This is more of a rant than an article but I feel like we should start talking about this now rather than later.
Till some time ago, my most visited places were Twitter and DevTo.
(They were so ingrained in my day to day life that to me, they were places, not websites or apps!)
As I write this, I’m mentally rewinding to that point in time and I can’t think of a single week where I didn’t spend considerable time on these two.
With time, I started hanging out more on Reddit because these places started feeling, well….off.
I couldn’t point to what it was but it didn’t feel like the same before. I saw the onslaught of spam bots on Twitter, how being a ‘reply guy’ meant you could grow your account and get paid, I saw how listicles on DevTo (I’m guilt of this as well, please forgive me 😭) started becoming much, much more rampant and so on.
This led me to swap these two places almost entirely with Reddit.
Until, a switch flipped there as well and it too, started feeling off.
Briefly, I tried going to Substack to find solace because I saw a bunch of Substack posts getting recommended on socials.
One of the articles I read from one such recommendation was along the lines of how the generation that grew up with internet now doesn’t feel like contributing to it.
It instantly hit a chord.
So, there are more people like me.
More people, who have felt things going off.
More people, who are going from places to places and still can’t find a sense of belonging.
More people, who are growing tired of this.
As I read that article, I wondered what the reason behind so many people feeling this way was. Were we experiencing this ‘withdrawal’ because we were the first generation that grew up with internet and it takes a threshold amount of time to feel this way, and everybody else just hasn’t spent that threshold time.
Was it nostalgia?
As I thought of all this, I realised how our parents have told us all that music used to be good in their days and how every new song is just worse than the other.
Was this internet thing our version of music used to be good in our times?
As I kept wrestling with these thoughts, somewhere along the line I came across a term called the ‘Dead Internet Theory’.
As I read more and more about it, I realized that’s what it was, that’s what I was experiencing, that’s what people were pointing their fingers at, even though they (they means me 😁) themselves didn’t know it.
I recently made a twitter post about it as well when I realized that even communities are suffering from this.
// Detect dark theme
var iframe = document.getElementById(‘tweet-2065341469742039478-731’);
if (document.body.className.includes(‘dark-theme’)) {
iframe.src = “https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2065341469742039478&theme=dark”
}
I had experienced this first hand where a couple of communities I ran were basically getting AI sloppified.
I thought it was just a short-term thing and it’ll fade out but now I see even content focused job posts listing ‘automate content creation’ under “What you’ll be doing” and I started thinking are they giving this no thought at all?
Do they really think this is the way forward?
AI creates content so that ‘number of posts published’ increases by one.
AI reads content so that ‘total views’ increases.
AI comments under the post so that the post’s engagement goes up.
Is this the version of internet we’re okay with?
Or is it just the point in time when this is the logical next step.
As I was still making an opinion about this, I read an article by Best Codes, which prompted me to write this article.
And now that I’m done writing this piece, I wonder if it will all go the Meta way.
Back in the day, Instagram used to be just about friends and family.
Then they switched to the endless feed, now although Meta can argue that the total users and the average time spent has gone up, I wonder if every Instagram user got a choice of either staying in the same endless feed mode or to switch to the ‘friends and family’ only mode, how many will choose which one.
And similarly, while we’re at this crossroads of sorts, I wonder if given a choice whether to sporadically use this dead internet, or be a participant in the human only internet, how many will choose which one.
That’s the question I’m leaving with: Before we get pulled into creating an internet for AI, let’s pause and think, shall we?
Thank you for reading and I’m super eager to know your thoughts, opinions and more…as long as they are entirely human written, like this article was!
Thank you!
~ Sumit S.
