[twodave]

Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.

[saadn92]

We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.

[zerobees]

The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.

We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.

And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.

[swed420]

> The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.

Only a subset. HN is not a monolith.

[not_a_bot_4sho]

This is uncomfortably true.

[trumpdong]

The most powerful force in the universe is not gravity, or the strong nuclear force - it's the prisoner's dilemma.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you could have avoided this. If you didn't, any one of the other ten million people would. You didn't choose for it to happen, you chose to be the one who got the money from it happening.

[switchbak]

They're also the ones that won't let their kids anywhere near the things.

That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.

I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Not all problems have technical solutions.

We need a national conversation (which we seem to be having) about the corrosive nature of these algos.

I personally think they should be liable for much more than they are under section 230.

[vitally3643]

Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.

But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.

[happosai]

As far as I see the "problem" with mastodon is the lack of addiction mechanics. The first time someone has an negative mastodon interaction, the close the app and because it isn't that addictive, they don't come back.

Meanwhile on Facebook people get angry every day on something they see on the feed yet come back in hour "just in case the are is something interesting this time"

[trumpdong]

The problem with mastodon is that people think it's mastodon dot social.

[swed420]

> We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.

This is a good start for brainstorming:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

[intended]

Far too much money in tech traces its roots to ad tech.

You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.

There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.

Incentives make the world go round.

[sph]

I’d rather ask the Amish how can we fix the internet than a bunch of Bay Area VCs and FAANG employees.

[keybored]

Don’t listen to the defeatists. This is like post-modernism. Post-modernism as a phenonemena is a very real thing, studied and documented extensively, critiqued extensively. And when you read about it it seems hopeless. Like everything is destined to be a pastiche. But once you stop reading about it you realize that there is no Matrix that you’re trapped in. The biggest Matrix is your own mind. People had problems disciplining their minds a millenium ago. They do today as well. It’s marginally more difficult today, yes. But smart phones are just addictive like bad food. Not like a ahrd drug.

We also, thankfully, don’t need a clique of very smart people to save us. We’re all in this together. (Except the psychopaths wanting to enslave us.)

[wuliwong]

I am going to push back without entirely disagreeing. Most of the people online are definitely caught in this social media as cable tv thing. But the number of people using the internet back in the early days is probably similar or even smaller than the number of people today that use niche areas of the internet, niches that still have that 'playground' experience and much less corporate overwatch control. Maybe?

[twodave]

There's a perspective by which you aren't wrong, and yet everything about how we interact with the Internet has changed in the last decade or so. Because (to quote School of Rock) the world is run by the man.

[squidsoup]

Capitalism subsumes all culture, even counter culture, destroys its essence and commodifies it.

[BLKNSLVR]

Well said.

I think the only reason I remain staunchly independent is because I've never found anything that has had enough common ground with enough people to allow me to profit (to any degree whatsoever) in such a way as to corrupt the core of "me". Oddly I find that the less my venn diagram overlaps with others, the more I like my venn diagram and the more committed I am to it. If other people start agreeing with me, I tend to question where I might be wrong.

[dijksterhuis]

this made me think of humdog’s pandora’s vox https://gist.github.com/kolber/2131643