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I ordered and picked up groceries from Albertson's and dinner from Taco Bell. I am a half shell of a man.
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Sep 30, 2021 08:44
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:The dominance of phones really hosed up the internet in a lot of ways that are hard to describe, like just the difference between typing into a phone and typing into a full keyboard changes the dynamics of written communication in profound ways. Also everything has to be simplified to the point where a boomer can mash it into a phone, so software universally became less powerful (in terms of what you can do with it), and the control that we used to have over software got externalized to dipshit design visionaries whose visions mainly revolve around monetizing boomers mashing poo poo into phones. Also since we can't have fat clients anymore, everything has significant input lag, and interfaces got slower all around, especially in enterprise software where you really need that low input lag to keep in your flow and get poo poo done. It's the same thing that happens to anything that goes mainstream or any company that goes public. Suddenly it needs to cater to every single one of the masses. Instead of being designed to be good, it's designed to be "inoffensive" and "simple". I know we call each other dumbasses on this forum all the time but generally anyone who can make it here and register an account is of sufficient enough intelligence that giving us the same thing as you give Joe "MAGA" Schmoe is like giving an 18 year old duplos to play with because it's what their toddler sibling gets. Sure you can still build a castle with them or whatever but it's offensively unengaging and then no one cares because you're part of the elusive "poweruser" demographic that doesn't amount for any measurable revenue.
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Sep 30, 2021 08:44
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I worked for a web hosting company in the late 2010s where customer support peoples minds were routinely blown because I could do things like tell them what "http" stood for or what PHP was or what a 500 error meant. This was because every possible piece of customizability had been sytematically removed from our product until all that was left was a site builder that wouldn't even allow you to do things like set custom dimensions for an image or have more than two colors on your site. The stated reason for this was to "prevent you from making bad decisions" And you know what, I saw sites created by customers on older versions of our product, they really were doing them a favor. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 08:47
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People used to have fun and unique and cool handles because it was dangerous to give your name on the intent
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Sep 30, 2021 08:48
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People don't refer to it as the information super highway anymore, they call it the information super tesla tunnel now and that really sucks
Sex Farm fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 08:51
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Everything is optimized now, I hate it. When the internet was novel it was rough and stupid. Some things worked and some things didn't. Nobody had any idea what the gently caress was going on and it gave us freedom to move around and explore. Now everything you engage with (besides SA) has been 100% curated, vetted, and sanitized inside and out before presented to you for consumption. It's like how in some countries they eat more parts of the animal, in America the chicken breast or whatever is so perfectly cleaned up and handed to you. So you just consume more of it, and faster. Maybe that bone you had to eat around took more time, but there's a bit of a ritual there, and it slows you down. Now the internet is perfectly optimized chicken nuggets. Just a perfectly manufactured and optimized slurry of sorta-meat. The internet, like the chicken nugget is a purely homogenized slurry of mediocrity, catered to average, fat, lowest common denominator consumers. This forum is great and persists because it is stupid and unoptimized. There is no upvote. Sure there are some threads that show other good threads or posts, but everything requires hunting and exploration. You may miss things. And that's a wonderful thing about SA. On the rest of the internet, everyone has heard about everything. There's nothing new or engaging. Everything died the moment it was born. The internet used to be a medium. It isn't anymore, it's just adspace and chicken nuggets. And most people love ads and chicken nuggets, so it'll be here until they don't anymore.
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Sep 30, 2021 09:08
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thehandtruck posted:most people love ads I hate this so much that there's nothing I can type in this post which would convey how much I hate it. Someone once told me it was "wrong" to use adblock because it doesn't earn revenue for sites. So what??? I have spent at least a few hundred dollars on avatars on SA in the 20 years I have been posting here which is way more than it could have earned from my non-ad-clicking rear end
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Sep 30, 2021 09:18
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I don't think most people do love ads. People tolerate them but the vast majority have to find ads annoying at the least. At least, my god I hope they don't. If you were to show me a study that said that a majority of people didn't mind or enjoyed ads I think that would push me over the edge from mildly misanthropic to outright anti-human. There's just no way. There can't be a person, let alone a majority of people, that looks forward to ad breaks and pop-ups.
