I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

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latexr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens

I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.

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kombookcha 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of really intense suffering.

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latexr 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yes, I think you’re right. And if I recall correctly, near the end he’s trying to get somewhere but gets stuck in traffic by the same problem he caused.

	▲	kombookcha 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ha, that's right! I forgot about that bit. Man. I do miss Terry Pratchett.

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siddboots 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For a long time I thought that the AdSense business model was ultimately doomed because I assumed that people hate ads as much as I do. It turns out I was just wrong about what most people are willing to put up with.

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latexr an hour ago | parent [-]

I remember visiting a friend over a decade ago, and for some reason I had to use their computer for a bit. I was immediately thrown aback by all the ads everywhere and installed an ad blocker before anything else. They were very grateful, but the part that surprised me was they were annoyed by the ads but never thought to look for some way around it. It never even crossed their minds it could be done or to search for it.

	▲	dmd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		All human progress in history has been due to a VERY small handful of people who think “this is bullshit, things could be better”. The vast majority of people accept what they see as the way things are and it never occurs to them that things could be different.

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nilirl 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm afraid it'll lead to a weird music-ification of content.

Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.

AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.

Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.

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pjc50 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's definitely the sort of thing that Crowley from Good Omens would be working on.

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Lalabadie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, people will reflexively filter out the slop, eventually, but they'll do it by leaving the places that have been rendered worthless by its persistent presence.

The particular type of innovator ghoul that's enabled by generative AI dreams of filling the entire internet with bullshit content. Aggregators (media and content) should be actively pushing them out for their own long-term survival, IMO.