[TFNA]

> People crave human interaction with like minded individuals

I don’t think they crave it enough to make a difference. Even before AI slop, Reddit had made successive changes that led to much less of a feeling of interaction with real, authentic humans who could become your buddies. The UI de-emphasized usernames and hid the sidebars where subreddits could have their own distinct community atmosphere. I hear that now on comment threads, Reddit will even hide a decent number of posts from other users, so that a poster may well be talking into the void.

It is on old-school fora that one can get a sense of actual interaction: with avatars and other personalized touches it’s easy to gradually learn who is who, and there is a culture of longform text where you can actually get a sense of other people’s personalities. But how many people under the age of 35 or 40 are joining those fora that survive? Give people a choice, and it turns out they prefer the dopamine hits of engagement-maximizing commercial platforms, and the smartphone as the default (or sole) interface to the internet with all the death of nuance that spells.

[alaudet]

Some definitely enjoy the dopamine hits and get addicted to the doom scrolling. Maybe I am just too old to understand it and the internet is passing me by. Some of us still like conversations like this. Real conversation in a respectful manner even when we question each others viewpoints. The old internet is still there in some places and I'll continue hanging out there as long as it does. While I have great friends in real life, not that many of them are old tech nerds, so the internet is really the only place to talk to like minded people.