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Sep 30, 2021 09:25
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Funky See Funky Do posted:I don't think most people do love ads. People tolerate them but the vast majority have to find ads annoying at the least. At least, my god I hope they don't. If you were to show me a study that said that a majority of people didn't mind or enjoyed ads I think that would push me over the edge from mildly misanthropic to outright anti-human. next time you go to a superbowl party, or a watch party for some lovely series that's currently airing, or whatever, watch people's faces during the commercials. watch how they comment. they are more engaged with the ads now than with the content. you cant buy the show, but you can buy the products on the ads. and people love to buy because it temporarily pulls them out of depression. so the ad is a buoy in an ocean where they are drowning from depression so of course the dopamine hits when they see an ad. "will this ad sell a product that will finally make me happy? im so excited!" well, for americans at least. americans. love. ads. even on twitch. when they do sponsored content and it says #ad. viewership goes up most of the time. of course twitch funnels people into that stream, but they don't click away. why? because people want ot see their favorite content creator play an ad. jamie pull up that aziz ansari clip
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Sep 30, 2021 09:32
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It just keeps going backwards. It started with multimedia poo poo, alright cool. Then it’s like alright gently caress that gently caress web sites put everything on Facebook. Alright so short pixelated clips and scrapbooking this doesn’t suck at all, but we’re moving into the future ok. Then it’s like, gently caress you now it’s Twitter. You can’t even type a whole paragraph now idiot. Then these tik tok assholes were like hey look, we can post lovely low quality videos on the internet again. We’re back up to 1998 bow down and kiss our butt, hackerz win the Internet we’ve already had a revolution. Just like how people invented the phone but all people want to do is text. I’m gonna go get a butter churn and a washboard and a loving corn cob pipe because the only thing that got more advanced and creative was some loving dildos dawg. 
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Sep 30, 2021 09:38
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thehandtruck posted:next time you go to a superbowl party, or a watch party for some lovely series that's currently airing, or whatever, watch people's faces during the commercials. watch how they comment. they are more engaged with the ads now than with the content. you cant buy the show, but you can buy the products on the ads. and people love to buy because it temporarily pulls them out of depression. so the ad is a buoy in an ocean where they are drowning from depression so of course the dopamine hits when they see an ad. "will this ad sell a product that will finally make me happy? im so excited!" well, for americans at least. americans. love. ads. I'm not normal. I have never been to a "watch party" or a "big game party" in my life and, God willing, never will. I dunno, I still don't think it's true. I don't have a super high opinion of the the average person but it's still high enough can't picture that outside of some dystopian sci-fi movie. I think marketing is mostly bullshit and not nearly as effective as the people selling marketing would have us believe it is. Yeah the familiar product will sell more than the unfamiliar one but I think that's about as far as it goes.
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Sep 30, 2021 09:50
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I remember when all of this was porn.
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Sep 30, 2021 10:05
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Funky See Funky Do posted:There's just no way. There can't be a person, let alone a majority of people, that looks forward to ad breaks and pop-ups. I know someone who will, if I point out that they have the DVD of a film, keep watching the free TV version because they "don't mind the ad breaks." They do at least sometimes use the break to get a drink etc. The same person complains they often miss the end of films because they go on past their bedtime. Yep, it's a boomer.
