Or is it just doomed to the vapidity of sterile commercialization?
It feels like everything is serious these days… and ‘humor’ is only of the commercial variety. Joke communities and circlejerk communities are considered ‘hate groups’ now. Mods will ban you for sarcastic comments on ‘serious’ topics, and even on non serious ones, and everything is politicized either by trolls, bots, or whackjobs.
It’s boring when you can’t joke anymore. I miss my internet communities of 5-10 years ago when you could joke around, and even people of different beliefs and persuasions could laugh at themselves.
Now everything is so deadly serious. It’s a complete bummer. And any sort of ‘edge’ or sarcasm or sardonic remarks are ban-worthy.
I guess it’s just poe’s law run amok? I feel like mods could tell the difference 10 years ago and the non-jokey psychos were just ignored.
It should theoretically be possible to set up an old school forum, train some ai bots on old school forum user data to get them to talk like morons and then boom, an old school forum full of computer generated shitposting. This way you could have a computer generated vintage internet experience from the comfort of your own home.
This reminds me of the old gpt2 and 3 subreddits, before this “AI” boom, and no one had ever heard of GPT. Every subreddit was condensed to a single user, with the GPT trained on only that sub. So you’d have things like TIL-GPT makes a post in the GPT3 subreddit: “TIL you can…” and a full comment section from from GPT users like Movies-GPT, WorldNews-GPT, PCMasterRace-GPT, etc.
Reading through them had the chance to be wild. When the posts would make just barely enough sense, but random enough to be unhinged.
I don’t know how much was automated, or if people would toggle runs of X amount of new posts, or what. But eventually people made subreddits for posting screenshots of the best GPT’s talking to each other.
You could always see patterns and then go to the real sub, and see how accurate they were. GPTs from gaming subreddits unironically posting circlejerks, from conservative subs being lowkey racist, etc.
I’ve been part of quite a lot of communities ranging from old electronics to silly song contests to cartoons with sentient objects (you can tell by my profile picture) to vidya games. Almost all of them have been incredibly fun at first, but eventually turned into shadows of their former selves. It’s honestly really depressing.
That and we also change. What we find fun now won’t necessarily be fun in a year, even if everything stays the same.
If the internet isn’t fun for you, find a community on the internet that you actually enjoy being in. Easier said than done, I know, but the internet is a big place.
there’s the indieweb movement, smaller sites trying to have fun, like neocities
Am seriously considering founding a not-for-profit to provide an ad free / spam free / bot free basic community. Would cost a dollar or two a month. Chief differences to the lemmy would be one account per person via proof of identity signup (I think this would improve behaviour and discourage spam), a single authority to tackle voting abuse and other things useful to be not federated.
Aside from that revenue would cover technical staff costs + hosting and the rest could go to some good cause. There’s be no ads. No data selling. Not conflict of interest over how the platform evolves. Would be open source. Adults only.
Id keep it as basic as possible to try and capture the spirit of 90s fora. Am not even sure I’d allow inline images or vid.
Thoughts?
God I’d kill for a place with no trolls, politics, shit posts, where your allowed to disagree and have spirited discussions on topics but mods would step in before it becomes an argument.
I feel like everywhere you go online nowadays there’s a `well ackwchullly’ type in the corner. I’d love a place people can get together share ideas and joke around.
Long story short, if you build it they will come.
no politics
good luck there. especially with determining what is or isn’t politics in the first place
Something Awful charged :10bux: for membership and was a pillar of good moderation. It works.
They were amazing pioneers of shitposting and circlejerking but some people considered them something of a hate group for their callouts of specific subcultures. I’m suggesting that aspect of things that OP is describing isn’t exactly new.
But yeah, agreed, the swift, stark ban policy was very effective in creating a “civil” society there - idiots showed up to fuck around, bam hope they’ve got 10 more bucks if they want to try again under a different account.
