 | Science, Technology and Computation |
The alarming state of the human mindset
December 5, 2024 Reading time: 8 minutes
One of my friends decided to create an educational website. It was a fantastic idea, and I fully encouraged him to pour his heart into the project. However, a lingering question kept nagging me: Are people curious enough to pay attention to this kind of work?
Unfortunately, I was right to worry. The web traffic to his site was so low that he began to feel anxious about what he was doing wrong. Generating a large number of web clicks wasn't the problem - after all, paying Google a few hundred dollars could easily drive traffic. The real issue was that behind these clicks, there were no actual people exploring the content on his website. Essentially, he ended up buying an "army" of internet bots created by the web search company, designed to make him believe his investment was worthwhile.
The problem of missing people on the Internet
July 26, 2024 Reading time: 9 minutes
If you are a frequent Internet user, you may notice an interesting phenomenon: a mismatch between your expectations of how many people should be engaged in various issues, and the actual reality. This situation is especially common on social media. For example, I recently joined a Facebook group with about 5 million members, but when I looked at the group's activity, I saw only about 10 people asking questions and making comments.
The same was true for Reddit. Conduct a test: go to Reddit and examine discussions in communities with over 200,000 members, where more than 50 members are online. You will hardly see any comments, and the ones you do see are often generic, like "Aha!" Recently, I tested this by posting a message in the group "MeaningOfLife," which has about 4k members. I was thrilled to receive one comment, but the group seemed completely inactive otherwise.
Next, visit Reddit's main page. You'll likely notice that 100% of the most popular posts are mundane, and honestly, quite silly, such as, "My girlfriend got a terrible haircut and she's crying," which garner thousands of comments and upvotes. While I suspect many of these comments and upvotes are from bots, it still raises questions. Why does this happen? Who is steering our civilization into such a state of being? Programmable bots? But who programmed them?