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Sep 30, 2021 10:12
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Funky See Funky Do posted:I'm not normal. I have never been to a "watch party" or a "big game party" in my life and, God willing, never will. I dunno, I still don't think it's true. I don't have a super high opinion of the the average person but it's still high enough can't picture that outside of some dystopian sci-fi movie. I think marketing is mostly bullshit and not nearly as effective as the people selling marketing would have us believe it is. Yeah the familiar product will sell more than the unfamiliar one but I think that's about as far as it goes. within the scope of the internet, you need marketing (SEO) for your content to be seen at all in the first place. It's not about selling your products, it's about getting even a single person to see your product. I can't find the statistic right now but some very large percentage of apps that get added to the iphone app store get literally zero downloads. Even if you're an artist or something, it does not matter how talented you are or how good your art is or even how many people see/like/upvote a specific piece, 90% of your work will be completely ignored unless you market the hell out of yourself. I posted a drawing on a reddit sub with 350k members and it was the top post there for 2 days. Over 1000 upvotes. It lead to a grand total of one person following me on instagram. People don't even seek out content that they like anymore because every platform in existence is shoving curated content into their face 24/7. Some lovely drawing with well-written emotional copy in the title and an attached sob story posted at the statistically most opportune time by someone who posts a similar drawing with recognizably similar copy at that same time every day will always be the winning thing that the masses hoist onto their shoulders thanks to reddit crowdsourcing content curation. This is in recent times thanks in large part to TikTok which is literally spy software that builds a complex psychological profile for you including things like keyboard/typing patterns and keylogging so that it can recognize you across devices and continue injecting algorithmically-perfect content into your feed even after you buy a new phone and start a brand new TikTok account on it and people are eating it up I come from a background of working in internet marketing and SEO and writing official copy for the public to consume on the internet is an entirely new programming language with its own syntax where the meaning of a word is completely separate from what the dictionary defines it as. Instead, the meaning of a word is determined by how it makes someone who has never heard it before feel when they read it. To make it even worse, content writing is largely being replaced by AI (called GPT3) which writes text that is purpose-designed through machine learning so far beyond normal machine learning that it's called "deep learning" in order to maximize its potential to sway and emotionally engage its readers. It is extremely successful despite its propensity to lean toward hate speech, racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. Or maybe it's extremely successful because that's what it's great at  I mean look at this, Facebook is literally paying people a few cents to get in racist arguments with its AI then trusting those people to go "Okay AI, listen... that was bad okay?" quote:Facebook AI Research, is testing ways to eliminate toxic text by making more of it. Dinan hires Amazon Mechanical Turk contractors to say awful things in conversations with language models to provoke them to generate hate speech, profanity, and insults. Humans then label that output as safe or unsafe Amazon Mechanical Turk is another hell entirely. You pay large amounts of people fractions of a dollar to do work like write specific text or do a survey. You know what the best part is? The majority of its "contractors" are in the US, earning around $1-5/hour to sit at home filling out internet surveys all day long. Why? Because one of the requirements to be a contractor is speaking English, and in many other countries just speaking English alone is enough to net you a higher paid job. Here's a story of a person with an Associates degree in nursing in 2018 who was forced to rely on Mechanical Turk as their primary source of income because it was the best option available to them: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/ Welcome to the dystopian apocalypse that the internet and Jeff loving Bezos enabled. And now he's trying to sabotage the entire US space program because he's mad that NASA wouldn't delay its bidding process long enough for him to start a company and go through a few years of R&D to submit a design. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 11:37 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 10:50
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The internet was promoted as this amazing resource of information when I was growing up. The Information Superhighway... Nigh everything useful is buried under piles of the stupidest poo poo humanity can squeeze out. The highway is just a traffic jam of moronic thoughts blocking necessary information from getting anywhere. Social media and content platforms are largely to blame, in my opinion(not that it really matters), for making people think their opinions of things matter or are valid.
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Sep 30, 2021 11:50
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deep dish peat moss posted:within the scope of the internet, you need marketing (SEO) for your content to be seen at all in the first place. It's not about selling your products, it's about getting even a single person to see your product. That seems like a lot of words to say "the familiar product outsells the unfamiliar product".
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Sep 30, 2021 11:52
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Content creator makes a video on the state of their channel: "Stop asking when the next video of a particular subject is coming. They weren't generating enough clicks to be worth my time."
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Sep 30, 2021 12:23
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What sucks is the term 'content creator' Sure don't be an artist or a writer or a documentary maker. Just give a big ol bowl of amorphous CONTENT to fill my empty evenings and keep the depression away. Mmm-mmm, yum yum, #brands #memes #creators Also, 90% of ~content~ was far better when it was odd people putting it out a few times a year because it was their hobby. Now that people are expected to have a side gig (so your capitalist masters can pay you less), it is all manufactured, faux quirky, overacted crap filled with calls to action (smash that bell bro) and referral links and donation buttons.
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Sep 30, 2021 12:46
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Bleeping out the curse words because the algorithm hates them.
