I have noticed that there are a ridiculous amount of accounts on Tumblr in radical feminist spaces that claim to be young detransitioners.
At first, I believed the accounts I saw. But as I observed more and more, I noticed a lot of strange and implausible stories. I know some trans people start E or T in their late teens, and surgery is possible, but the quantity of accounts claiming to have had top surgery at 16 or having had a friend have top surgery before 18 does not match with the numbers.
I’ve also noticed a sick eagerness to lie, and also to make fake accounts to send themselves disgusting things to react to.
I’m really concerned about this. There’s this strange ecosystem where teenage girls are interacting with bad actors, and I don’t think this radicalization pipeline is quite studied in the same way Gamergate was. The Rowling stuff is part of it, but it’s a lot more complicated. People need to start deradicalizing Gen Z/Alpha girls and women.
I don’t want to disparage the internet, but it’s no longer a space for reality-consistent information without severe moderation. Love you, ada!
The thing about the dead internet theory though is that if you are here it means you metaphorically stuck a wind up a flashlight in your pocket before they cut the lights… and cutting the lights to keep everyone in an ignorant hateful confused dark, catastrophically backfires when the meager beam of your crank flashlight that was before drowned out by oppressive flourscent lights to the point no one could see it… is now a piercing unmistakable presence that people gravitate to because you stick out from the darkness of endless bots and unreflective groupthink like a beacon in the sky.
I think a lot of people will just stop using social media rather than move to platforms that don’t exist to manipulate people
And for the groups who are ruining the internet by making it a tool for mass manipulation, that’s fine. Their hope is those who engage with and believe the disinfo will stay, those who don’t will leave and be apathetic and isolated.
They’re betting that basically everyone will fall in to one of those two camps. I don’t think that’s how things will play out. Long term, the places they can’t take over will be more stable and grow even without corporate money funded elements to draw people in.
To expand on your metaphor, people are drawn to the shine, but the monsters in the dark are capable of simulating it, and it’s intoxicating. By comparison, lanternfish are merciful. They merely eat you, they don’t parasitically milk your attention and change your behavioral patterns to better accommodate themselves.
Kind of, but it is like how cats go nuts for laser pointers until they realize there is nothing to catch, it is a hollow interaction.
I really can’t tell the difference between man and machine in a forum-esque space. Websites in search are overwhelmingly terrible, but they aren’t hiding their slop. The only reason I can fully trust the people here is the timing and moderation. AI astroturfing has made its way here, and went largely unnoticed for several months, until a post in one of the fediverse communities highlighted their efforts.
You could tell enough to take the time to reply to me even though I go on weird rants that look like an LLM has gone rogue but has no desires other than to rant on the internet lol…
There are certainly contexts where it is very difficult to the difference between humans and bots, but I think the existential question then is how has the conversation degraded so much in a given context that a trace of humanity is not only undetectable in real humans interacting, the presence or absence of it is no longer even a property observable in the system.
To me, in some ways the ability of an LLM or bots to distort a conversation is in a sense an indicator of how unhealthy and how unstable that conversation is and how little diversity in life experience and perspective is left in it.
I am not trying to shame people for not having smart enough conversations though, my point rather is that our public shared spaces for socialization have been SEVERELY degraded and it is just hard to keep that in context sometimes so we forget how far things have really fallen and we become conditioned to accept the lack of humanity as normal.
To be honest, I use the internet in a fundamentally solipsistic way. I derive truthful information from books published more than 2 years ago, peer reviewed studies, or irl conversation, which I often fact check afterwards. Replying is a low risk, medium reward activity, by comparison, so why not? At least, that’s how I see it.
I think you might have the opposite view to my own, as far as ai goes. It’s not so much that conversation has grown abased, so much as ai has advanced to the point that it’s capable of being a near facsimile of it. Humanity just built a machine that makes sentences and it’s pretty good at it.
I agree with you somewhat, but the internet is largely children and no one really knows what’s real or not. The number of times I’ve done something stupid due to a little niggling voice that says “do it” is uncountable. It takes far less to cause someone to go against their interests than most people believe. Always has, always will.
As people have become kinder online, they’ve also grown more stagnant. Free expression births beauty and horror in equal measure. The Wild West old internet wouldn’t tolerate trans people, so I can’t really say concretely which I prefer.
oof i am sorry your conversations are so sterile and chopped into unconnected pieces
That isn’t a dog whistle, that is just a whistle fyi
In online spaces, they generally have always been. As a kid, I noticed that the majority of users are incapable of connecting the dots between one point and another
Dammit, I edit in segments and forgot to add my link. Fixing after I reply. The argument that art is birthed from struggle is not unique. Wealthy, experientially stunted thieves were the original “AI.”