It’s not unreasonable to percieve the WWW for the past 20 years, definitely 10 years, to basically being a handful of website with 90% of the users.
I for one miss the smaller internet of days past, but I’ve always assumed I was in the minority here, as most of my peers don’t seem to care about everything being on Facebook these days.
However, as AI slop overruns these platforms, I’ve noticed increased interest in alternatives. As each major platform gets slopified, the sites and communities that are too small to warrant much interest from bots become more lucrative.
And as for the ones who are fine with the slop feeds who think what they’re seeing is actually real, I guess we’re not losing much of value if they stay with InstaFaceTwitterTok
Smaller communities, where you actually know the screen names of a lot of the active users, are much higher quality in terms of actual conversation.
On Reddit, for example, you’re rarely talking to anybody in specific, just yelling into the void. This is painfully obvious if you ever try to engage someone who only exists on commercial social media. Their ability to have a conversation or entertain another point of view is almost non-existent. Their comments read more like they were written to chase upvotes than in an actual attempt to engage with the human on the other side of the conversation.
The influencer-driven obsession with views/likes/subscribers makes people think that small communities (like this one) are somehow worse. That’s just not true, as long as your goal is more ‘social’ and less ‘media’.
Well i think piefed is a nice example of this - its nice to be here as before, when I used reddit and had an account, if i wanted to get into the conversation I had to be among the 1st commenters to be seen at all. Idk if its filled with bots or just so many people, but its really nice to be among the few and not the many
I went to see bluesky when people started boycotting social medias and it seemed to be full of bot posts instantly
I enjoy the quality over quantity as well. Came from Reddit 3 years ago and seen waves of users come and go. The people that stayed helped build this place. It’s slower and more quiet here, not so much driven by attention. Way better for actual conversations.
went to see bluesky when people started boycotting social medias and it seemed to be full of bot posts instantly
We don’t have bots yet because we’re still small. But if we continue to grow (which would be a good thing imo, less people on big tech) then we will eventually have to deal with bots too. What’s the fediverse solution to that? Is it just manually reviewing account creation requests by server mods? That doesn’t seem like a solution that scales well.
The bots are already on the fediverse. The difference is, the admin to user ratio on the fediverse is much better, so they get identified and removed within a day or two, rather than spamming for weeks or months
Also admins who want the best for their instances rather than having to answer to a mega corporation
I know, its going to get worse. But i figured ill try to enjoy this platform as much as i can while this is still the case. I do hope that they manage to get on top of the bots, somehow
For some reason, Piefed reminds me of the forums that still were very active like +10 years ago and thats what i like most about this place
Not only AI slop, but general enshittification of the big platforms could be part of this.
I for one miss the smaller internet of days past, but I’ve always assumed I was in the minority here
No idea how many we are (I’m not much into tracking users online, so I also don’t want to know how many we are ;) but I can assure you are not alone, no matter how few or how many of us there is :)
Also that Web is still there, and alive. Apparently, it’s just too much to ask to those many people that are used to mega-corp owned walled gardens to go have look on the other side of the fence.
However, as AI slop overruns these platforms, I’ve noticed increased interest in alternatives.
AI is dumb but keep in mind it improves at an incredible pace. Those mega-corps don’t invest billions in it just to make it look nicer, nor to please shareholders (go have a look at how Amazon was hammered for announcing its next round of AI investments). When it starts getting less stupid, AI will most likely regain whatever fraction of those users it… deceived.
Imho, the small web should not be offered to the public as an alternative to an AI-filled Web, but as plain and simple human-centric that is not corporate-owned. My own crappy part of that small Web is also AI free, and will most likely remain so, but it’s out of sheer habit (I’ve posting online since the late early 90s without any AI-crutch) what matters to me is that it is independent (and add-free and tracking-free) ;)
Spot on.
So then should we all be building and running AI slop agents on the big platforms? A collective organizing this properly might be useful.
The only downside is normies vote in elections and even if they eventually understand that JPEGs aren’t real life, they will lobby increasingly intrusive governments to ban the internet outright before they ever consider that other websites exist or even just go back to their IRL bubbles to larp the noble savage fallacy and let us all be in peace like before.
They’ve done it with drugs, they’ve even done it with vaping in what are otherwise considered first world democratic countries, they’re doing it with porn and fucking Imgur, they do it with sugar and they do it with salt and they’ll sure as hell do it with the internet and those without self control will be the end of us all and all we’ll have left is the man on TV telling us that all is well, and our eyes are fooling us as always is all, just like it was before.
But I hope I’m wrong.
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