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I love how reality manages to combine the most comically exploitative parts of cyberpunk fiction with literally none of the intense, vibrant, or interesting parts. It’s just a dull, gray, sexless, post-industrial dystopia with ugly cars, chronic obesity, and fentanyl addiction. And now surge pricing.
American corporations want an “easy” war. Like against a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, someone that has no real capacity to fight back or strike foreign military targets (like a Lockheed martin manufacturing facility) and is more of a punching bag for the US military. A war with China would immediately spark World War 3 and trigger a global economic and military crisis. It is also extremely undesirable because China is a nuclear superpower and, uh…we tend not to get into shooting wars with those because they can potentially escalate into literal nuclear holocaust.
One thing I will never be sorry to see go is the age of pathetic power users who steal content from others and repost it ad nauseam for their own social network capital. Because those people are getting out competed by AI, who are stealing stories from those users, as well as stories posted by other AI. And thank you, writing is a small hobby of mine.
What is this cursed place?
Oh, boy, where to begin? Digg was originally a content aggregator founded in the middle of 2004 (around 7 or 8 months before Reddit), that was basically Reddit with a slightly sleeker UI. At one point it actually had a higher number of daily active users than Reddit and it was, for several years, Reddit’s chief competitor.
The fascinating thing about Digg is that it went through enshittification long before it became the phrase to describe our current internet zeitgeist. It happened incredibly early in its life, but for reasons and in ways that would come to be emblematic of the current internet. The core reason is that the owners of the website were just looking to get out of the game with a pile of fast, easy cash ASAP. They were in talks with Google to sell Digg for $200 million in 2008, but that deal fell through.
The beginning of the end for Digg came in August of 2010, when the site went through a major redesign, referred to as “Digg v4,” that fundamentally altered the ranking of posts on the site to heavily favor power users, as well as introducing a metric ton of bugs. It’s hard to describe the feeling of waking up one day and have your favorite website totally, completely destroyed. It was a Frankensteinian abomination; a cruel, misshapen doppelganger of an aggregator that now mainly linked to advertisements thinly disguised as “user content” and content posted by literally a handful of users who were able to manipulate post rankings to exclude any and all posts from non-power users from the front page, driving traffic exclusively to where they wanted it. As many of these power users existed on the political spectrum somewhere between Libertarian and outright Fascists, the political content on the website became especially jarring. No boiling of frogs took place here like it did on Reddit. One single code deployment and server restart later and the website was unusable.
The complete catastrophe that was this redesign triggered a mass exodus from Digg to Reddit. Digg was never able to recover and Reddit became the de facto content aggregator site for the internet (and it’s where I spent around 8 hours of every day from September of 2010 to some time in 2023 when they finally gutted the API and I moved to Lemmy). In a grand example of historical irony, Alexis Ohanian said, in an open letter to the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose,
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
Eventually, Digg was gutted for spare parts and its components and miscellaneous intellectual property sold off piecemeal for a total sum that was less than 5% of the value of the initial deal with Google. And the website Digg itself was ultimately sold in April of 2018 to BuySellAds for an undisclosed, but almost certainly pathetic, sum.
And now, dear reader, you are aware of the sad and tragic history of Digg, whose rise and fall was an unheeded warning of the precipice towards which the internet as a whole is headed.
This is true. Right now the OG internet is sort of kept alive by oral history, but we have the technology to save these websites in perpetuity as historical artifacts. That might be a good coding project - a robust archiving system that lets you point a URL at a webpage and scrape everything under its domain and keep a static collection of its contents. The issue, though, is that this doesn’t actually truly “capture” many web pages. A lot of the backend data that might have been served dynamically from a database isn’t retrievable, so the experience of using the page itself is potentially non-archivable.
Dead Internet Theory is one of the few “conspiracy” theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it’s probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it’s becoming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
And also with less of the whole “they’re doing this to manipulate people into believing…things” and more “people want quick and superficial information so that’s all that’s being produced and since it’s easier for machines to produce it than humans, humans will automatically get outcompeted and eventually that’s all the internet will be.” The internet is becoming a dead mall, filled with the corpses of long abandoned Hot Topics.
From a historical or intellectual archaeological perspective, no one in 2000 BC Babylon thought their pottery would be of historical significance, but 4000 years later, it is. These websites, particularly ones independently created and maintained by hobbyists, are snapshots of the ideas of the time and people that created them. These websites may not have been intensely popular, but they were in many ways a foundational part of the inchoate tapestry of the internet that would eventually become the “modern web.”
