After contemplating on this: These companies that seek to eliminate thinking, spit in the face of agency. They call themselves agentic yet seek seek to kill all agency and authenticity in the users of their products which is contemptible enough.

We should all be more like Donald Boat.

If we can’t change the material conditions that let these losers play with money and toys then we can at least hold them in cultural contempt.

A bit long, but well written. It read like a novel, quite enjoyable.

What a fucking world

A world of non-thinkers

At least Donald Boat found some wisdom.

Thanks for your comments. I agree with everything you said especially that these traits are desirable for broader life IRL. In a way the web culture is a reflection of our own cultures just more mixed, extreme, amplified and with a good dose of parasociallity. I desperately want people to break free of their cycles. Think, talk, discuss, empathize and form communities, use your free will for good damit. These are the real antidotes that will enable the cultural shift that will allow us to reject the smothering of the human spirit in the current way of life.

Anyways, it is a terrible thing that there is an armsrace to be authentic. This really ought to be solved on the user registration side. And also yes, saying something profound with hidden meaning through creative intuition is great, I write poems sometimes. But its not the solution to authenticity online.

Haha you did not answer my questions, but you are clearly passiinate about this vision and I like that. As I understand it you describe a sort of moral credit that has value within the community that hands it out. So I imagine that a board would mint these tokens? What would these tokens buy you?

We will grant that most in the community will be commited to the cause so they will want to participate, but other than respect, why and what should I grant/sell you (you having some credit) for helping the cause. Couldn’t I just grant my effort to the cause directly? I get the renown aspect, but we also have commemorative mission patches pins and stickers for that.

So in short, I am not questioning the renown/trust mechanism of a moral credit system, but I am questioning the monetary function.

Don’t take this a rejection of the idea, the rebirth of the internet has to start somewhere and that might be here by visionaries.

Yes! After winter comes spring, and who knows what that may bring. It is the belief in a better world that brightens my days. Even if hope can’t heal everything it might heal some and that is enough for me.

We are not powerless agents! Use your free will to shape a better world. Unironically: live laugh love.

Thanks for the elaborate write-up, it’s good to engage in discussion about these things. An electoral system seems quite elaborate, but I would love to see it work. It would require quite active participation by the users, and I am not convinced that smaller instances would have the active user base for this. Even so, the idea is quite appealing.

Vetting good faith users is indeed one of the difficult problems. We could make better captchas maybe. For example taking some pictures of household objects in certain orientations. You could also check the exif flags to check if they line up with known cameras or something. Just an idea.

I like your idea of social credit/karma, but I have some questions. So imagine that an instance can hand out these social points and so can another instance. How would we equate the value of one system to another? What is stopping my instance from minting a bunch of social points and giving them to me to elevate my “trustworthiness” in your instance?

I also had an idea for a trust system based on belief systems. So as per Decartes I know that I am (real), and I have met some people IRL that are also real, so whenever they message me, I have a high degree of trust that they are not bots. I would also feel relatively inclined to trust the friends of my friends, with that trust decaying as we move down the friend chain. You could sort of make a “trust tree” where you would be able to see how many trust steps you are removed from IRL validation. You could even weigh the scores and downgrade someones trust score in the tree if it turned out that one of their contacts turned out to be a bot or something like that.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Genuine discussion and meaningful interactions make this a better place.

How would we defend ourselves from such a bot flood though?

Let’s say that we start to become competitive with one of these big tech companies user wise. What is stopping them from destroying the fediverse with bots by sewing dissent, hate and slop?

Perhaps the answer to such a scenario would just be to splinter, defederate and sort out the bot issue with better user registration.

Happy to hear your thoughts.

We are the web. There is no web without the we.

It is ultimately humans who add value to the internet. We can make decisions, take action, have bank accounts, bots for the most part still can’t. If we keep growing, there will come a time where swaying opinions, impressing advertisements or driving dissent will reach that value/effort threshold, especially with the effort term shrinking more everyday

I think that we are genuinely witnessing the end of the internet as we know it and if we want meaningful online contact to persist after this death, then we should come up with ways that communities can weather the storm.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I want to talk and think about it with others that care.

On the individual level we can maybe fortify against the reasons that might make someone want to extract that value.

• Being a principled conscious consumer makes you a less likely target for advertisement
• Avoid ragebait and clickbait, and develop a good epistemic bullshit filter along with media literacy, this makes it more difficult to lie to you, or to provoke outrage.
• Unfortunately, be selective with your trust. How old is the user account? are the posting hours normal? does the user come across as a genuine human being that values discussion and meaningful online contact?
• Be authentic and genuine. I don’t know how else to signify that I am real (shoutout to the þorn users)

I would love to hear what others think.

We wake up in our cells and dress in limitation

To deprive ourselves of action and causation

Can’t or won’t we see that we rob ourselves of agency?

Why waste our will with can’t where we could won’t?

So don’t say that you can’t.

But do say that you won’t

And I will know that you will will

For where there’s a will, there’s a way

And who knows where you may stray

🙏 ty that really cleared it up

I agree that only love is real. Its capital G Good. But I have a hard time following what you are trying to say after that sorry. Could you elaborate?

If hate is the opposite of love, then hating hate inverts that back to love <3

You are right my friend. But i’m afraid that this might be at odds with annonimity online. These micro communities might look a lot like this, just more restrictive on the user registration side.

I can imagine that we may have a federated community of human verified forums. Where you have to go to the computer club at least once to get a forum account.

Anyways, the death of online truth and authenticity gives us a tremendous opportunity to reinvent what online contact should look like. But inevitably, it will be more outside and less online I think.

Yes it sort of feels like online ecosystem collapse. Between all the insincerity, ads and slop. Very few online places feel alive :(

Well Yes!

AI is utter shite at poetry. Its the only proof of humanity I can convey over text except for swearing to show my humanity

Glad to be here, witnessing the death of the internet as we know it here together. I’m pretty sure most of you are real so let’s enjoy the show together before we all go outside again!

As the internet lay dying I wondered if I should be crying A great gift to mankind is losing it’s mind

Should we stay? Said the friends we made along the way

Who are we without web? But who, is the web without the we?

Even as we grieve and leave

Remember.

There is no web without the we And where we go the web will be

Thanks for responding. I don’t have time to write a proper reply (sleepy) but wanted to say bye. Thanks for chatting!

I find it difficult to pick a side, so I guess I don’t. I am a researcher and I also work with ML models everyday to make things that can help real people. But I would hesitate to say that LLMs have been a net positive for humanity.

I guess what it comes down to is that the potential for misuse feel limitless, while the potential for good feels limited to me. Technology is only as good as the people using it. That says less about the technology and more about the current state of the world.

Although I think that the world would have been better without LLMs, that is wishful thinking. It’s better to tackle the underlying problems that are being amplified by LLMS, namely: in-authenticity, misinformation and online slop.

That is why I come here, this place still has some sense of authenticity. Like us, engaging in real discussion, It’s not a proper meaningful human interaction, but hey we all want to relax online sometimes.

I would be happy to hear your thoughts.

Best,

A real fellow human.

I would hereby like to issue a formal invitation to the pro-human community!

With the emphasis lying on breaking free from the fake and inauthentic interactions of digital life. You can still have a digital life and even use a some AI, but the human spirit should not be smothered in the way that it is now.

(partial sarcasm) Join today rediscover your humanity!

Edit: Preaching to the choir here I imagine

Ik snap peertube, maar ik denk dat op inhoudelijke basis nebula wel veel beter en ook een betere vervanging is. maar ja, betalen :(