TikTok just dropped a new realistic beauty filter

This 1,000%. If anyone's struggling with social media addiction, doom scrolling etc. and this little rabbit hole intrigues you, keep going down it:

* Is that photo of a real person? Or is it filtered so heavily it no longer fits the definition of a photograph?

* Did nobody like my post? Or did the algorithm just not feel like showing it to anyone?

* Did that person decide to ignore me? Am I sure they're even who they claim to be? Did the platform arbitrarily decide not to show them my message, or did they get it at a bad time along with 50 others? Did they delete the app because they got sick of it?

* Am I really interacting with other humans? Or am I interacting with inhuman tools that are run by an entity who keeps its name out of the limelight and occasionally gives me morsels of human interaction to keep the ruse going?

Examine the Skinner box long enough and it will lose all of its power over you. You will switch off all of your notifications and delete all your social media apps and miss none of it. Your phone will sit in a drawer for most of the day. HN and Reddit are all that's left for me personally now (I deleted all the others), and I have a feeling the latter's days are numbered. The resulting void was quickly filled with better things. I started reading books again. And talking to nice people in public because it turns out humans are actually kind and friendly. And sunshine. Jesus, I'd forgotten how wonderful sunshine is.

There are no humans on the Internet.

> There are no humans on the Internet.

There are, but human spammers & scammers.

There aren't, that's the deeper point. Only cyborgs exist on the Internet, that's all there has been from the start.

At best you're interacting with a user agent, software that's animated largely by a human's will. Though most of the time you're interacting with an agent of, say, Meta Platforms. This agent impersonates the human you think you're interacting with, but isn't one, and ultimately just does whatever Meta tells it to. E.g. if Meta wants a post to vanish, then it does.

Even right now you're reading a post (mine) which was conceived of by a human, but you're not interacting with a human, you're interacting with a software layer run by YCombinator. I gave it permission to impersonate me, but the interaction is way different from unadulterated human to human contact.

The Internet has always been like this. The first user agents were simple so we didn't think about it much, but now these agents are becoming exponentially more complex so it's becoming more obvious that whatever you're dealing with is progressively less human.

I just don't know about that. If you go on Reddit during a major sports even there will be thousands of people posting to no one about their thoughts on the game in real time. "Great play!" along with 100 other comments on that particular play that no one is going to read or interact.

If you had AI bots like human posts then I really don't think the type of people that are into social media would care at all if a human is behind the like or not.

It is the very young now that I can see growing up being into something else besides social media but the current addicts are truly hopelessly addicted.

> There are no humans on the Internet.

Isn't this one of the necessary bridges to Meta's vision? The first steps are to kill authenticity and any aspect of defect - from there it is a gentle fall into the cosseted, synthetic alterplace of your choosing. It's all so strange and I feel lucky to generationally have escaped its pull.

I really like how you articulated it!

Viewed from this perspective, it's like we're experiencing a man-in-the-middle attack on all of our humanity -- and the interposer isn't even human.