Autism's confusing cousins

The internet is turning society into a kind of "social emulsion" where everyone is their own little droplet in the fluid, but they don't merge together.

It's not "the internet". It is "this internet".

Back in the 90s early 00s the internet made us mesh together because each one of us there was a specific person. We had forum signatures and every single post was clearly made by a person, for a person.

Then social media took over and relegated every single person into a tiny unidentifiable avatar next to a non-prominent name, not unlike NPCs in CRPGs.

In turn this has been exploited by the powers that be to ensure the social glue gets even weaker: a society barely held together won't revolt. There's only one thing left to do: productivity, productivity, productivity.

The political opponent is no longer a person. Just a nameless, faceless NPC (personifying everything that's wrong) spawned there to be defeated and collect their social loot tokens.

But I might just be an old fart rambling about the good, old days.

I wouldn't say Internet is a problem, but centralisation towards big tech algos and clearly gamed social media comment sections do control the narrative of what the majority of people see most of the time.

Maybe the issue is this perception that "the Internet" consists mainly of the big 4 social media sites.

Go on Discord. People have usernames, avatars. Discord Profile Bios are just as unique as forum signatures.

I am on Discord and the balkanization+homogeneization is still as prominent there as everywhere else.

Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged (spoiler: the average Joe is just irritated by those). Sometimes you get a quest from them.

Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.

I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same ploy.

Fuck discord. Another big for-profit platform that is swallowing big chunks of the internet. before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules. Now I need to register with some big overlord and download their shitty app just to read what has before been just an URL away?

> Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged. Sometimes you get a quest from them.

Maybe you should join better servers. I'll also add that this was common back in the forum days too. Most admins would just... admin the site.

> Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.

Wrong on both counts.

> I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same.

I did not present it as an "opposite to social media" - I presented it as a counter to the idea that we've lost the personality GP is talking about

But you can enjoy it before enshittification arrives!

All praise our VC overlords.

You're one of the 1% who reads profile bios.

Discord also is a centralized piece of proprietary totalitarianism. No thanks.

Nah. Right in the browser works great: discord.com/app

You’re going to keep running into a wall thinking of discord like a forum replacement; It’s designed to be an IRC replacement.

The invitation system intentionally creates some privacy so you can build a sense of enclosed community around them, and so you have some control over who sees what. Not having your conversations on full automatic blast to the public is a feature.

Of course, because the alternative - that they're wrong, and more people actually do read bios - couldn't possibly be true.

In any case, I see no reason to believe any higher % of people paid any particular attention to forum signatures back in the day.

> before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules.

And running them was awful and drove the people who did it insane, mostly because you had to fight spambots.

back in the 90's a minority of people were on the internet in the first place. it predates eternal september.

The internet is now dominated by the opinion of the lowest common denominator, so we find ourselves holed up on forums like this.

IRC works in the browser now thanks to IRCv3. Matrix is another option

The invitation system gives a false sense of privacy. There are bots that crawl publicly posted invites, public IRC channels, etc. Eventually people will understand that IRC and discord are public in the same way we understand usenet to have been public

“Paid attention”, you're probably right. Seen them enough to remember? Forum signatures were far harder to miss than Discord bios.

Yeah, sadly it is the spambots which have killed off independent platforms more than anything else. It sounds like something which could easily give rise to conspiracy theories from people putting the spammers into the same mental baskets as the controlling companies. It isn't the expense of having to leave on a raspberry pi running a server.

It's not specific to the internet. It's just that basically everyone came into the internet when it became cheap and easy enough to use. However, previously it was only a subset of people who were willing to put in the effort because it offered some benefits to them.

It is simply the typical effect of regression to the mean of large groups. Previously there was the illusion of meshing because the group was more homogenous. Diversity is touted as a panacea, but it actually has many deleterious effects, the most obvious being the reduction of what is deemed acceptable/normal behavior and speech.

It is not surprising that everyone looks like an NPC because bringing everyone into the fold requires a redefinition of what is considered the acceptable norm. It systematically goes through narrowing the definition to artificially create the illusion of homogeneity (necessary to reduce conflicts).

This is the same process happening to society at large. Psychology is just a replacement for religion, and the various diagnostics just serve as a tool to police what is acceptable behavior. This is very much the same thing as the various religious scriptures, using moral arguments, appeals to emotions, and enforced tribalism to promote the “correct” way to live one's life.

The endless discussion of psychologists around diagnostics is hopeless; they are just gurus replacing preachers, but instead of using gospels and mythological stories, they use pseudoscientific bullshit to categorize/label behaviors and argue for what they believe should be the norm.