A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
The wild internet never went away. It's just that "nobody" cares to use it.
Renting a webspace and putting up some random HTMLs or PHPs hasn't gotten more difficult. And some people do it too. You can still just put up a phpbb on a free webhoster. Many of the 20+ year old websites & forums are still around.
The corporate web has won based on convenience, appeal and psychologic trickery not by killing off the old web.
And in my opinion, socialist governments should take advantage of this new centralized structure and force corpos to invite wild culture into these large structures
What is wild culture? And in what sense is it unwelcome in social media?
Wild culture in this case means the culture of the internet that was present before the Adpocalypse, where you could do things that are now deemed "brand-unsafe" without risking your livelihood
If you don't make your money as the online equivalent of a walking billboard you don't really have to worry about that.
Could you give an example of this brand-unsafe behavior? I meant to ask before, but I'm still unclear reading through how the thread has progressed on what "wild culture" means.
You are asking why a Chinese corpo site looks and feels like a corpo site...?
Why is that desirable? Why would you want bad actors to have free reign of your internet?
Define "bad actor"
Fascists, pedophiles, scammers, stalkers etc.
I don't, but I don't see how a rewilded internet would let them have more free reign than they have now. I mean look at fascists on X, pedos on Roblox, etc. Xitter and Roblox are far removed from the "wild" platforms of the 00s-10s, especially considering Roblox's new ID verify shtick that actually makes it harder to catch predators because now predators can just pretend to be kids and now their messages will be hidden from well-meaning adults who can report. Tangent aside, the "taming" of the Internet that started with the Adpocalypse was not targeted at these groups. It was targeted at creators who were trying to make a livelihood but said things that went against corporate PR. This was a move orchestrated by corpos against small creators because corpos feared they wouldn't profit as much if they platformed brand-unsafe creators. The Adpocalypse would not have happened under later-stage socialism because the DotP would have recognized the contribution and upheld their right to make a livelihood "from each according to their ability, to each according to their labor".
I'm a bit confused. As I understand it, your post is about large socialist platforms vs decentralized socialist platforms. Your response here now compares decentralized platforms with large capitalist platforms. How does the latter relate to the former?
It's not about the size of the platform but how it's managed. When I am referring to a "tame" internet, I don't mean centralization per se, but the trend towards things like ID verification, demonetization, etc. If I'm not mistaken, Chinese platforms are stricter on this than their Western counterparts (at least how they used to be before ID age verification is getting shoved down everyone's throats). I don't think socialist China ever had an era of a "wild" internet, correct me if I'm wrong.
I hate to revive an old thread, but I want to at least provide you with a response.
You're probably right that China never had the type of internet that you're describing. My original point still stands though. What are we comparing here? From what I understand from the discussion, your gripes about the modern internet stem from the push for monetization and de-anonymization. I would argue that both are large issues in a capitalist society but not the same in a socialist one. I don't care of a fascist gets deplatformed from Douyin or if a Taiwanese separatist gets outed on XiaoHongShu.
This sort of stuff has to happen organically in my opinion. What the state can do is facilitate this kind of internet by providing people with free hosting for example. The tools for this already exist, I'd argue the Fediverse model is the perfect way to do this. The problem the original internet had was discoverability. If you had your blog, then people would have to find it through web rings or word of mouth. With the ActivityPub, you get organic propagation of content through the network. In my opinion, that's the missing piece.
The two barriers that exist right now are hosting costs and technical know how to maintain your own server. And that's the sort of thing that could be subsidized by the state. I think it would be absolutely fantastic if China or Vietnam gave everyone an option to spin up a personal site that was federated, and people could just do whatever there.
yes, we don't even provide people with accessible computer skill lessons, if you don't know how to use a computer you're seen as deficient and it's your fault, same as with using the internet and building something in it, the only solutions is a service you have to pay for.
And sure some people are gonna be altruistic and reject profit motives, but guess what happens when that person has a life crisis and suddenly needs f.ex a ton of money to pay for a loved ones medical bills. If you're lucky enough to have had the opportunity to develop a sizeable amount of recognition, perhaps you can rely on charity to solve your issues, which you're still just off-loading the problem on other people. (I'm not saying it's anyone's individual fault here, but that's what charity is under capitalism) so you have these deeply, deeply ingrained for-profit incentives to enshittify everything.
It's also why discoverability is so selective and difficult. If you let people just talk about what they're working on you're gonna be flooded by for-profit seeking individuals that only care about the money. Lots of people say how AI made the internet so "fake and inauthentic" and I'm like yeah it's accelerated the fall maybe, but since when have we been authentic lol? Those were the exceptions.
Very much agree, and have exact same view on the whole AI hysteria. Slop has been with us for a very long time already. In fact, I'd argue that a much better way to decide whether something is slop or not is by focusing on its purpose rather than the medium. Any piece of advertisement is inherently slop, even if it was painted by artisans using oils on canvas. It exists for the sole reason to convince you to buy something.
Do you think AI hysteria is even a real phenomenon or is it something that Radical Liberals are orchestrating and being really loud about? I think the Westerm internet is so far removed from reality, but so are RadLibs, the petty bourgeoise, so ironically it's a pretty accurate representation of how they actually feel like. It's just that they're like 1% of the world population amplified by bots, temporarily disadvantaged and the rightists who engage with them in keyboard wars.
