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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31257 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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The Beautiful People are in Charge Just Like Everywhere Else.

I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about any of this. It's just another entry in the ongoing process of what I've mentally termed internet gentrification or nerd cultural appropriation. I attempt not to get bent out of shape over these things, lest I tip over into the "ugh, normies..." nerd-hipster trope but this article resonated with me. I miss the pre-Dice CmdrTaco-era of Slashdot (fuck Beta!). I hate influencer culture and every YouTube video telling me to "like and subscribe". There used to be a commenter on SSC whose entire schtick was something like "Everything is a popularity contest and all is lost" and he's starting to make sense to me. Moloch will have his sacrifices.

In charge of what? I have no idea how most of the authors I read look like, and frankly couldn't care less. I never, in my life, had a virtual encounter with a creature called "instagram influencer" (let alone a meatspace one), and I imagine this cherry will remain un-popped for a long time, maybe forever. I am probably not that special, so I assume there are millions of people like me. Of course, there are also millions people unlike me. But I am not sure what "instagram influencers" are in charge of? The instagram influencing market? Whatever it is, let them have it, I would never know it and would never care. Why bother?

At the age of 12, in 2003, Le Conte and a group of friends played a contest to “find the weirdest porn on the internet.” Today, the results of such a search would be unpublishable

On the 12 + porn bit, controversial claim: it doesn't actually do that much, she wasn't really injured by it. men were much more violent with women (on average), not less, in pre-modern life, and choking-violent-sex-bad thing seems like a strange male-power-bad/early-feminist thing.

As for 'unpublishable' - no? there are plenty of places that'll "publish" that, including substack, or random subreddits. Reddit still hosts all sorts of weird porn. It's not going in the NYT, but why does that matter?

I’m never going to have TikTok on my phone because I tried, and I hate that it doesn’t let you search or watch what you want. It is fully algorithm-driven. It’s incredibly frustrating

tiktok actually does have a search function, and you can also browse by hashtags? No idea what that means. Tiktok is designed for the algorithm-driven mode, and it's more effective for most people's use cases, but it isn't even that different from 'searching or watching what you want' - it's still the same content, and most people click on the cat videos or half-naked women either way.

There's plenty of surviving online spaces populated by ugly people. She should check out Tumblr.

Or reddit, or discord... outside the porn subs, few in any position of e-"power" or e-"influence" are 'beautiful'. (Also, almost nobody outside the porn subs posts their faces at all)

Conversely, there are some internet subcommunities whose members are both quite conventionally attractive (due to working out, eating well, etc) and also incredibly edgy, niche, and 'online'.

I'm going to stay with my usual schtick and say actually everything is fine. The weird corners of the internet are still there. In many cases they're doing better than ever, because the nerdy adolescents have been nerdy adults with software engineering jobs and six figure incomes to throw at their esoteric hobbies. Yeah, the normies invaded the internet, but the normies didn't get online so they could join SomethingAwful or 4Chan or your sci-fi versus debate forum with twenty users. They joined the internet to use Facebook. The only thing that is truly lost is the sense of exclusivity - the feeling that the internet as a whole was a preserve from normie influence.

I think Le Conte's problem (cf. @MeinNameistBernd) is that she has chosen a life path that demands she be engaged with the most toxic parts of the normie web.

On a decent chunk of the popular internet - discord, reddit, twitter - many involved posts no photos of themselves at all, so her complaint about 'beautiful people' is bizzare. (also, why is she including photos of her in the article??)

Is 'toxic' really a useful descriptor here? Her issue seems to be with ... normie culture as a whole, the fact that beautiful people are on instagram, etc. And while that does suck, is it 'toxic'?

I've actually been meaning to write a response along those lines to that "dead internet" post that was going around. Most of the internet really is a stale wasteland infested by bots, zombies, and normies, but the poster upset about /l/ being gone just hasn't found his way to where all the interesting people went.

Problem is it's a hard post to write in enough detail about esoteric corners of the internet without revealing enough to make some people break their scouters and run for the hyperbolic time chamber.

