Digital society sucks, and to a degree modern society in general.
There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities.
Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever.
Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen.
You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void.
The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance.
Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.
1) My first thought would be that such a conversational search UI would never hit the original website, thus drying up monetization for the content creator. Kind of like snippets in current search. Then I realized that there is no "original website", no singular source for the AI answer given. That's even worse. Search is the main traffic controller of the web and now has zero reasons to send any traffic your way. Not only does it not have any reason to send traffic, it simply can't. You can't back trace an AI answer to a (single) source.
2) The implication of the above point may be that for human creators, producing new content for the open web becomes (somewhat) pointless, even in the case where you do not even care to monetize it. An exception is video, for now. You should not expect this change to lead to a drying up of content for AI though. Google/Microsoft will simply resort to making deals with major content platforms. That's where most content is produced anyway.
3) An interesting new problem for Google/Microsoft is the increased accountability regarding correctness. Right now, search results do not have to be correct. You're just showing results produced by other entities. This changes when you confidentially give an answer directly in the search UI though. Now you own the answer, even if this expectation is technically inaccurate. Since GPT3 is often confidentially incorrect, that's a major challenge. And we should hope that this problem remains for a long time, because the moment GPT3 is extremely accurate and correct, we're in a different world entirely.
4) Safety and political correctness is another concern. Google/Microsoft will likely deliver AI that is a little too safe instead of not safe enough. The implication is that instead of being a controller of traffic, it becomes a controller of opinion. Of right think and wrong think. Which may be ever changing and subject to institutional pressure. Combined with point 3, you're no longer a proxy. You're the source of truth and the source of what's right.
5) Some say that the open web is already close to dead thus the already ongoing trend of people resorting into private spaces (Discord, Mastodon, etc) might accelerate. An open web and a closed human web. Even in the closed human web AI-generated content can and will penetrate so there will be attempts to detect it. Which is likely futile, because one can use AI-generated content and then tweak it to make it more human-like.
6) We need legislation ASAP. None of our regulations and laws are designed for what is coming. Do you really want a congressional hearing 10 years from now where a 75-year old asks "So this AI thing, is it like a smart calculator?", after all damage has already been done?
7) We should unite in at least some basic pushback. Stop thinking in individual use cases like AI art, Copilot and GPT3. Think about the broader problem where all of human creation is sucked up for free and without permission, after which all benefits are centralized up to the point of even replacing you. It's a shared, human problem. We're unlikely to stop it but at least don't make it this easy.
See, I was trying to find the most innocent progressive topic as to not derail from my main point. Which is not masks. It's unhinged ideological purity inside bubbles, which soft silences speech. Masks was just an example.
And yet still you manage to label anybody opposing your opinion as children, even before hearing any argument. You're part of the problem and the very reason people go into silent mode and simply stop bothering.
No, I think the effect of "toxic positivity" is found wherever you create a small community, whether that be Reddit, Mastodon, or anything else.
Toxic positivity isn't necessarily about banning, it's rather "soft silencing" within the bubble. Those most ideologically active dominate the network and discourage any type of dissent.
To stick with my mask example. There's absolutely no consensus within progressive circles that mandatory masking should make a comeback. So there should be significant debate even within the progressive bubble. But there is none. Zero. That likely means that a lot of people in the bubble disagree yet are afraid to express that.
I think today it translates into every platform due to the highly polarized political landscape. This sorts people into just 2 buckets, after which each bucket is dominated by radicals or semi-radicals.
That's why I dislike the term "bubble", because it fails to describe the inner working of the bubble. It suggests that it is uniform and consensus-based, whilst instead they are ran by an autocratic elite that "softly" silence dissent. By making dissent costly.
The state of online conversation: 50% of the population is evil. Luckily I'm in the good 50%, which is full of terrible ideas but I can't afford to challenge them.
I think Mastodon has the tendency to grow into the opposite extreme of toxicity: fragility. People as well as instances are very generously blocked, leading to perfectly peaceful bubbles.
Which are not that great. There's almost perfect ideological agreement...but not really. A handful of people dominate conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind.
