What to Do About the Junkification of the Internet
Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy i... See more
James Vincent • AI Is Killing the Old Web, and the New Web Struggles to Be Born
To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
the internet, as we have known it, has evolved from a quaint, quirky place to a social utopia, and then to an algorithmic reality. In this reality, the primary task of these platforms is not about idealism or even entertainment — it is about extracting as much revenue as possible from human vanity, avarice, and narcissism.
Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It.
Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.
Social networks have become “the web” for many pe... See more
Social networks have become “the web” for many pe... See more
Besides the infinite social media maelstrom1 and the continuously growing commercialization of the web2, we will soon have to deal with an avalanche of AI-generated content3 as well. The corners of the internet cultivated by individuals are important for its vitality and may even become critical to the very survival of a humane online ecosystem. Ot... See more
lucasdidthis
The internet as we know it is quietly/rapidly changing—and not necessarily for the better. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quietly taking over much of the digital world, and soon, we may find ourselves living in a reality where almost everything we see online is artificially generated.
Jerry • AI Is Quietly Destroying the Internet!
Unlike an HTML website where you can right click on the background and select “View Page Source” to review every creative decision, what we see on social media is powered by vastly complex “black box” algorithms. For New Yorker contributing editor Kyle Chayka, the appeal of the early-internet aesthetic is its contrast with the “repetitive tem... See more