I remember the point in my life where I taught that if I try to fit in and secure material gains I'd be able to turn against the system when I'm older. If it wasn't for the liberals who conditioned me relentlessly into taking the "Higher Road" and their empty promises which I foolishly fell for, maybe I would have, but it's pointless to blame my past self now. It's just scary how insidious their propaganda has been. But that has been their purpose.
I definitely think it's the latter, because vast majority of people don't really think about AI at all. It's exactly as you say, there's just an online bubble where people are eager to signal group membership to each other, and they just rally around talking about how much they hate AI. I also think there are a bunch of grifters using this as a low hanging fruit to grow their subscribers.
And breaking out of the liberal mainstream is no small achievement. We're all products of our environment, and when everybody holds common beliefs around you, the process of questioning that is not easy. You often feel like you're the one taking crazy pills when you start discarding mainstream beliefs. Learning is a continuous process, we all hold incorrect ideas in our heads, and there's nothing wrong with that. The key is developing the ability to introspect, to self criticize, and to grow your understanding.
but since when have we been authentic lol? Those were the exceptions.
Yeah I remember early youtube for example. Early youtube was more of a "doing it because you want to make something fun and put it out there" to an extent. But some of it, especially as it grew, was "appearing to be doing it because you want to make something fun and put it out there but there's actually a company like Maker Studios behind you that you don't call attention to and you act like it's all you anyway (probably because that sells better)". Then there was shit like all the "prank" channels that would put on this show like they were pranking people in real life and eventually it came out that most of them were staged. Slowly, youtube morphed into being more openly a place where people were trying to make money off of it, but it was already being that with a mask on for a long time prior. When Patreon came along, it more enabled people to turn the stuff into an actually independent "small business", as opposed to being on contract with a corporation, formalizing the idea of the platform as one to make money off of while trying to retain some semblance of the quirky individual image.
But it was never very authentic. Maybe more so in the very early days before monetization was well-established, but as soon as people could be a youtube partner and make money off of videos, that was the beginning of the end of "quirky authenticity", instead morphing it into something more like reality TV that is presented as actually real to a (largely in those days) audience of kids who are not wise enough to tell the difference.
Imagine the AES federation...
Yeah, that would be incredible to see.
'the internet' in the west was created by the us govt/military. china has the 'great firewall' for good reason, 'the internet' can you be used as a propaganda weapon in cyber warfare
Why would they do that
I don't think it's possible to rewild the internet. Part of what made the early internet as it was, was the novelty of the technology. It was new to everyone as well as being largely unregulated, no one knew what it could do and everything was an experiment.
Now people have much different expectations, the internet is infrastructure and the services it can potentially offer are unrivaled. There is merit to a wild west free-for-all and we've seen the good and bad that produces. What many would argue today (imo) is that there's infinitely more merit to having governmental services accessible from anywhere, from having moderated & reasoned discussion areas, and to have any and all bad actors suppressed in the 'digital town hall' we all love hanging out in.
I do think it is very much possible to rewild the internet. Like I said, rewilding isn't inherently about centralization/decentralization but how it's managed. You can, in fact, have a centralized "wild" platform, which is more feasible than returning to decentralization. A centralized "wild" platform under socialism would look similar to pre-Adpocalypse YouTube, except that the rules are decided upon democratically by creators and it would be much larger. This would ensure the robustness that did not exist with the original "wild" platform as well as no longer make the creators beholden to the profit motive that made the internet "tame."
Would a sufficiently developed socialist government see this as desirable? Would pre-Adpocalypse youtube 'gel' well next to the socialist government's social media, or online banking infrastructure? & is there anything actually all that vital about the content/culture produced around this time?
I would argue that yes, it would. This kind of content is a genuine form of self-expression. There is something actually all that vital about the content/culture produced at that time and that is that it is a true reflection of society when not forced to suck up to corporations.
I very much agree, the kind of content we had before the internet was overrun by corps was just regular people putting things online because they wanted to express themselves, or share some idea they had. This is the most genuine type of human expression, the basic urge to connect with others for no other reason than to just communicate. People weren't trying to gain followers, monetize their content, or become influencers. I think that type of internet is far more compatible with socialist principles.
Edit: wai the downvotes
I assume because having fewer larger social media sites makes it easier to manage
I don't know. I need to look into this more. My guess is that, with the United States wildly lashing out at Socialist countries as well as simply anti-American ones, and Socialist education and organization being of prime importance, having a part of the internet that is not only hard to manage, but often filled with lollygagging and reactionary propaganda would not be a good idea. No opportunity should be open for reactionaries to obfuscate what is happening in the world. After the collapse of the United States and implementation of Socialist states within its borders, then there can be a rewilded internet.
Am the only one who doesn't want the internet to be a "wild" place?
Why do you not want the internet to be a "wild" place?
I prefer some basic level of stability and moderation or else things turn into 4chan.
I'm not talking about 4chan, but rather pre-adpocalypse YouTube
I've been using YouTube since back when they had a 5 star rating system. I'm not sure I'd describe it as "wild" it was just more dominated by smaller creators. The smaller creators still exist there's just a lot of other content as well so they can be harder to find. I do like plenty of big creators as well. The only thing that particularly annoys me these days if that sometimes if you try to search for things the results are biased in favor of corporate news.
Because that's how you get the proliferation of right wing ideology.
Have you been on forums with zero moderation?
It doesn't necessarily mean " no moderation " but rather decentralized and de corporatised, you know, like here on Lemmy