The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.
It’s the normie trap. We made the mistake of letting normies in on our Internet and now we try to contain them on Facebook because they have ruined the Internet.
It seems like the Internet has allowed them to band together to reinforce and validate each other’s stupidity. I think they’re far bolder than before but I’m willing to change my mind.
Well mostly it comes from my memories of going to the pub before internet adoption was wide spread, Idiots were always the majority but you couldn’t prove them wrong and it was difficult to find anyone that would dare express anything but the dumbest groupthink opinion. Like even as late as the start of the Iraq war the level of discourse was unimaginably dumb even compared to your average Facebook group today.
It’s kinda strange, the Eternal September was before my time and now we have whole generations of even tech-affine people who never heard of usenet. Which btw just like email pre-dates the internet.
Email predates WWW, it’s fuzzier to determine if email is older than packet routed internet because both standards evolved in parallel so you have to pick and choose what counts on each end. First use of @ or creation of SMTP? First network with 3+ organizations or creation of TCP?
It’s the normie trap. We made the mistake of letting normies in on our Internet and now we try to contain them on Facebook because they have ruined the Internet.
Too few people realize this is actually the source of all the world’s current problems. We never, ever should have let the normies on here.
They were even worse before the internet, it’s hard to deal with but this isn’t even close to as bad as humanity has been.
Why do you think they were worse before?
It seems like the Internet has allowed them to band together to reinforce and validate each other’s stupidity. I think they’re far bolder than before but I’m willing to change my mind.
Well mostly it comes from my memories of going to the pub before internet adoption was wide spread, Idiots were always the majority but you couldn’t prove them wrong and it was difficult to find anyone that would dare express anything but the dumbest groupthink opinion. Like even as late as the start of the Iraq war the level of discourse was unimaginably dumb even compared to your average Facebook group today.
Eternal September
It’s kinda strange, the Eternal September was before my time and now we have whole generations of even tech-affine people who never heard of usenet. Which btw just like email pre-dates the internet.
Email predates WWW, it’s fuzzier to determine if email is older than packet routed internet because both standards evolved in parallel so you have to pick and choose what counts on each end. First use of @ or creation of SMTP? First network with 3+ organizations or creation of TCP?
I’d actually date it back to UUCP and BBSes exchanging batches of messages once a day or so. The days of routing by bang path.