As an example, on a fairly large Mastodon instance I saw a popular user claiming how we should still wear masks. There were a few dozen replies, all in perfect agreement.
That's truly bizarre, as this is a topic that people have strong opinions on across the entire political landscape. Even amidst just progressives, there's no uniform consensus, granted people are free to speak their minds without repercussions. The fact that there wasn't even a hint of disagreement or nuance I find telling.
So I agree with your point, this too is a type of toxicity, just a different flavor. Fragility, toxic positivity, I'm not sure what to call it, but it's not healthy.
Another fun opposite effect (in comparison to Twitter) to reason about is algorithms and amplification. Mastodon has very little of that which is considered good. It's a more "organic" social network.
Quite a few users will discover though that an organic social network makes the chance of getting engagement on your posts even harder than it already was. Just getting your post seen at all is a challenge, and building somewhat of a following can takes months if not years of purposeful effort. This means that for the typical user, the feeling that you're screaming into the void will be common, leaving the question: why post at all?
I tend to agree with the conclusions of the article but at the same time I think it leaves out a few important factors in comparing the old internet versus today's internet.
First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few years ago.
Second, the mobile revolution. Which leads to a dumbing down of engagement. Before, people would sit behind a PC with a large screen and functional keyboard, enabling deep engagement as seen here on HN. Today, people sit on the toilet, look at a tiny screen with endless content, and any engagement (most never engage at all) is very shallow and lazy: a like, a retweet. It's not a conversation, it's amplification. In the rare case where somebody produces original content (a self-composed tweet), Twitter's format incentivizes hot takes and makes context and nuance impossible or impractical.
Third, amplification. It's a specific choice by Twitter (UX, algorithms) to promote and reward the worst opinions. It's a complete inversion from real life.
Hence, rather than stating that human conversation absolutely does not scale, I'd refine that conclusion. It does not scale in these particular conditions.
We live in a multi-device reality. People expect their notes to sync. If you don't need sync, you might as well use notepad and store .txt files on local disk. Fine by me, but then there's nothing to discuss.
A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Your content is stored and this costs money. Not only is it a recurring cost, it's also a growing cost as content keeps getting added and rarely removed. It's not illogical that a recurring fee is asked.
It's very much possible that a large company subsidizes these costs or runs ads, thereby making it "free". But the costs are still there.
You do have a point about office and image editing programs. A local desktop app in itself has no recurring costs for the company that built it, at least not directly. Still, after market and customer saturation it would mean the companies go bankrupt, as little new revenue comes in.
Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.
You're doing the exact same thing: reverting to instinctive binary positions and name-calling. Throwing away the baby with the bath water. The thing you accuse the original source of, you're mirroring.
Sure enough, there really are people whom dislike minorities altogether for whatever twisted reasons. Awful people, no argument here.
Yet you're looking over a sizable group who have no issue with minorities, they have an issue with equity politics, which flies in the face of equality and is racist and sexist by design. People whom find it incredibly patronizing and insulting to call an entire demographic "marginalized".
Those people are not conservative nor are they racist. We use to call these people progressive. Center to center-left, classic liberalism. Many aren't on board at all with the postmodernist version of progressive politics. Yet they are lumped in with "racists", this is how you keep a culture war going. Just keep doubling down, and keep losing ever more support.
I think there's a neutral technical aspect and a political aspect.
The neutral aspect is that if you have so much money (a surplus) that you start giving it away to secondary causes, you're being misleading. The begging messages clearly imply they're about to run out of money to run things, which seems opposite to reality.
So they should change the tone of the message, and provide more transparency about where the money goes to. It should be a basic donator's right to understand if the money is needed at all, and where it is used for. No matter from which political angle you're coming from.
As for the political angle, to each their own. I'd say most knowledge institutes are progressive and always have been. Importantly, moderately progressive or "classic liberal". Which is quite different from post-modernist, equity, "woke" type of politics. This last category far less embraced, and not just by conservatives.
