gender you like trying to woo you.
How discouraging would it be (intentionally) if every time an AI had access to your attention, it was trying to make you angry. This would probably cause a lot of people to disengage, a lot to get angry, and a few able to live without being affected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
The root cause underlying all of that is the simple fact that the average person just isn't intelligent enough. They fall for the grift, they fall for the advertising, for the manipulation, the propaganda, the echo chambers, the emotion, the hate, they fall for it all. They're either unable to see it or escape it or both.
With the internet connecting everyone together, giving you direct, immediate, access to billions of people from the comfort of your own home, of course there's going to be classes of people working to siphon money (or power) from the unintelligent into their own pockets, rather than doing the hard work of actually producing value for their civilization.
There's also no real solution to this.
Of course, educating people is a solution, somehow getting people to be more intelligent. But that's a slow, long, process, and the more I see, the more I realize just how commonly intelligent people still fall prey to the same things.
The only other solution I see is blocking access for the majority for either consuming information from or contributing information to the internet, which is a hard pill to swallow, and which has its own horrible, and mostly unsolvable issues.
Sadly, I can't find anything to disagree with, here...:(
Half the comments here, for instance.
The observations appear like disconnected pieces or isolated trends. They are not. You need to step back and look at the full picture. It's just one trend with multiple manifestations. It doesn't require lengthy essays if you look at it's core.
It's the business beast riding the tech monster. Its not people. People are simply driven by the beast.
I have been to a village recently, hoping to find the foods and fruits I remember from my childhood. They are all gone. Seeds were GM modified, chemicals entered through soil and water, the entire soil layer has lost its nature and ecosystem. The livestock has changed as well. You don't get the same chicken and eggs anymore. Grains, spices, pulses, milk, water everything changed. Just like internet, the enshittification happened everywhere.
That's not an isolated trend.
Good writing includes some examples or statistics.
The ratio of grifters to non-grifters could have halved or risen tenfold in the last few decades. How would we know?
What percentage of the population "now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice?"
How "many online grifters are themselves marks"?
> Crypto has become the subject of my verbal ire so often because it is the apotheosis of the grift economy.
AI is replacing Crypto on the topic in some sense.
If you don't know the song Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham, allow me to introduce you to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
(Heck of a karakoe number if you can pull it off.)
You could replace nearly every instance of "the Internet" in this article with "capitalism" and it would make perfect sense.
It's interesting to me how complaints about widespread Internet political propaganda and "grifting" so consistently reveal the author's own political biases. It's really hard to write about it in a detached way.
(It's strange to see people accuse others of grifting but then continue to engage with the arguments made in that "grift" as though the other party sincerely believed the claims. In my experience, the claims usually probably are made sincerely, and the "grifting" terminology is used because the accuser can't accept that the other worldview exists, or else just as a generic boo word.)
"Kind of" feels like the understatement of the century
This reads to as pure AI slop to me, and Pangram agrees (100% AI).
To use one of the idioms that give this impression, this is not just knee-jerk whining. It's material to what the article is about. If you're going to raise this topic, be a human and say something constructive. An AI generated ragebait whinge about ragebait is ragebait squared with a heaped serving of hypocrisy on top. This exemplifies everything it complains about.
Part 1: Everything was turned into social User Generated Content to reduce editorial costs. Part 2: Predatory third parties ranging from nation states to SEO agencies started mass filling UGC with anxiety inducing brain rot. Part 3: the brainrot generation is automated by AI and it silences any real people or voices. Part 4: People go outside to touch grass and Part 5: That leaves opportunities for platforms for real people with good culture
"Usenet is a cesspool, a dung heap" -- Patrick A. Townson -- published in May 1994 in The UNIX-Hater's Handbook.
tl;dr: The internet is the thing that needs the most attention when educating your kids.
I get a lot of value from the internet. I fell for some traps (instagram, facebook with very little value but lots of wasted energy) that I mostly got rid of.
But I have many products I am very happy about, that I got to know through other people on the internet.
Heh “predatory cesspit”. Ironically, the internet is kind of returning to its roots in this respect.
I've seen this same discussion in a million guises.
This particular essay starts with
> I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet.
... and then contains a lot of predictable stuff about how and why avalon became: tarnished, effete, weak, tawdry, despoiled, no-fun, toxic, predatory, rapacious etc. You can take your pick, it doesn't matter. It's the same argument no matter which adjective you choose.
It finally gets to
> The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does.
That's a truism of no value.
Take the whole essay, replace "internet" with a country's name and amend some of the details. You've seen it before? You read it every damned day in every form of media. It's used to justify just about anything; the good and the bad. In the end it's a boring, repetitive argument.
At the edge, it reduces to: my country used to be great and now it's crap because it's not how it used to be - so, we need to roll everything back despite the number of years that have passed between then and now, and despite any of the positive things that may have come during that time.
Well duh, was this not expected? The Internet userbase has transitioned dramatically over the past several decades.
It moved from an outpost for computer nerds in the early 1990s, to a middle-class product in the 2000s, then everybody got access in the 2010s with the spread of the smartphone.
The demographics of the internet look nothing like they did when it was created.
I will provide a contrary opinion.
The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class.
And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.
I have IRC logs from 1998
Most people were dicks even back then
including me :)
I love Stephen's writing, and this is so well written.
> I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice.
I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life.
Also, this explorable by Nicky Case is evergreen: https://ncase.me/trust/
I think part of it is due to corrupt government regulating internet as if only Facebooks and Reddits were on the market. It destroyed niche forums and made the place less democratised. Today you cannot just rent a server and start a forum without massive financial backing and therapist on speed dial.
> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.
I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.