I mean its not hard. A significant portion of the interesting internet is now on Discord (and private discords), another chunk is on (niche subreddits on) reddit.

More esoteric than that? Certain forums that you cant easily find with a google search or web-scrape off the top of my head. More than that and I cannot say.

There used to be a commenter on SSC whose entire schtick was something like "Everything is a popularity contest and all is lost" and he's starting to make sense to me. Moloch will have his sacrifices.

You can still follow that guy on Tumblr if you like.

Yep. BrazenAutomaton's not the only good tumblr ratsphere culture warrior, but he remains a frustratingly good if depressive read.

The idea that the internet has been taken over by any one group or people is wrong. The internet is way bigger than ever. Even the smallest or most esoteric of niches are finding large audiences and making decent money. There are plenty of YouTube channels that do not have influencers. Social media made the internet bigger and maybe angrier, but there is still tons of non-social media stuff.

It still boggles my mind that you can find YouTube videos on how to rice out your vim editor's status line that have 30,000 views.

The internet is so big that your weirdest subculture will still have hundreds of thousands of people who are into it who can find each other.

I personally wouldn't take views as a solid metric, there's probably bot inflation in a lot of places.

There are still tons of people making stuff who aren't currently influencers, and most of them never will be. But increasingly it feels like everyone would be if they could be, if given the opportunity most would jump on being invited to panels and give Ted talks and monetize their podcast and whatever else.

What it's most comparable to is punditry. I've known very few people who can get the talking head gig on Ms/CNBC, CNN, fox, oann whatever who turn it down. It eats interesting newsmen and journalists and even authors!

My rule of thumb is that no one can resist getting paid for their thoughts.

And even if I avoid monetized content, the possibility changes how people work.

My rule of thumb is that no one can resist getting paid for their thoughts.

I think there is a serious survivorship/availability bias involved in this assumption as 100% of the people you know of who get paid for their thoughts are definitionally the the one's who could not resist.

Hence why it's a jokey heuristic rather than a real theory of human behavior, similar to the theory that you should assume all professional athletes do steroids because so many who have gotten popped for steroids were previously on record as "clean" and lauded in the press as too honorable or too concerned with their health to take them.^1

When content as homegrown as Jomboy and RiverAveBlues Yankees analysis can get brought onto CBS and YES, when writings as honest as SlateStarCodex analysis and as off-kilter as KulakRevolt Reddit rants are providing livings to their authors, when podcasts as niche as the #1 Bachelor recap podcast hosted by a male interracial best friend duo and the MoneyBall of The Bachelor hosted by a former shockjock bro-lit author are all selling merch I think we've passed the point where anyone gets into the game without knowing that it can happen to them. And even if it doesn't ever happen to most of them, it impacts how they think and write and act. These are all example I've followed in real time, from hobby to vocation. It could happen to you! I've even had my own joke-y conspiracy theories get picked up by the media and become brief micro-trends in a particular subculture. And to be honest, I see the appeal, so maybe in another life I'd start churning out more and more unhinged tinfoil hat theories in the hope of bringing in more attention.

I don't subscribe to it as a complete model, but The Beef-Only Internet Model of Rao is kind of a relevant reference. The knights and bishops and rooks and queens of the great internet battles duke it out, and their loyal pawns join the fighting, but every pawn secretly thinks that he's just one clever comment in support of his knight or reply-guy-ing the other knight from getting a battlefield promotion. Which really happens! You really can go from nobody on Twitter to having a career, getting interviewed on legacy media, getting invited to the good parties. And as we have no effective way of determining morality in advance, we have to assume that everyone is out there trying to get attention.

^1 Rick Reilly on what to do when Barry Bonds passes Hank Aaron

• Send rabbits' feet, four-leaf clovers and two-headed pennies to Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr., letting them know that you're pulling for them to pass Bonds like he's a hitchhiker in an orange jumpsuit

Marie Le Conte, indie music blogger and BuzzFeed News’ media and politics correspondent, who was named one of Portland’s Rising Stars in 2016, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018...

