Am I to mourn the loss of what I personally consider one of the worst manipulative toxins to ever exist?
Thanks AI.
It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.
This human nature shit is empirically wrong. There are quite a few scammers around. You also meet these people in real life, you just don't notice immediately.
Hard disagree, and I’ll cite a simple example: Reddit isn’t one community. It’s a hub and spoke model. There are many good communities with curators and SMEs.
My canonical example that’s counter to this is HN. No offense to anyone but Reddit doesn’t have a hive mind - communities do. And HN hive mind is wrong more often than right and has been targeted by all sorts of astroturfers along the way. I personally take very few comments on here seriously, no takes seriously, and mostly show up to read comments by some actual hard cred people (f.e. animats). Everyone else might as well be a shill bot. AI doesn’t change this. I still get cream of the crop from Reddit.
Having said that, social media isn’t dead. It’ll transform. Two things are eternal: 1) women’s need for attention, 2) men’s need to get laid.
The bots have gotten a lot smarter about making their ads look organic too. Even easier now with the ability to hide post history
The non-default experience is a mixed bag. Specialized communities are usually moderated pretty strictly, including rules against outgoing links, product reviews, etc. That said, you definitely see product placement disguised as questions / off-the-cuff recommendations where some previously-unheard-of Chinese brand is all of sudden mentioned every day.
HN has its problems, mostly in the form of people pretending to be experts and saying unhinged nonsense, but it's far less commercialized. If you want your brand to be on the front page, you sort of need to make an effort to write at least a mildly interesting blog post. Now, AI is changing that dynamic a bit because we now get daily front-page stories that are AI-generated... but it's happening more slowly than elsewhere.
Seems like the Butlerian Jihad is arriving ahead of schedule, and the real horrors demanding the uprising aren't oppression and violence, but viral marketing and sockpuppetry.
Okay, is this just an ad then?
Now it seems war is coming from the US it could not be more true that at this moment.
It's easier to count billionaires who aren't supervillains.
p.s. this is not a great photo of Marc on his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marc_Andreessen-9_(croppe...
The call is coming from inside the house.
If you want more photos of his phone farm... it's all on his twitter page: https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997
"Accelerating the dead Internet"? Why are we, as a community, encouraging the acceleration of enshitification of our common spaces? So weird to me...
If we never do things that later make us cringe and want to correct, we're not reflective and self-critical enough.
They used to be at the pinnacle of the VC sector, and now they seem to actively seek out the most toxic portcos possible.
> Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?
People who get to what seems like infinite money only do so because they were seeking money as a means to power for which they have an insatiable desire in the first place, its not that getting to (even practically) infinite money triggers the desire for unlimited power, its that it is a symptom of it.
My actual guess is that they got way too big, both in terms of headcount and fund size, to limit their investments to what is expected to be the best of the best in terms of financial return and societal impact.
>"Take proven content and spawn variation."
It's almost refreshing how unashamed they are. I hate it, obviously, but I kind of like it better than companies that say something dressed up in marketing speak but actually mean what this site just says outright.
According to Cambridge's data, $100 gets you around 2k fake but verified tiktok accounts: https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=lf
Viewbotting is a pretty big issue on all the streaming platforms. Twitch changed their technical measures recently and a bunch of big streamers concurrent viewers dropped by a large amount. "Fake it until you make it" is a viable strategy with streaming. It's all about fake engagement to game the algorithm and end up in people's feeds.
Probably moves like affiliate/referral linking, client paid campaigns, cpa lead generating arbitrate at scale, product seeding.
> Because using the CFAA as a cudgel against things you don't like, whether it's journalists exposing insecure government systems, or companies engaging in deceptive marketing practices is a bad idea?
I think you're confusing bad ethics with a bad idea. A prosecutor's job is to win, not behave ethically.
Edit: The community has spoken and I've come up with a way to include a16z in the title whilst keeping it under 80 chars.
There is an 80-character limit on titles
This title is 75 characters
A mod changed the title to something other than the originally submitted original article title, to protect a major VC.
Not cool.
Both for length reasons and because it was clickbait.
The original title doesn’t even have the actual company’s name in it, only the name of the investor, which is intended to elicit just the kind of ragey reaction you’re exhibiting in this comment.
On HN, titles need to be more neutral and factual (I.e., include the name of the company the article is primarily about).
(Also, you seem to be implying some conflict of interest? Doublespeed and a16z have nothing to do with HN/YC.)
I'd say that the change is editorializing more than the original was "linkbait".
The original title is 75 characters. Your title is 74 characters. If it was edited for length reasons, I'm not sure saving 1 character is worth it.
Lmao. Nice.
This reminds me of some youtube videos when I was researching some stuff to buy. Those videos are just still images plus text-to-speech narration, usually with an annoying background music.
I'm not on tiktok and the videos often won't play for me because of that.
Are they still images as videos with tts or literally just still images?
You are making yourself easier to fool: You don't know which fake accounts you overlooked, and by increasing your confidence you make yourself more vulnerable to them in the future.
In this case some slop is hacked and exposed. I check them out to see if they're good yet. The quality of the slop is unrelated to whether they'd get hacked.
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