spector
The colloquial use of "AI" is basically the Hollywood concept of a conscious computer. Nobody knows about AI as it's used in computer science industry. Nor does it matter in regular discourse. In this sense it's not AI. It's a disservice to lead the on laypeople to believe it's something it's not.
I don't rule it out. The prior era of "reddit alternatives" in the Voat era was quickly overrun too even though they were very small. The key to the internet has always been first mover advantage. If they have enough power to manipulate the top sites, it would take very little to hedge bets on budding platforms. They risk losing their advantage if a replacement platform establishes itself without them. That's pretty much the whole history of modern tech. To actively seek and snuff out your competitors.
They've been increasing the ad load the whole time. The most I've seen so far is 5 ads. Streaming will return to broadcast TV convention sooner than people think probably. 15 minutes of ads per hour.
It's in its afterlife phase right now. Much of the comment sections on any given subreddit are full of newbies using colloquialisms from other platforms. e.g. Users call subreddits "groups" which I think originates from Facebook. Or users trying to "bump" posts. There's a lot of signs that the core userbases are gone.
It's predicated on baby boomers not having hard times. There's no basis in reality. Not unless one were to believe baby boomers are all predominantly white upper middle class. Not to mention one must believe history was all sunshine and rainbows until their generation (millennial/zoomer/whatever) came into existence.
Do they really think people just walked right out of high school into wealth from the career factory? This is basically the privileged upper class. Which is the top percentage of their generation. Guess what? Everyone else had it hard!
So much of current day pop culture "boomer bad" stuff is based on these stupid notions. I wonder how people are going to rationalize when baby boomers are all dead and the class war still exists. I think some younger people are in for some serious cognitive dissonance ahead.
Apart from people parroting these things. Those who actually have those well off parents are admitting their own privilege. The parrots are too entranced to realize they're worshiping their own oppressors. The upper class. They don't know they are the cannon fodder in the cycle of hard times, revolution, and renewal.
Nothing happened. It was always like this. Geeks got unduly put on a pedestal. They got a reputation that was never earned. They're not any different than your typical psychopath executive.
I grew up in a town where a lot of these types of guys have become multimillionaires since 2010s tech boom. One person manages some hundreds of millions of dollars AI investment portfolio. That was before the GPT explosion. I have no idea how big they are now but I wouldn't be surprised if it's billions.
Growing up they were almost all psychopathic. Lying, cheating, backstabbing type of people. Nothing like the timid altruistic geek that pop culture proliferates. The more normal people did not go into tech. The actual timid types have had modest middle class careers in tech.
It wasn't hard to foresee. We knew these kind of things could happen. The internet used to be very out spoken about it. That ethos is long gone. What's equally disappointing is tech nerds selling out for bigger paychecks.