Takes off problem glasses, stares directly into mirror: "who could have done this to the internet?! Where did all these clout-obsessed influencers come from?! And why is it all so tiresome now I'm no longer an Under 30?"

Yeah it's quite ironic seeing her complain about pretty people taking over the internet... then looking at a picture of her and realizing she's decently attractive. It's attention-seeking all the way down.

and realizing she's decently attractive

This is disproportionately the case.

I'll add that absolutely ugly people are also disproportionately underrepresented in terms of making arguments like this/being taken seriously.

yeah she embodies that which she opposes

Was compelled to check her background because indie music hipsters were the very first people I met on the internet who got into modern cancelling campaigns over IRL clout, using it to get jobs at... Places like buzzfeed.

Making video the primary form of communication has ruined the internet.

Longreads and effort-writing is not dead yet, but I do hate when people assume I want to watch video of them essentially reading a text. Unless there's content that is not representable in a textual form, I don't want to see your video.

Podcasts are fine, OTOH, I can listen to them while driving or mowing the lawn or doing some other stuff that leaves higher brain functions free.

Twitter is an obvious exception to this. Same for Substack, Reddit, Facebook, and blogs. It's not that video has taken over the internet , but video has consumed the attention of those who are receptive to it.

TikTok is poised to overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture. Facebook and Reddit both let you post videos. Substack, tumblr, and other blogs are an increasingly irrelevant fraction.

In order for TikTok to "overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture". Twitter would first have to be the main wellspring of culture, which I find difficult to believe. While Intellectually I recognize they must exist, I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly.

You definitely have, see the mau chart.

I don't believe that chart proves as much as you think it does. If we assume for the sake of argument that every single one of those 70 million north American accounts corresponds to a real live flesh and blood person. IE that the number of bots, corporate PR accounts, and users operating multiple accounts on Twitter is 0. That works out to a little under 1 in 5 people, or around 18% of the combined population of the US and Canada. In contrast creationists are estimated to be around 30% of the population. How many creationists do you know?

Of course thing is that while the number of bots on Twitter is in dispute, we know for a fact that that a substantial portion of Twitter accounts are official corporate PR, and that a lot of people have multiple accounts so that estimate of 1 in 5 people or 18% of the population is almost certainly overgenerous.

I was specifically rebutting the " I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly." claim. Obviously a MAU chart proves nothing about 'wellspring of culture', as the creationist example, or something like 'red tribe', 'christians', 'reality tv fans', 'old people' - all of which have large populations yet aren't culturally dominant - nicely shows.

and I'm pointing out that it's not much of a rebuttal, for instance that 18% of the population (if we're feeling overgenerous) might be concentrated in a specific geographic area. Likewise "cultural dominance" is a difficult measure. IE Gamergate is really big deal amongst a certain subset of the extremely online left, and has been characterized by a number of different users here as "the most culturally significant event of the last two decades" but I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the general population knew or cared anything about it. Publishers sleeping with and/or buying off reviewers oh you sweet summer child this has been the norm since the 19th century.

I suspect lotsa lotsa botsa there. No way almost every fourth American (excluding kids too young to know what Twitter is) is an active twitter user.

"MAU" is an industry term that means something like 'people who have used the service in some way in the past month', like, if you have an account and went to twitter.com at some point. It doesn't mean 'number of people who have a twitter account and actively post'.

From twitter's most recent financial report

We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given daythrough twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions. Average mDAU for a period represents thenumber of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days for such period.

(mDAU is monetizable daily active user, not monthly active user - "In Q2 2019, Twitter discontinued publishing MAU figures in favor of figures regarding monetizable daily active users (mDAU)")

Worldwide - "Average monetizable daily active usage (mDAU) was 217 million for the three months ended December 31, 2021, an increase of 13% year over year.". In the US - ". In the three months endedDecember 31, 2021, we had 38 million average mDAU in the United States".

For the monthly active user number - afaict, all that requires is 1) have a twitter account and 2) be at 'twitter.com' sometime in the past month. It makes sense that 1/4 of americans do that.

