this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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The internet is fine.
Listen. The era of algorithms and automated aggregators and what not feeding you endless interesting content is over. Before that we read blogs, we shared them on Usenet and IRC, we had webrings. We engaged in communities and the content we were exposed to was human curated. That is coming back. If we can quit it with the hackernews bot spam on Lemmy, it can be one of those places. You need to find niche forums that interest you that are invite only and start talking to people. The future of the internet is human.
Algorithm created curation isn't necessarily bad. It's just not great when it's designed to increase engagement, rather than have the most liked, most interesting or best written content rise to the top. When engagement is the most important metric, instead we get lies, click bait and emotive content rising to the top.
Enragement is hard to distinguish from engagement and most creators of algorithms don’t seem to particularly care about the difference. Some creators DO know the difference and still choose the dark side. It’s shitheads all the way down.
I'd say it's more the problem that if you have any system, someone will try to game the system and succeed eventually. There's no metric for objectively good objective quality that we can measure. Most liked? Use bots or use the number of likes as a goal where you'll do a silly thing. Most interesting? That's completely subjective and varied, the only real way to use that would be to track the individuals and serve "things that interest them." Best written? I don't know enough about writing to appreciate what's good and isn't and most people don't either as long as it's good enough and appeals to them.
See also SEO. Or marketing in general I guess.
In theory, you have a better widget so you want to get it to the top of the relevant search results. In practice.... 10,000 people trying to make money off a lemon pie recipe create a hellscape of mostly indistinguishable garbage that technically fits the description.
Renting a VPS was one of my best internet decisions TBH. I now have exactly this - my own website, XMPP server and an IRC bouncer) IRC forever, seriously.