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Sep 30, 2021 12:52
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If everyone used adblock it'd be illegal by now. It's probably good that most people are too dumb to do this.
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Sep 30, 2021 12:53
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deep dish peat moss posted:It's the same thing that happens to anything that goes mainstream or any company that goes public. Suddenly it needs to cater to every single one of the masses. Instead of being designed to be good, it's designed to be "inoffensive" and "simple". I know we call each other dumbasses on this forum all the time but generally anyone who can make it here and register an account is of sufficient enough intelligence that giving us the same thing as you give Joe "MAGA" Schmoe is like giving an 18 year old duplos to play with because it's what their toddler sibling gets. Sure you can still build a castle with them or whatever but it's offensively unengaging and then no one cares because you're part of the elusive "poweruser" demographic that doesn't amount for any measurable revenue.  thehandtruck posted:next time you go to a superbowl party, or a watch party for some lovely series that's currently airing, or whatever, watch people's faces during the commercials. watch how they comment. they are more engaged with the ads now than with the content. you cant buy the show, but you can buy the products on the ads. and people love to buy because it temporarily pulls them out of depression. so the ad is a buoy in an ocean where they are drowning from depression so of course the dopamine hits when they see an ad. "will this ad sell a product that will finally make me happy? im so excited!" well, for americans at least. americans. love. ads. Not American, but yes I see my friends do this too and it's super sad. If I'm forced to watch commercial TV at home for some reason (usually sport) I will always mute the TV as soon as ads come on and usually find a reason to leave the room for a minute. Some people find this super weird, but imo there's nothing beneficial to be gained from watching any type of advertisement. This thread has been surprisingly depressing lol
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Sep 30, 2021 12:54
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People hyper-obsessing about their gender identity and sexuality and telling everyone about it.... basically I hate twitter.
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Sep 30, 2021 12:56
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It used to be really exciting. Anything could happen. "Wow you're from sweden?" "Oh those are your boobs?" "Sure, I'll move to sweden" God I wish I'd moved to Sewden for those boobs when I was 18.
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Sep 30, 2021 13:03
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I really hate how social media CEOs hem and haw and tsk-tsk and half-assedly state, “What do you want me to do about it? My hands are tied  ” whenever the people call them out for not doing anything about the rampant racism, fascism, misinformation, and hatred that has infected everything on their sites. If only there was something the loving owners could do…  It’s probably why I never went past having a MySpace page back in the day, where my biggest worry was who was going to be in my top 8 friends.
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Sep 30, 2021 13:08
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It seems like there are two sorts of answers we're getting in this thread, for what sucks about the internet. One is a kind of decline narrative, where we talk about what was lost about the internet that we grew up with and are comfortable with. Everything is so gentrified and there's nothing to discover anymore. Everything is highly regimented, and you're fed garbage by social media companies looking to sell your data to get you to click on garbage. It's basically looking at how the internet has turned into its own economy. And the economy is based on the single worst thing in the modern world: advertising. The other sort of answer seems to be focusing on the bad kinds of posting. People shouting at each other as every disagreement turns into culture war trench warfare hell. Videos that are too long or too short and you can never really tell before hand if they've got what you want. The way everything retrenches along the dumbest possible identity lines, like everything is now the console wars. The second set of answers can be explained by the first, of course. We get the terrible posting because it's good by the hell metrics of the internet economy. But also I'm interested in more of those second sorts of answers. So the internet is owned by a bunch of evil demons who want to melt your brain to get you to click on a button because that makes their internal metrics go up, and they can charge people more for that button. What sort of posting does that result in? What are the worst effects? What are the ways in which this is unpleasant? deep dish peat moss posted:This is in recent times thanks in large part to TikTok which is literally spy software that builds a complex psychological profile for you including things like keyboard/typing patterns and keylogging so that it can recognize you across devices and continue injecting algorithmically-perfect content into your feed even after you buy a new phone and start a brand new TikTok account on it and people are eating it up I find this stuff fascinating and would love to know more, but it probably deserves its own thread.