Wikipedia says that Overwatch and Apex Legends are each part of the “Hero Shooter” genre (boy does that sound like an uninteresting genre). I’m guessing there are greater subdivisions of play structure that matches what you’re describing, but it all sounds like an uninteresting blend of character based FPS, like multiplayer Borderlands. I guess that’s where modern gaming is, though, since these really took off after 2016, which is solidly after my “hardcore gaming” days were mostly over.
That’s fair. I’ll admit that I have a problem with getting overly mad at people for making stupid, accusatory comments that actively misrepresent what I say for their own benefit. I mean, they made a dumb comment and I can, and should, just ignore it. But I also have a difficult time letting things like that go and it’s something I should try to be better about.
I’m emotionally incapable of accepting that other people dislike things I enjoy and I perceive their criticism of those things as personal attacks. When they tell me that this is a personal problem that I have and that I should learn to accept that people are complicated and that enjoying something someone else does not is perfectly valid and shouldn’t impact my sense of self-worth, I piss and shit myself and tell them that they’re calling my baby ugly. Because that’s how I think of the mindless entertainment I consume: as the closest thing I’ll ever have to children.
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.
In terms of AAA video games, I can’t help you. I really like Becky Chambers novels, though. Lots of people talking about their feelings in a space opera setting. Big emphasis on character development. These are things I enjoy. The ball numbing action violence of your typical mass-media space opera stuff? Much less so.
I consider myself a pretty big science fiction fan. I’ve read a ton of science fiction novels, both old and new. I enjoy Star Trek. Love Star Wars. I like a lot of science-fiction themed video games, like Zone of the Enders, the original Bioshock, Borderlands, Prey (both the original and remake), Halo, Metroid, Half-Life, Fallout, etc.
I utterly loathe Mass Effect. I consider it one of the worst pieces of science-fiction ever created. I consider the overly sleek aesthetic of everything, from the ships, to the weapons, to the armor hideous. I consider the characters underwritten. The political entity that runs the galaxy is an uninteresting and derivative bureaucracy. The conflict between the various member races and their respective histories are far more interesting than the looming conflicts of the giant undead space robots looking to destroy the galaxy. And as a game, the gameplay is repetitive and uninteresting. Many of the enemies eventually just become damage soaks. The weapons and abilities are generally forgettable. I don’t think I’ve ever had less mentally impactful combat in a game before (as a note, I consider this a general issue with third-person shooters). And the inventory management in the first game was painfully terrible. I remember getting to the end of the game and having to spend an hour to manage my fucking inventory right before the last fight because I literally ran out of space and at a certain point all the crap you’ve collected just becomes worthless and pointless to have.
I played the first two games. I hated the first one when it came out and still hated it when I revisited it years later. I did like the incredibly janky Mass Mobile, as it was so poorly implemented that it was hilarious to watch it bounce off of random pieces of landscape like it was made of rubber. The second game I also really disliked because of the bifurcated Paragon and Renegade oppositional morality system that seemed really popular with that era of RPGs. And I didn’t even bother with the third. The games are just dull and frustrating, and I’ve never understood the love people have for them.
I remember watching Red vs. Blue back before it was even on Youtube. Fuck I’m old. That was the era of the internet that, for me, was at its best. Before everything became a collection of solidified super services and people made shows by just moving a character model in Halo around. As others have said, the true end of an era. Also RIP to Monty Oum. Man was an auteur. Horny weirdo, too, but also an auteur.
This is my thinking as well. IPOs are almost never profitable. If the stock lists at 50 a share, six months later it’ll probably be way closer to 20. And it’s not like Reddit is Facebook, either, if you want to compare it to another publicly traded social media website. Facebook, for all its faults, diversified its corporate enterprise years ago. It’s not just a social media company, but a legitimate tech conglomerate. It now handles payment processing, offer a functional storefront for small businesses, and also owns Oculus, Instagram, and a massive truckload of other shit. What does Reddit own? Well, it owns…Reddit. Its valuation is…maybe 15 billion dollars. What does it have to offer other companies? Well, it has user data. Which is not valueless, but also worth way less than it used to be since every single company you have an online account with collects and sells your data to someone else.
Yeah, it’s really more about two massive industries colluding to extract additional income from working Americans. Rental agencies contract with Spectrum, get a cut off the top, and the renters are stuck with a shitty internet service they don’t want. Honestly, renting has never been a great experience for the average American, but it’s been getting worse over time. Rental agencies are starting to cut staff, reduce actual beneficial services offered, force renters into paying for additional junk services they don’t want or need (what the fuck is a $50 a month “beautification fee,” anyway? Nobody ever fucking cleans this place…), and, of course, increase rent every year. And they can do this because…what the fuck else are you going to do? If you’re working class and live in a high cost of living area, you can’t just move, or buy a house. You have to rent. No other options, really. And while you’d think “well, if someone else opens an apartment complex that offers better services, you can just move there.” Sure, and spend 15 grand moving a mile and a half only to have the apartment complex you moved to suffer the same enshittification after 6 months that the first one did.
