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We're All Sitcom Characters Now
If you've ever watched a successful long running sitcom, you've seen it happen. The characters start out mostly normal with a quirk or two. Maybe a little neurotic, or slow, or promiscuous. Four seasons in and the characters have all become deranged parodies of themselves. All their most entertaining qualities have been heightened, everything relatable or normal has been squeezed out. The character that was a little slow is now a straight up drooling retard. The promiscuous character obsessively fucks everything that moves. The neurotic character is only a step removed from Howard Hughes in his final days. You watch the last episode and the first episode of a sitcom, and you'll barely recognize the characters.
It's obvious why it happens though. The writers and actors give the audiences what they want. Sitcoms are (or were?) a cuttroat business. There was little room for artistic integrity, vision, or any other high minded concepts. Give the audiences what they want, or they'll change the channel and the show will be cancelled. Just shut up and do it!
I regret to inform you that we are all on a sitcom now. Everyone is enmeshed with an attention economy. Be it farming engagement on twitter, or upvotes on a reddit clone. And unlike actors who only have to inhabit their roles for hours a day, for a shooting schedule that might be weeks or months out of a year, those enmeshed in the attention economy must be in character 24/7. On social media, on streaming, on podcast, on youtube, all at once, all the time.
Some have whole heartedly embraced this. Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud. Catgirl Kulak comes to mind. He's out there using an AI catgirl as an avatar, staying more and more in character as some sort of neo pagan feral/trad nordic catgirl with hot takes. It's a dangerous game he's playing, existing more and more in a fictional role. But there are others. The preposterous performative pro-Elon or pro-Trump nonsense I saw and tried to avoid on twitter this last week was really something. Twitter super users who've built their brand on being staunch partisans like Catturd out there acting like absolute charicatures of themselves. They're just sitcom characters anymore, and rapidly approaching the braindeath of the latter seasons. Others I don't think fully understand what was happening to them. I wonder how much upvote driven personality disorders had to do with certain flameouts here.
Because eventually every sitcom hits the wall. The characters have been intellectually and emotionally abused and lobotomized to such a point where there is no humanity left in them to ritualistically beat out for the amusement of the audience. It gets it's final season where the writers attempt to rehabilitate them just enough to send them off into the sunset.
There are no writers to rehabilitate you when the algorithm is done with you, and you've lived inside a cartoonish and horrifying version of yourself for attention for years on end.
You can just... not engage with most of that? There are places like Substack and this site that don't sort by popularity. You can also curate your feed to make the algorithmic sites useful. I use Twitter/X to keep up with bloggers I know, and Reddit is useful for AI updates and video game discussions. Youtube can be almost anything you want it to be as long as you subscribe to the things you like and don't subscribe to things you don't like. Just get off /r/all and Tiktok.
True, but in many cases you will have to actively fight the algorithm's attempt to get you to partake in whatever drivel is popular with everyone else, and watch out for its attempts to sneak in ads or other content that someone is paying to put in front of your eyes.
Twitter and Reddit both allow you to sort chronologically. I've just naturally stopped using most of the ones that don't have an option like that, such as Facebook and TikTok (I never got into TikTok in the first place, I bounced off hard). I also don't think "the algorithm" is necessarily always bad -- Youtube's recommended videos have exposed me to some truly excellent creators like Montemayor over the years. Sometimes I'll watch lower quality stuff like whatifalthist and my recommended will be populated by garbage for a bit, but that resolves itself after a week or so, and I could probably speed it up by marking those videos as things I don't want.
Ublock Origin blocks basically all ads, and is quite effective. I haven't noticed shills posing as users to be that much of a problem outside of stuff like porn.
I sometimes wonder if I'm the last user who still goes to each user's personal page a specific subreddit when I want to see something.
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