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Sep 30, 2021 14:05
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Hand Knit posted:It seems like there are two sorts of answers we're getting in this thread, for what sucks about the internet. One is a kind of decline narrative, where we talk about what was lost about the internet that we grew up with and are comfortable with. Everything is so gentrified and there's nothing to discover anymore. Everything is highly regimented, and you're fed garbage by social media companies looking to sell your data to get you to click on garbage. It's basically looking at how the internet has turned into its own economy. And the economy is based on the single worst thing in the modern world: advertising. I got the impression that you were asking this question in the sense that you wanted to improve this site for the people that use it. In which case my answer is ban twitter. Make it impossible/illegal to quote a tweet. If someone wants to repeat something said in twitter then make it so that the stupid piece of poo poo needs to take a minute to copy the picture to their imgur or whatever and then reword the tweet before they post it or else just not do it/gently caress off.
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Sep 30, 2021 14:12
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Funky See Funky Do posted:I got the impression that you were asking this question in the sense that you wanted to improve this site for the people that use it. In which case my answer is ban twitter. Make it impossible/illegal to quote a tweet. If someone wants to repeat something said in twitter then make it so that the stupid piece of poo poo needs to take a minute to copy the picture to their imgur or whatever and then reword the tweet before they post it or else just not do it/gently caress off. I mean, that's absolutely on my mind but kinda at the back of it. I'm mostly just kinda broadly interested in what we think about the internet. What it's turned in to. How it's trying to kill us.
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Sep 30, 2021 14:22
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I don't like that, if I want to learn how to do something, what would have been a few paragraphs of text maybe with some illustrative images is now a 20+ minute video. I don't want to watch some guy blather for 20 minutes, comment on other videos he's made, and feature zany recurring characters just to learn something. I also know that I learn much better from text than audio and it's hard to find that anywhere any more. This is probably my single biggest old man gripe about the modern internet that isn't just "our society sucks and the internet reflects that." Even there though, there's reasons for it. Youtube is monetized and Wikipedia isn't. The whole first generation internet was largely built off of a "volunteers having fun together" ethos that's basically vanished today, but it vanished for reasons. The first reason was that it was kinda exploitative because people who aren't the volunteers scooped up all the profit. Random wikipedia editors don't make money off of wikipedia; the guy who owns it, though, he draws a salary. The second reason is that youtube was the only major content host that dove hard into monetization -- that is, specifically, *giving people money* to contribute to the site. If people could get paid to edit wikipedia a lot more people would be editing wikipedia in their spare time. The third reason is that our society is collapsing and people can't afford hobbies any more. Nobody has time to edit wikipedia all day when they're working three jobs during a pandemic to keep from getting evicted. It still irritates me and I've written a fair number of Steam video game guides out of pure spite and frustration when I got sick of watching "like and subscribe!" for the thousandth time. They're good guides -- every steam guide I've ever written has been in the top rated all time for that game. But nobody has ever offered me cash to write video game guides, so eventually I ran out of time for that hobby. At one point I was in the top 1000 rated reviewers on Amazon. They *did* send me free stuff to review for a while. But I can't pay the bills with a free box of packing tape or whatever, so I stopped. The volunteer ethos wasn't sustainable in a capitalistic society like ours where every hour you spend not hustling is an hour you're behind. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 14:27
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Hand Knit posted:I mean, that's absolutely on my mind but kinda at the back of it. I'm mostly just kinda broadly interested in what we think about the internet. What it's turned in to. How it's trying to kill us. My answer is the same. An opinion doesn't need to be a paragraph long or well thought out or intelligent or good but needs to be your own and in your own words, at least. I spend 25% of my time on this site reading twitter whether I like it or not.
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Sep 30, 2021 14:30
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Funky See Funky Do posted:My answer is the same. An opinion doesn't need to be a paragraph long or well thought out or intelligent or good but needs to be your own and in your own words, at least. Yeah I'm definitely sympathetic to the idea. I'm not fond of posts that are just twitter embeds; they're kind of like the new empty quotes. e: "Posts are not retweets. If all I wanted to do was read tweets I'd be on twitter. Or dead."