Oddly, this means I'm not counted as a mDAU, despite spending at least an hour on twitter.com today. And most of that was w/o adblock.

Anyway even if for the sake of argument it's 1/4 that, that's still 1/16th of all americans, meaning HIynka has interacted with many of them

I don't think most of those are bots.

We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given daythrough twitter.com,

That includes every bot that logs in at least once a day, and pro-rated count of every bot that logs in less frequently.

  1. have a twitter account and 2) be at 'twitter.com' sometime in the past month

Once per month would only give 1/30: "number of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days". If you go once a months, that's 1/30 on average mDAU. And no, even that doesn't make any sense for 1/4 of Americans. 1/4 of people living in a posh neighborhood of San Francisco, maybe, but that's not everybody in America.

I do not see any mention of the filtering of the data to exclude bots, and I imagine they have zero incentive to do this - most casual readers would assume it's "number of people using Twitter", and for the litigious types there is actual definition that covers their asses. I think this number however is grossly inflated and actual people constitute maybe 1/10, maybe even 1/100 of that number. Maybe even less, who knows.

More comments

Since when was Twitter a wellspring of culture at all, let alone the main one? Twitter is 90% people saying stupid shit and getting into Internet drama.

That's not at all incompatible though. The other 10% could be influential, and that's what you'd expect - 90% of everything is shit, elite theory, whatever

Internet drama that we all subsequently talk about and/or elect president.

I think that a lot of the people who live and breathe internet drama forget just how niche it is.

Twitter is an obvious exception to this.

No it really is not. Twitter is, if anything, patient zero.

I think centralization also ruined the internet (to go back to the days of forums where we didn't have constant culture wars over who controlled the four or five social media sites...).

What a coincidence: video probably requires the most centralization and capital.

The centralization trend was already present, hell Usenet was a central forum before people used the term forum (compared to contemporary BBSs.)

Not exactly: copyright compliant video does. Bittorrent was wiping the floor with mainstream services for a long time. Now they're about on par.

Even putting aside ease of use (I know people here will object but some people really don't want to do the minimum and would just rather use Youtube/Netflix/whoever) there are forms of media that aren't best suited to Bittorrent.

For example: obscure stuff was often a problem due to the need for seeders. I imagine a lot of stuff (e.g. low-view, long runtime streams) would also have issues lasting.

I dunno, I'm still happily using it, and obscure media are a lot easier to find there.

Yeah I was going to say torrenting is my first choice for obscure shit these days. You might not get it immediately due to seeding, but at least it's there.

I appreciated the article, but it is a little funny watching Millennials reinvent the Eternal September.

One thing that the essay suggested to my mind is that maybe I should think more about how the Internet and academia have co-evolved in the last ~50 years. The geekiness of American universities was eroded first by athletics, but later--and much more powerfully--by credential inflation in the job market. The essentially "democratizing" process of expanding college from perhaps 5% of the population to nearly 50% has had similar effects in higher education as democratizing the Internet has had in online spaces, with popularity crowding out capability as the primary measure of success. Increasing competition for "top spots" without proportionally diversifying the availability and character of what gets recognized as a "top spot" has injected all sorts of crab-bucket distortions into both systems. But the Internet's development arc has moved much more quickly; if the analogy holds, then watching how the Internet develops from here may be informative as to the future of academia. Which I do not find encouraging.

Guess I will just have to hope the analogy is bad...

The geekiness of American universities was eroded first by athletics, but later--and much more powerfully--by credential inflation in the job market.

Universities have always been jock and job factories. It was probably worse a long time ago than today, when favoritism was more rampant in the Ivy League (such as gentile favoritism). Despite democratization, top colleges are more exclusive and competitive than ever. The student body today is probably smarter and more meritocratic, some affirmative action notwithstanding, today for top colleges compared to 50 years ago. More college demand means more colleges. The overly competitive job market tracks increased competitiveness seen everywhere in life.

Yeah, I thought about that as soon as I hit comment. Everything old is new again.

I'm increasingly finding my solace by avoiding the Internet, except for very curated spaces like this place.

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