Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.

Thing is it’s kinda too late, and the, uh, “commercial net” has all but taken over society.

Whatever happens, it would be nice if that part burns down. And I think yanking the techies from the space with the Fediverse will help.

At risk of rambling… It feels like attention spans have shortened, too.

https://www.axios.com/2024/11/29/gen-z-kids-reading-tv-songs

People don’t want to dig through long discussions and documentation, they want a quick fix in a YouTube Short, or for it to be fed to them shooting the breeze in Discord.

And this sorta works short term, until the “old” information well those shorter systems rely on dries up.

It’s already a serious problem in newer topics. I’m part of the “localllama” community, for instance, and it feels like any central organization of knowledge has completely collapsed, and there is no old info to fall back on because everything is so new.

Anything anti billionaire, to sum it up.

Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. Discord too. Even Reddit is trying as hard as it can to be insular.

Much of my family doesn’t even know how to use a browser, at least not beyond the bare minimum for work. They probably never will.

I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.

Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.

let the world burn

That’s what’s gonna happen.

Maybe Europe and China will “isolate” themselves from much of the burning. I hope they do. But the rest of the world seems quite entrenched in Big Tech.

Maybe burning quickly is better, since more people will notice.

You mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?

In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?

Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I’ve learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.

Or Matrix?

According to history:

• Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…

• If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.

The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.

Today. Among thousands of times.

I’m with OP. People have been screaming this for ages, and the collective societal reaction hasn’t even been apathy, but “We vote for Big Tech CEOs, full steam ahead.”

So… Yeah, I’m tired, too. Screw it all. Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.

Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.

Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that “role” of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of “bug” that deprioritizes their discoverability.

It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.

A problem is volunteers and critical mass.

Open source “hacks” need a big pool of people who want something to seed a few brilliant souls to develop it in their free time. It has to be at least proportional to the problem.

This kinda makes sense for robot vacuums: a lot of people have them, and the cloud service is annoying, simpler, and not life critical.

Teslas are a whole different deal. They are very expensive, and fewer people own them. Replicating even part of the cloud API calls is a completely different scope. The pool of Tesla owners willing to dedicate their time to that is just… smaller.

Also, I think buying a Tesla, for many, was a vote of implicit trust in the company and its software. It’s harder for someone cynical of its cloud dependence to end up with an entire luxury automobile.

Oh, this looks awesome.

Not necessarily all of it.

Even anti fingerprinting browser forks aren’t perfect.

The energy cost of inference is overstated. Small models, or “sparse” models like Deepseek are not expensive to run. Training is a one-time cost that still pales in comparison to, like, making aluminum.

Doubly so once inference goes more on-device.

Basically, only Altman and his tech bro acolytes want AI to be cost prohibitive so he can have a monopoly. Also, he’s full of shit, and everyone in the industry knows it.

AI as it’s implemented has plenty of enshittification, but the energy cost is kinda a red herring.

LLMs tend to be really bad at detecting AI generated content. I can’t imagine specialized models are much better. For the crawler, it’s also exponentially more expensive and more human work, and must be replicated for every crawler since they’re so freaking secretive.

I think the hosts win here.

The problem is the way they’re pushing the tools as magic lamps, and shoving them down everyone’s throats.

AI is a really neat tool that got dragged into an incredibly toxic system that enshittified it. Not a useful tool to help development, no, skip straight to replacing employees even if it doesn’t freaking work.

The corporate implementations are mostly crap though. With a few exceptions.

What’s needed is better “glue” in the middle. Larger entities integrating ideas from a bunch of standalone papers, out in the open, so they actually work together instead of mostly fading out of memory while the big implementations never even know they existed.

It’s also cultish.

Everyone was trying to ape ChatGPT. Now they’re rushing to ape Deepseek R1, since that’s what is trending on social media.

It’s very late stage capitalism, yes, but that doesn’t come close to painting the whole picture. There’s a lot of groupthink, an urgency to “catch up and ship” and look good quick rather than focus experimentation, sane applications and such. When I think of shitty capitalism, I think of stagnant entities like shitty publishers, dysfunctional departments, consumers abuse, things like that.

This sector is trying to innovate and make something efficient, but it’s like the purse holders and researchers have horse blinders on. Like they are completely captured by social media hype and can’t see much past that.

It’s ironic how conservative the spending actually is.

Awesome ML papers and ideas come out every week. Low power training/inference optimizations, fundamental changes in the math like bitnet, new attention mechanisms, cool tools to make models more controllable and steerable and grounded. This is all getting funded, right?

No.

Universities and such are seeding and putting out all this research, but the big model trainers holding the purse strings/GPU clusters are not using them. They just keep releasing very similar, mostly bog standard transformers models over and over again, bar a tiny expense for a little experiment here and there. In other words, it’s full corporate: tiny, guaranteed incremental improvements without changing much, and no sharing with each other. It’s hilariously inefficient. And it relies on lies and jawboning from people like Sam Altman.

Deepseek is what happens when a company is smart but resource constrained. An order of magnitude more efficient, and even their architecture was very conservative.