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Sep 30, 2021 14:33
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the internet has created an entire legion of dudes who try to engage in debate by just saying "By your logic...." at eachother back and forth
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Sep 30, 2021 14:33
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Hand Knit posted:Yeah I'm definitely sympathetic to the idea. I'm not fond of posts that are just twitter embeds; they're kind of like the new empty quotes. If I owned a site like this then I'd experiment. I turn off tweet support for a month. I don't punish people for doing it but I make them do the extra typing. When people complain in QCS I say "I think twitter is a bad influence and I'd don't want to support it" and then I'd see what happens. My hypothesis is that almost everyone would stay and that most users would be happy with that choice. E:They're not even empty quotes because an emptyquote is internal. It's recognizing a person in the community for their contribution to the community. A tweet is just "someone, maybe a real person, said this. What do you think? I didn't say it so don't criticize me, but someone said it. Maybe." Funky See Funky Do fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 14:42
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The internet is such a glut of information that it can be hard to find exactly what you want. I tried searching on youtube for info on how to clone a hard drive. Most of them were not-so-obviously sponsored content that had me download Macrium Reflect and wait for the drive to format before hitting me with a registration fee. I tried watching a video on jamaican beef patties. It was 30 mins long. In the first 5 minutes I had to skip past 6 adverts. Another three minutes went by and a lenghty add for adblocking software started.  A few years ago I went through my list of youtube subscriptions. I had over 30, some from channels I didn't recognise and some that no longer existed. I googled "youtube autosubs" and it turned up a billion results. It was full of how-to guides on how to set up your videos to auto-subscribe random viewers. All just to make some quick money from advertising. It reminds of the nineties, when there were millions of porn sites out there with maybe one or two galleries of images, tons of banner advertisements and a big section at the bottom. The bottom section was just text - the same colour as the background - full of every possible search term for porn you could think of. Each of these sites got a few pennies for everyone who stumbled in and clicked a banner that led to a paysite.
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Sep 30, 2021 14:42
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I can't remember the last time I saw a web page that just stole funny flash animations and reposted them without consent. 
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Sep 30, 2021 14:57
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ikanreed posted:I can't remember the last time I saw a web page that just stole funny flash animations and reposted them without consent. Every once in a blue moon I'll see someone on Facebook get ragingly angry that someone reposted their 5 minute shitpost meme without giving credit but it's not the same
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Sep 30, 2021 15:58
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Hand Knit posted:I find this stuff fascinating and would love to know more, but it probably deserves its own thread. To be fair, a lot of what TikTok does is not any different from other social media apps - they all harvest absurd amounts of data about you. The one thing that is pretty unique about it is that in their privacy policy, they state that they collect your “typing patterns or rhythms” but they do not state why. Keystroke Dynamics are a fairly undiscussed thing, but what makes them notable is that they are effectively personally identifying information; while social media in general anonymizes a lot of the data they harvest and are required by law to store your information without identifying personal info, keystroke dynamics can be used to identify a user across multiple devices without the user ever identifying themself as the same person: https://axbom.com/keystroke-dynamics/ Fun fact, using keystroke dynamics to identify individuals goes all the way back to the 40s during WW2. Google "Fist of the sender" if you're interested - it was a way for US military intelligence to determine the sender of morse code signals based on their typing rhythms. When TikTok was brand new this was particularly scary because it was a social media app explicitly owned and operated by CCP, meaning that by using it everyone was directly giving CCP trackable, identifying information about themselves. It also did some things like send the contents of your clipboard to some central server every few seconds. Luckily our government was able to agree to do one good thing last year and they said that to operate in the US, TikTok would need to create a separate, non-Chinese branch, which they did, so we at least don't need to worry about it being a CCP data harvesting operation - and they made lots of changes to data harvesting and how/what they harvest last year as a result of pressure from the US government. But also they have been expanding their data harvesting again this year and now they collect your biometric information like fingerprints and voiceprints. This is not too long after they settled for $92 million dollars in a groundbreaking