The situation seems comparable to Mozilla. Many people would gladly donate to support the development of the Firefox browser but not neccessarily want to reward incompetent leaders or fund the running of a "indigenous intersectional BLM feminist blog" that does absolutely fuck-all for anybody.
"Where the complaint does succeed is in showing an intense disgust for the social justice movement. So, don't donate to Wikimedia if you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small amount of money going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-male people being encouraged to (& see themselves as allowed to) participate in science and journalism. Go buy a copy of Encarta."
Thanks for making the debate worse. It's basically "do what I say or you're a racist".
It's far more than 50%. When specifically considering "woke" politics, centrists and moderate progressives reject it too. I'd say it's in the range of 70-90% rejecting.
Pretty much anybody outside California rejects it.
A BIPOC receiving a grant is not the issue, the issue, and what might be considered "woke" is to give the grant because they are BIPOC. That's "equity".
Equity means awarding people based on immutable characteristics and makes every interaction in society a racist/sexist struggle.
Anyway, you may be in favor of it, which is fine. Just know that it's an incredibly unpopular movement that is widely rejected internationally, and also in most developed nations across the political spectrum, minus the far-left.
Even the idea to call said people "marginalized" is insulting.
I'm from the Netherlands, so very much proud of our bicycle culture which only works because it's a fundamental part of our road design and related facilities, like bicycle parking. It's questionable whether you can retrofit this into a city.
Anyway, even in our little bicycle paradise there's a new danger: electrical bicycles. Currently, about 1 in 3 is electrical, and it seems most new ones sold are electrical. They are most of all popular with people 50+ y/o.
Recently I saw an accident happen from the outside security cam of a friend, the incident explaining the danger very well.
A woman in a car is trying to cross a road that intersects with a bicycle lane, so she checks for oncoming cyclists. One does seem to be oncoming in the distance. She then concludes there's plenty of time to cross, makes the move, and finds the cyclists on the hood of her car.
The way she probably read that situation: pretty far away, old guy, slow leg movement. All adding up to a low speed estimate and a high time estimate. That's how all of us have been subconsciously trained for decades.
Until electrical bicycles. The "cyclist" came on about twice as fast as expected. The obvious solution is to watch longer, to monitor speed over time. Yet to effectively get through traffic and not spend forever parked at a crossing, you do need speedy judgement. Also, these e-bikes can accelerate in ways a normal bicycle can't.
Another common dangerous e-bike situation: One passing you unexpectedly when cycling yourself, on a bicycle lane. Normally, just about 2 bicycles fit next to each other, but only barely. You'd normally anticipate such a passing because you can hear one coming behind. Now they seem to come out of nowhere, passing you by an inch at high speed.
My feelings are far less complicated: TDD is a high-discipline approach to software development, and that's why it doesn't work or doesn't get done.
High-discipline meaning, it entirely depends on highly competent developers (able to produce clean code, deep understanding of programming), rigorously disciplined out of pure intrinsic motivation, and even able to do this under peak pressure.
Which is not at all how most software is built today. Specs are shit so you gradually find out what it needs to do. Most coders are bread programmers and I don't mean that in any insulting way. They barely get by getting anything to work. Most projects are under very high time pressure, shit needs to get delivered and as fast as possible. Code being written in such a way that it's not really testable. We think in 2 week sprints which means anything long term is pretty much ignored.
In such an environment, the shortest path is taken. And since updating your tests is also something you can skip, coverage will sink. Bugs escape the test suite and the belief in the point of TDD crumbles. Like a broken window effect.
My point is not against TDD. It's against ivory tower thinking that does not take into account a typical messy real world situation.
I've noticed a major shift in the last decade. We used to think like this, in TDD, in documenting things with UML, in reasoning about design patterns. It feels like we lost it all, as if it's all totally irrelevant now. The paradigm is now hyper speed. Deliver. Fast. In any way you can.
This short-sighted approach leading to long term catastrophe? Not even that seems to matter anymore, as the thing you're working on has the shelf life of fish. It seems to be business as usual to replace everything in about 3-5 years.
There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities.
Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever.
Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen.
You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void.
The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance.
Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.