yotsuben

this user is riddled with disease

graphic designer, video editor, podcaster (the good kind, I swear), and lego-liker

 

updated autopsy report banner
https://cohost.org/aceattorney



nicky
@nicky

in my honest imho, i think people should stop expecting The Algorithm to hand their entire online experience to them. because whatever The Algorithm is, it mostly delivers slop. black box recommendations and For You pages are an absolute scourge

i recommended cohost to someone and they complained a day later that there wasn't anyone to follow and there isn't an app. i told them how to turn the site into an app on their phone and pointed out ways of discovering posts & people. they were like "but why do i have to do all that work". like, idk, that's not really work? maybe you should learn how to seek out the things you care about, and create those things if you can't find them? it doesn't have to be on cohost either! curate your online experience! become immune to slop! this is my imho!


kuraine
@kuraine

thinking about this a lot lately, maybe because i'm old, but having that perspective of where the internet came from really does help me see the path we traveled to get to this state of mind

when the internet was something that had to be activated, like a spell cast across the phone line, it was an act of curiosity. it was a time investment to dial up and call upon the resources available online. whether it was looking something up, browsing a brand page on an AOL keyword, most destinations were informed from outside the internet & invited you in. but that's also why it wasn't "mainstream". if you wanted mainstream unthinking content slurry, you kept the tv on. but even tv used to "end" for the day. even radio used to "end". when the information pipeline was manned by people on every stage of the process, the human element needed to sleep.

algorithms don't need to sleep.

and that process of min-maxing the capitalist gain is generally why we don't sleep anymore, why we don't seek things out for ourselves. because it keeps the number going up if we lose every possible form of downtime. so it becomes a responsibility of the people using the resources available to us to mediate why we're seeking things out in the first place. we'll hook into any bad habit that strikes us as convenient if it means it feels like someone is looking out for us. but they're not. they're only looking out for themselves.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @nicky's post:

This and also I feel like we’re at the point where, with AI slop being cheaper and cheaper to produce you will have to curate your experience even if the website you’re on already has The Slop Page because otherwise you would just see Worse Slop.

I honestly can't think of anything more pathetic than stating outright that you don't know how to find & follow things you enjoy on the internet

I really wish I knew how to convince others that it's worth putting a tiny amount of effort into using the internet. I wish I knew how to convince others that stuff like adblockers were worth using. I wish it was more than just the Computer Touchers who were willing to learn

okay so i believe you on this but i do not understand how someone could exist on this modern internet and not immediately see the value in an adblocker, most pages are more ad than slop by volume

i guess this just shows that even the parts of my friend group that are outside of a bubble are kinda in one

it's been kinda surprising for me to see how quickly people have forgotten how to discover things on the internet on tbh, like you kind of just click on profiles/tags/posts you think look cool or interesting, which will bring up a whole new page of profiles/tags/posts to click on, and so on, and i feel like it really was not that long ago that everywhere on the internet was like that. even here on cohost i've seen some ppl mention how it feels harder to find anything and idk it's just like. you just click links.. if you see a post that looks even mildly interesting to you, you can check out the poster's profile, or explore the tags on the post.. you do the thing that made the internet such a powerful means of communication in the first place, yknow

people understand that much

the problem is that when you log onto cohost for the first time, you don't see any posts. there's no cool or interesting posts for you to click on. you start with a blank slate. you have to go guess at a tag and start searching for them yourself

most other social media sites will start you off with a basic feed of stuff that's popular, and you can just scroll that feed looking for stuff that you find interesting and click on that stuff and go from there

"you have to go guess at a tag and start searching for them yourself" exactly. that's a good thing. my whole point is that it's worth it to expend the tiny amount of effort to curate your own experience

there's no guesswork for the first-time user either, they just pick a topic they're interested in and see what stuff in those tags. if that is somehow too much effort for this kind of user, i guess TikTok is an option. from what i understand, with that app you don't need to think at all. you just Consume

The fundamental problem is that literacy of the Internet (computers in general, really) is in sharp decline due to modern computing methods (tablets and smartphones) because they present primarily tightly controlled and and curated experiences. People raised with this paradigm feel alienated, so they don't want to overcome the hurdle and do what we had to do before.

The issue is so much broader than this or any other site, this is more a microcosm of larger issues.

At least, that's what I believe.

it doesn't help that we've been teaching kids to read wrong for the last decade and went with "young people know about tech intrinsically" as our strategy for teaching kids about computers.

i don't think it's so much about young people's motivations - i learned how to use a computer in computer class, it didn't matter if i wanted to learn or not, it was school. i was lucky enough to have a home computer but no one expected that just passively having one was a good enough education

when computers are intimidating and longform reading is no fun, it's pretty reasonable to want to stick to the apps

the algorithm delivers slop because a large amount of people LIKE that stuff

there are lots of problems with algorithmic stuff, but you can't really take them on without acknowledging the elephant in the room: pretty much every algorithmic recommendation algorithm just shows you stuff a lot of other people like

a lot of people aren't signing up to social media to find things they care about. they're signing up for social media to fill their free time and stave off boredom by scrolling an endless supply of mildly interesting posts/videos/whatever. they're not on these sites to find things that are Important To Them, they're on these sites to kill some time. waste fifteen minutes during their break at work. occupy themselves while their food is cooking. whatever. shit like that

they are not going to put effort into it, because it is not important enough to them for them to put effort into. they're looking for quick entertainment, not a new chore

in reply to @kuraine's post:

I've lately been feeling that maybe it'd be a good idea if I only went on the internet by going on the computer. Goodness knows I've spent the bulk of the last, oh fuck, 23 years or so chatting to people by text and reading their blogs even if the exact protocol and websites have changed. Maybe Twitter was just a bad dream. Facebook certainly was.

I'm coming up on 34 this year and something I think a lot about as I get older is how, at most, maybe people a few years younger than me now are the last ones to remember much about how culture and technology used to be and used to intertwine in the past. I was 17, a senior in high school when the iPhone came out and my initial Japanese learning was largely done before the modern Internet and app ecosystem had coalesced towards what we have now. I remember what it was like to go forage for information and like-minded groups and in some ways, I have trouble sometimes relating to how people even just like a decade younger than me consume the Internet.

I've struggled to articulate to myself what that difference in values is between me and a lot of younger people online and I think what it ultimately comes down to is, I grew up with, more or less like you and OP are saying, the Internet being what you make of it. You chose where to navigate to and for what purpose; it was a lot easier to have a much more personalized relationship with the Internet when the infrastructure was decentralized. That definitely came with drawbacks, but I'm glad to have that perspective and history because it always serves to remind me that what we have now elsewhere isn't a natural progression, that the Internet didn't have to turn out this way.

And I'm not trying to paint with broad strokes, obviously we have plenty of people younger than us who are similarly skeptical and whatnot. But I do have to wonder how "natural" all of this feels to that younger generation who knows nothing but algorithms in the same way they only know a post-9/11 political climate and whatnot. Our generation can't turn back that time, but I do feel it's not imperative of us with sites like these to show there are other ways to be online because otherwise who's left to push back on the direction things have taken? Anybody older than Gen X is generally too old to have been technologically literate enough to use the Internet the way we did; that Internet existed for only a limited period of time and the number of people who can say they were there for it is finite. Where things head from here, I have no clue, but I feel like we need to do what we can within our power to reclaim that culture, if only to keep shining a light on how artificial the rest of the Internet really is.

I remember there used to be a lot of curators and like with blogs they usually linked to other similar blogs. Nobody really curates anymore and the lists i see today are not really my specific niche of interest either.