Fediverse

You're not wrong.

The biggest caveat I'd have is that social media with a friction point is still bad. The negative effects of the whole thing are fundamental to the types of interactions it fosters. Even purely direct messaging applications can and will generate a lot of the same results.

And I would even argue there was no Web 1.0. Back in the webring days I was already in IRC and Usenet was a thing. The only reason it seems healthier from a distance is that fewer people were doing it. Get back to that tech with the same user counts we have now and you have the exact same thing. Just with more ASCII art and fewer AI filters, I guess.

Sherry Turkle’s book “Life on the Screen” was an amazing read back in 1997

The blurb:

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity—as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people’s experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.

A good look at the sociology and psychology of the early internet and how it has potential to impact in both positive and negative ways.

Oh, man it's been ages. I'm talking being in high school and having teachers talk to me about this. And then being in uni and having it be a thing people argued about.

I do not have any of the papers on hand or even remember the authors or names. The idea that algorithmic searches would create a bubble of self-selected media and erode a sense of shared reality isn't new, though. We're talking mid-90s here. People were arguing this about Altavista.

I wasn't around back then, but people like Oscar Gandy and Dan Schiller were open critics of personal data and centralization. Maybe that gives you a good lead.

Thanks, those are awesome! I'll be adding my own site to both

Those are great links. Thanks for posting them! Gonna give them a look.

Perhaps all the above could be summed up by “Capitalist Greed”…??? 🤡 🖕

No. It's can't. And you're actively hurting your efforts by attaching high school edgelord bullshit to it.

Corruption has been a seriously problem everywhere, forever, and does not care one bit what words the ruling party uses to express themselves. None of what is happening right now is restricted to nations which call themselves capitalist.

As great as it would've been to have Python on the Web instead of JS I don't think that would've gone well when the Python foundation decided to make Python 3 incompatible with Python 2. That change already broke a lot of shit (Kodi addons never quite recovered from that) and I remember many people excusing it, but if websites ran on it, that wouldn't have been inconvenient, it would've been far more devastating.

Still not the technology at fault. Webapps for example are a good innovation. But it's used for evil as well.

Sky ad technology can be developed out of the good of someone's heart. Maybe to show emergency alerts quickly. Disaster warnings. But then, it gets in the wrong hands.

We could say similar stuff about the internet. I don't think Tim Berner's Lee had bad intentions when founding the World Wide Web. It's a double edged sword. Same has happened with a lot. I even believe that God's sacrifice on the cross- an act of perfect love for all humanity- has been misused to control, manipulate and abuse. The guy who created dynamite wanted it to be used for safer mining practices, not a weapon. Many things we make as humans seems to be invented for good, but used for evil

Internet advertising wasn't initially that bad either. People would pay to have a button for their site to appear on another page. Or a video to play on a streaming site. Then someone thinks "let's actually make more relevant ads appear. This video is about videogames, let's show a videogame ad." Then: "We can see what videos this user likes, so we can get an idea that they like videogames, so let's show them videogame ads, even on other videos". And it eventually morphed into "We can see this user visited this videogame shop 1 month ago thanks to our other maps service. Let's show them adverts for that shop's sale". It's just crazy.

Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it's going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it's not financial gain they're after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it's to hide something else they're doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.

The bots and scrapers are most definitely going after anything and everything - I’ve got about 10+ bots trying to scrape my site every day according to my logs. Quite honestly it shocked me considering I do zero SEO and it’s mostly random shit on my site.

There’s stuff being developed - ai robots blocklists, ai tar pits, poisoning the images and other media.

It’s a pita to implement a lot of this however, just for a small personal site.