A bit tangential, but it's interesting to see comments like "we should start hosting our own websites". We were discussing it with my friends, and it seems like there was a significant changes to what is considered as "cool" in terms of social validation. I understand that I'm dumbing it down right now, but it's not just AI that contributes to it. It's definitely accelerating this feeling though.

In early 2010s when Instagram, Twitter, Facebook started getting big, all the websites and apps had this process of discovery that you had to go through to make it fun for yourself. It obviously turned some people off of it, and made the onboarding a bit harder, but you needed to follow some people, send some friend requests, and in the end you would mostly see things you've actively wanted to see. Even when the algorithms started sorting the timelines, it would still be (mostly) within the things you've chosen to see. Even Youtube's recommendation algorithm was pretty simple, and it would suggest extremely similar videos.

I think it changed around 2016, when the algorithms started trying to determine what you like, based on your interaction with other things, rather than your explicit action of saying "i want stuff from this person/channel/etc.". I'm sure a significant chunk of us have worked on similar algorithms, so you get the gist of it. But this change resulted in users getting attention from the global audience (because in order for algo to detect what you like, it has to throw in suggestions from everywhere).

I get that forums have existed for decades, and people were getting Reddit karma since 2000s, but it was still more deliberate action when you wanted to see something. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram changed the entire playing field in the last 6 years or so, where your real life "social score" didn't have to be depend on whom you know in real world for anyone. It translates into - you can generate posts, content, whatever you wanna call it, for everyone rather than actively getting someone's attention. Like, going viral on YouTube was a big thing at some point. There's some ongoing meme-like comments saying "you would be invited to Ellen's show in 2010", which is kinda true because breaking out of the "only seen by people whom you know" box was extremely rare.

Well, now, everyone, technically has a chance, which incentivizes people to constantly push out content. It doesn't matter, if you're doing it for just social media clout, or financial motives, and etc. It's just possible for something to go "big", albeit for minuscule benefits from it. So there's constant churn of... content. And now AI is just making it even simpler to create such content. But again, resulting in even further decrease of social importance of such pictures/videos/texts.

I understand there's always a group of people that "write/create/paint for themselves", which I understand. I'm on a similar boat. But the if majority of creators have different incentives, the platforms will cater for them. And in this case, platform is the whole Internet, and incentives are "financial, and seeking global attention". Right now, it takes about a minute to create a video and post it on any of the websites, which was basically impossible back in the day. That barrier of entry, combined with one's deliberate discovery what, I think, was making the internet look more fun.

I'm not touching the subject of ad-infestation in every corner, and it definitely accelerated the downward spiral of average quality of content. But in the end, I blame ourselves for choosing this path, because we could've put pressure on global-algorithms of YouTube, TikTok, and etc. We chose to not to do so, because, well, it still gives us dopamine hits.