What to Do About the Junkification of the Internet
Kids will not believe me when I say this, but people didn’t always absorb their “content” by way of mysterious algorithmic black magic on endlessly-scrolling crack feeds. We used to type web addresses into our browsers, and actually visit our favorite sites. This, going to “www dot college shitpost dot com” or whatever, was itself considered a radi
... See moreMany things in modernity are brain dead, but I can’t think of anything worse than the short form dystopias of TikTok and Instagram. They’re materially making people dumber, breeding addict behavior (particularly in the young) and ultimately ruining the lives of normies. It’s depressing to think about the countless kids who might have started garage... See more
Adam Singer • TikTok and Instagram are intellectual poison
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
New_ Public • 💾 Why we’re nostalgic for the early web
The internet as we know it today reliably brings out the worst in us. Our platforms incentivize the shallow and new, and our algorithms amplify outrage and despair. The result is an information landscape that keeps us fearful, hopeless, disconnected. It's like a virus that keeps humanity trapped in a destructive emotional state, keeping us at war w... See more
Sari Azout • A year in review
social media has created a mass ability to publish images and curate them. On Tumblr and Pinterest and Are.na, you can group images into categories and comment on them. Through cheaper, consumer-grade media production tools, ideas once restricted to the underground or the zine now have glossy indie magazines, self-burnt mixtapes, and dozens of dedi
... See moreToby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
As social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram grow larger, they skew disproportionately toward supernodes—celebrity, meme and business accounts.