lawsuit against them for Illegally harvesting US users' biometric data. The only change they made is that they won't do it for the few states that have laws against gathering biometric data - for the rest of the US it's still on the table. It's really anyone's guess on what all of this "means" but they are actively pushing to harvest more, and more valuable, personal information about their users than other social media platforms, which already harvest a disgusting amount. To my other statement about meaning of words in writing online copy, it's not as interesting as I made it sound and I'm being a little hyperbolic but it is a thing. It's just that when you're writing copy, you're trying to engage with the audience in some deeper, more meaningful way, because that's the best way to influence their decisions. So a lot of research (not scholarly, but like, experiments ran by marketing firms) and a/b tests go in to determing what verbiage can be used that will maximize the range of people that will be swayed by it, and that includes for example understanding how a word sounds to people who don't know the word, how it makes them feel when they hear it without understanding the meaning. The best example I can think of this is not related to online advertising at all, but related to A&W's "1/3 lb burger" which is one of my favorite stories ever about how loving dumb people are so here you go: https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions In the 80s, A&W wanted to compete with McDonalds very successful Quarter Pounder - a burger that had 1/4 lb of beef. So they released the "Third Pounder" - more beef (1/3 lb), the same price as McDonalds' quarter pounder. When it hit the market, it just didn't sell at all. A&W was confused - this is more burger for the same price as McD's, why is no one buying it? So they hired a research firm to look into it, and that research firm ended up conducting a focus group where they got their answers. "Why should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat?" their customers asked. Because they literally thought "Third = 3, Quarter = 4, and 3 is less than 4, so McDonalds is giving us more burger for the same price." Today, the same 1/3lb burger would be named something like the "Quarter Deluxe" instead, because they need verbiage that clearly tells idiots that it's more than a quarter. And that brings us full circle to using the word "quarter" to refer to 1/3 of something. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 17:01
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I was raised on the internet by my parents back in the mid-90s with advice like "make multiple alts, never tie them together" and "don't even tell people what timezone you live in, keep them guessing" and "keep the possibility that everyone is out to get you in the back of your mind" because the internet was a wild frontier of shitposting and bullshit and it was glorious and beautiful. It was a fake world you inserted yourself into whenever you wanted for however long you wanted, as whoever you wanted to be. Now you have underaged people hanging out on the internet advertising their age, state, and what mental disorders they have, posting a livestream of where they've been throughout the day to make it easy to figure out their schedule. Every website encourages you to just use one identity so you're easy to track for corporations and people are fine with it. Everyone's lives is now public. Everyone submits to a paparazzi of their own making. I don't get it.
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Sep 30, 2021 18:32
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Finding other people with your own interests sounds like a great idea when you are just considering building HO scale railroad bridges or taking pictures of pelicans or whatever. One of the worst things about modern society is that there is no longer a single information ecosystem. Not that people with different opinions find different hugboxes to hang out it, but that in many cases people cannot even agree on the most basic facts. This is partly on cable news and AM radio but it's pretty clear that the constant drip feed of "news" on the internet has really ruined a lot of people. I genuinely do not know how we can recover from it as a society without a massive crash of some kind first.
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Sep 30, 2021 18:59
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SYNC YOUR CONTACTS FIND YOUR CONTACTS ADD YOUR CONTACTS CONNECT TO YOUR CONTACTS FOLLOW YOUR CONTACTS SEND THIS TO YOUR CONTACTS SHARE WITH YOUR CONTACTS SYNC YOUR CONTACTS FIND YOUR CONTACTS ADD YOUR CONTACTS CONNECT TO YOUR CONTACTS FOLLOW YOUR CONTACTS SEND THIS TO YOUR CONTACTS SHARE WITH YOUR CONTACTS SYNC YOUR CONTACTS FIND YOUR CONTACTS ADD YOUR CONTACTS CONNECT TO YOUR CONTACTS FOLLOW YOUR CONTACTS SEND THIS TO YOUR CONTACTS SHARE WITH YOUR CONTACTS even porn sites are covered with SHARE THIS AND THAT TO YOUR CONTACTS buttons now I mean come the gently caress on part of the appeal of using all these sites and communities is getting away from all the personal bullshit we deal with in real life
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Sep 30, 2021 20:57
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A small stupid thing I hate about the internet today is 10+ years ago when you saved a file it was pretty descriptive, like carmen_electra08.jpg Now everything is stuff like LiKh7p9.jpg and it pisses me off
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Sep 30, 2021 21:05
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