What to Do About the Junkification of the Internet

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. [The platforms] have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the... See more

In the past, audience members had limited ability to influence what news was covered. But social media changes the equation. “In the modern era,” Klein writes, “a shortcut to newsworthiness is social media virality; if people are already talking about a story or a tweet, that makes it newsworthy almost by definition.”22 It’s a vicious cycle. As pol

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We’ve seen professional media platforms do this on a smaller scale (e.g. Netflix making originals, etc). But to do this at the scale of an open creation platform, such as TikTok or Instagram, platforms won’t be able to rely on humans. They’ll instead need to rely on machines to create AI-generated media, or as my friend Matt Hartman calls it, synth... See more

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

The publication-less internet is an absolute Petri dish of idiotic shit, and for every Discourse Blog or Defector (pretty good, trying our best, really just want to give people good and true things to read) there is a far larger and angrier The Free Press (doing a low-effort 2010 Fox News impression in service of the same general goal of bigotry), ... See more