The odds of that are so incredibly low. DE is a fantastic standalone game. Arguably one of the most artistically complex and rich games ever made, and it stands alone perfectly well. It raised the bar for gaming in a way that others have aspired to but not ever really reached. The best we can hope for is that the makers of the game can make a new game in the future. One whose IP they know how to protect, this time.
Isn’t it great that the only way the supreme court can be recused from a case is if they decide they have a conflict of interest? You know…because the fact that Trump appointed 3 of them and the wife of one of them actively participated in an attempted insurrection don’t qualify as “conflict of interest.” What a fucked institution the Supreme Court is. Who could have predicted this would happen with a branch of the government defined by “all power and no accountability?”
A lot of companies overhired during COVID, Trump basically turned the Federal Reserve into an unlimited money hack for banks and other companies, the tech sector is particularly sensitive to boom and bust cycles of mass hiring/layoffs every few years, there’s been Fed rate hikes recently, and other factors. Your more conspiratorially minded would say it’s a concerted effort to make people too afraid to unionize by making them think their jobs are in danger.
Gaming, like all software development, becomes plagued by popularized anti-patterns every so often. Remember back in like 2010 and every. single. fucking. game. had unskippable, frustratingly difficult, often instantly fatal should you fail them, quicktime events? Because I fucking remember. And now those are nowhere, because they’re terrible. And, yes, the use of AI is not a game design pattern so much as it is a development tool that will be used to fastforward development and decrease costs around, presumably, asset generation, but to some extent that was always going to happen. Any time a tool comes about that fundamentally reduces human labor, it always sees widespread adoption. Eventually it’ll be industry standard, and it’ll be…fine. It’ll suck for people with aspirations around graphic design and 3D modeling, but those are just the first places there will be cuts. Eventually you’ll have the physics engines, game systems, state management, etc. and other core components of game design automated via AI processes, which will kill a shitload of dev jobs. And eventually the people who make these AI game engines will, instead of selling to a studio who will parameterize the AI with prompts, will automate the prompting process with AI itself, so instead of selling to studios, they’ll just have an AI service that will take your description for a game that you want, run it through a bunch of canned AI subroutines and it’ll crap out a boutique game of your design that they technically own and have full copyright over and which is just incredibly derivative of a ton of other IP - imagine every single game being Palworld, “like X crossed with Y with a bit of A and B thrown in.” That’s right: eventually the end user will design the games themselves. A world in which you never have to consume any game, or probably eventually any media of any kind, beyond the one you already liked and wanted. You’ll never have to be challenged more than you would like or experiment with different forms of media. It’ll be a brave new world, filled with brave new games.
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every “alternative” browser is chromium under the hood. Google’s next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it’ll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That’s only going to get worse with time.
I don’t know why you would think they’re paid media or propaganda. It’s not like they’ve been paid over half a million dollars in 2015 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or like they received almost 3 million euros in 2022 by a “philanthropic” organization called Open Philanthropy that operates on the philosophical basis of “effective altruism,” an ideology which functionally equates to “let’s try to convince billionaires to throw some money at the poors instead of addressing systemic inequality,” and which totally cool people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk have latched onto as belief systems. It’s also not like they’ve been given money by the conservative religious John Templeton Foundation, which was one of the largest financial contributors to the early climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.
Nope. Nothing to see here. Not in bed with big money or ideologically dubious organizations at all. /s
The insane thing is that it was working a few weeks ago but then it randomly went away. Like the computer would go to sleep like normal (S3) and then I’d wake up to at least 80 percent battery. Now? All I have is hibernate. Man, as bad as Windows is and always has been, I can’t believe it’s somehow getting worse with time.
The thing is that you probably won’t find anything that looks too closely at the efficacy of the claims, because the claims are all that anything is reporting on, since the product is so new. Here is a similar article published on asme.org (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), that discusses the buoys and the company’s claims surrounding them: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/tapping-the-ocean
Accusing criticism of Biden and his viability as a presidential candidate on “Russian bots” is purely a silencing tactic: a way of dismissing criticism rather than engaging with it by asserting a specific intent behind that criticism that reduces it to a tool of a foreign adversary as opposed to a genuine set of concerns by members of the electorate.