the end of the legacy internet

But despite being “empty calories,” junk info still tastes delicious. Since your dopamine pathways can't distinguish between useful and useless info, consuming junk info gives you the satisfaction of feeling like you're learning—it offers you the sensation of mental nourishment—even though all you're really doing is shoving virtual popcorn into you... See more

A study by researchers in Germany, published earlier this year, also confirms this. After analysing the highest-ranked pages for several product review search terms on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, the team found that many top results aren’t only low-quality, mass-produced information — they’re often just spam .

we’ve turned everything in life into a giant popularity contest–everything you say, everything you experience, everything you see, and even everything you feel–is a product of a giant worldwide counter of likes and follows. It’s a planet-wide exercise in objective convergence, a giant narcissism amplifier that cynically assumes that competing for m... See more

In a world awash with information and eye candy, “social gaming” is rapidly evolving as the largest existential threat to legacy media’s claim on engaged consumer attention. Trust and manipulation issues are also causing people to look beyond incumbent social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

To drive that engagement, media companies in all industries have turned to volume at all costs — quantity over quality. Throw enough shit at the wall, and something will stick until eventually it too doesn’t, and it’ll get canceled before it concludes

Step back from the online cacophony and immerse ourselves in content longer than 280 characters or a seven-second TikTok video.

Last year, Medium deleted and removed one million spam posts from your feeds every month. Last month we removed nearly ten million. That’s a deluge of digitally-assembled nonsense that is hitting every part of the internet.

Han diagnosed what he called “the violence of positivity,” deriving from “overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication.” We are so stimulated, chiefly by the Internet, that we paradoxically cannot feel or comprehend much of anything.