you may think this a rubbish idea, and thatd be fair enough, but have you tried substack?
I’m not against Substack; it’s very understandable that someone would want to make money from their intellectual efforts. But it’s a very deracinated experience; it’s not really a community. Also, very ugly interface.
A forum is the optimal intellectual experience:
- Plenty of space to write, no pressure to deliver a finished product (articles are time and energy consuming)
- A regular community (over time, leads to the development of an organic culture)
- No porn ads
- No algorithm forcing you to look at ragebait or low IQ content
- No likes or upvotes, so having a voice isn’t dependent on popularity
- Easy to archive; can be read in posterity
- Content is far more spontaneous and higher quality. The algorithm is incestuous, and actually gets worse over time because it has to keep refining its slop
- Search functionality that isn’t broken
- No normies
yeah I get you. That’s the thing i hate about 4chan, the fucking porn everywhere. And also knowing that there’s likely CP just a few clicks away really freaks me out. btw wtf you on about with deracinated?
Yeah 4chan really makes my skin crawl. I get that it’s a free speech site but I don’t like using it. I only use /lit/ and /pol/ occasionally.
Basically deracinated means that there’s no culture or human connection. Substack is the blog equivalent of McDonald’s. Contrast that with something warmer like Dhublog, or political YouTube circa 2010 / 2011.
Relevant:
ah okay thank god I thought you were on some 4chan tier racial baiting. Those books look great, especially the last one. Adjacent to psychogeography. will check it out. thanks again for cool recs
Well, I am a nationalist, so I do talk a lot about race. But in this context I mean internet culture
This is a very excellent video, I’ve watched it before. I honestly think at least a chunk of what’s caused the Internet’s simplification (and centralization) is the globalization of it – the easy access to its “hubs” and “centers”, which slowly put forums at the backburner as convenience ate complex thoughts whole. In other words, too many third worlders, I feel.
Yeah. If you spend time around brown people, you can hear them watching the lowest IQ content slop imaginable.
But I think the very premise of using an algorithm is wrong-headed from the start. Think about it like this:
Let’s say that the algorithm updates the content on a website in rounds.
In Round 1, the algorithm selects for the most effective slop content. So the people making genuine content have less eyes on them, whereas the people who make slop have more eyes.
In Round 2, the algorithm selects again. This time there is more slop being posted, and the algo chooses the most effective content from that pool. At this point, a lot of genuine content creators give up.
In Round 3, the algorithm tweaks the winners from Round 2 and makes them more effective. By this point, the genuine creators are buried, and have to be searched high and low for.
So this is a very incestuous system. The AI is selecting the AI-selected content. As a result, people begin to seriously dislike the website. It pulls you in and keeps you addicted, but the time spent is regretted.
I miss when forums were the main thing too.
There used to be some key forums for artists around 2007 or so - ConceptArt .org was a big one. It used to be that amateurs and professionals alike would post on there, interact, encourage and advise each other and just be a genuine community. It shut down some years ago, but people tried to make a new version of it a year or two ago, to try recapture some of that spark.
The new version didn’t last a month. There was no interaction or community at all. Professionals came to post there, yes, but they just posted their latest and greatest works and then linked all their social media, literally just “Here’s my stuff, follow me on X and Y, ok bye.”
No attempt or even desire to build a community - these days most people only care about increasing their followers, likes, and views.
Yeah it’s super gay. And the worst part is that it doesn’t lead to any community building. Social media atomizes and deracinates its users constantly. You can’t develop meaningful dynamics with other users
I think this forum could succeed because it’s based around focused intellectual discussion, which isn’t really available anywhere else or is low quality. An intellectual space has to be cultivated, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere spontaneously on the magic World Wide Web.
I appreciate the effort and hope this endeavor is successful.
I also appreciate the effort.
X basically can’t be used for discourse, the algorithm, the entrenched stance of everybody, the obviously paid thiel shill accounts and worst of all the extreme suppression of people who understand that we didn’t win and that for us whites literally nothing will get better under the current administration, besides a few pr “wins” ofc. etc.
I vividly recall the transition from decentralized internet to social media slop. It all began when Zuckerberg required everyone put their real name on their Facebook profile. At the time he did that, the culture of the internet was anonymity. “On the internet, no one knows your a dog.” That came from the 1990’s internet. For those who don’t know, that quote is from a 90’s cartoon about anonymity the internet. Putting our names and faces online was extremely disruptive and put an end to the assumption the internet is supposed to be anonymous.
Another factor which is an offshoot from Facebook’s new rule was monetization. YouTube had ad sense early on, but no one thought much of making a living from the internet. With anonymity on the internet going away, the idea of becoming an influencer really took off, along with the idea the internet is for monetization.
I’m sure there are many more factors at play but I consider these the two main root causes. With the erasure of online anonymity and the internet becoming a financial center, interest in forums and everything which made the decentralized internet faded.
Hey, I’m so sorry for not responding. College break is over so this kinda fell out of my radar for a bit. I’ve now bookmarked the forum for more frequent consultation.
In Round 2 , the algorithm selects again. This time there is more slop being posted, and the algo chooses the most effective content from that pool. At this point, a lot of genuine content creators give up.
Your analysis here is perfect, the feedback loop of AI-generated (and otherwise half-AI or quarter-AI generated content) feeds into the entropic broth of lower and lower quality information.
I think the monetization of the Internet, as per @subprime 's post, was also the death knell of genuine, structured high-quality content made by enthusiats (autists) for enthusiasts and other autists.
I think the monetization of the Internet, as per @subprime 's post, was also the death knell of genuine, structured high-quality content made by enthusiats (autists) for enthusiasts and other autists.
I’ve been thinking about the social dynamics of the old web and comparing it to today. Internet culture of the old internet was a subculture. A break away from the mainstream, which existed irl, on TV, music, etc. Today, that same mainstream exists, it only moved in to the large online spaces like TikTok and X/Twitter. We can still have an online subculture like what we loved about the old internet. It’s a matter of carving out spaces for an organic internet subculture to grow. Places like this are where we do that. That’s how the subculture formed in the first place, on independent and decentralized forums and websites. A decentralized subgraph of the internet can still exist parallel to the large, centralized one. We just need to stick our middle finger to them and do our own thing.