The Internet is Cooked

The monetization model of the internet has been a disaster for the human race. 

I'm going to lay out some stuff we all know but is extremely important context. After you pay the monthly fee to access the internet, you get the web for "free". That's because your data and your eyeballs are the product being sold to the advertisers that actually fund your favorite website. This incentivizes websites to keep your eyeballs glued to their site for as long as possible, so that the advertisers can invade your vision and mind. This incentive leads to, as Anthony Fantano pointed out in a great recent video, websites encouraging content that validates you, content that enrages you, or braindead memes. Any content that doesn't fit one of those three categories requires a lot of extra effort on the user's part to seek out and engage with, since the algorithms that dictate what gets in front of the user don't prefer it.

Bo Burnham's Inside resonated with a lot of people because it gave voice to what we all feel on this hell of the internet. I think that not enough people have traced the cause of these results to advertising. As long as users expect websites to be free, this is going to be the internet. The things on the internet that are actually good are funded by donations, things like Wikipedia and Patreon creators. Every other website encourages you to be a lower life form. Twitter is basically 4chan now, with people competing to have the most outrageous takes for attention. Video sites like YouTube and TikTok have drifted towards a bright audiovisual language that is similar to advertising, trying to grab and hold your attention against your will. Reddit is only useful because there's like three guys on each specialty forum who know what they're talking about.

All this is to say that I know that the general populace using a mass force of will to collectively drop the apps is not going to happen. I think I have pretty decent willpower and even I can't kick the stuff. And although I can fantasize about someone pushing a massive RESET button on the internet, that's not going to happen either. It's hard to imagine any outcome other than seeing the current trends just getting worse. Not a nice note to go out on, but I genuinely do not know what comes next. All we can do is watch.

Comments

  1. EchksOctober 23, 2024 at 8:33 AM

    society if everyone was just on somethingawful-esque paid-entry forums instead

    I've seen some legislation thrown out there that would limit the type of time-maximizing algorithms/data sales that sustain these companies (usually just banning it for users under 18), but I'm not exactly holding my breath for any of that to pass any time soon

    ReplyDelete

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