Posts Tagged

internet phenomena

VHS Tapes and Analog Horror

Elizabeth Technology December 12, 2023

What is it about the humble VHS tape that inspires such magnetism from the horror community?

Distortion

It’s no secret VHS tapes are prone to degrading over time. The tape inside loses its charge, and the plastic it’s made out of starts to dry-rot. If you’ve tried to replay a particularly old VHS movie, you might have gotten part of the way through it only to have it crumble on you, never to play again. Even the old-fashioned photo reel tape is not as fragile.

A number of strange effects can be pulled out of the tape and the machine just by treating it poorly, even fresh out of the box – if the tape is exposed to radiation, it develops a distinctive ‘snow’ to it; if it’s rewound or played too fast, the voices and visuals onscreen get weird, high-pitched, and anxiety-inducing. Colorful graphical glitches and brief audio cutouts are eerie, no matter what movie they happen to, and the classic abrupt cut, as though the tape inside has been cut and reunited minus a scene, can jerk anyone out of a Disney movie or war film alike. Tapping, dropping, or shaking the VHS player is an easy way to distort the viewing experience without necessarily breaking the tape or the machine, too, making it super easy for kids to get the funny colors they like to appear onscreen.

For the artists who can catch it juuust right, exactly how it used to happen to them, it’s really something to behold.

Irreplaceable

But you’d think the nostalgia of the casually-creepy VHS system would fade, the same way other trends in media do – Westerns dominated the film landscape for years before slowly sliding off the map, and slasher films are nowhere near as dominant a horror style as they used to be. In that vein, you’d think the sort of skips you see from CDs and other optical storage methods would be getting the attention that VHS glitches are getting from analog horror, a recent online trend in horror that’s only getting more mainstream. Analog horror gets its very name from the style of filming that came to define the genre. Popular projects like the Mandela Catalogue or Angel Hare are purposefully designed to look like they are recovered from VHS tapes and analog TV tech, helpfully uploaded to Youtube by someone trying to get answers. The glitching is used to great effect: when something too horrifying to look at on-screen is due to enter, the VHS tape glitches and clips over the horror, a clever way of hiding the monster from view while amplifying the terror of the unknown.

The corruption itself represents a strange flavor of nostalgia, an additional ingredient thrown into the horror of the scenario. After all, new VHS tapes are rare now. Old VHS tapes didn’t look creepy or monstrous when they were new. What the best analog horror projects capture with this stylistic choice are childhood memories of VHS tapes revisited as an adult, only to discover those tapes have been irrevocably changed by the passage of time. The ultimate premise of trying to share these tapes with the next generation only to have them rot away in one’s hands, blinking all sorts of strange colors and textures on-screen before it fails to warn them of the danger it’s trying to capture, is itself a powerful metaphor.

For millennials and the oldest members of Gen Z, the comfortable becomes a source of horror, a haunted childhood home. For the younger members who never had those VHS tapes, it’s an alien technology that behaves irrationally and unpredictably. The fuzz of a VHS video is not a comfort to kids who grew up with 1080p60 resolution videos. Modern videos don’t skip, either. Optical tech skipped for obvious reasons, like scratches on the disk. VHS tapes seem to choose arbitrarily when to skip.

In this way, VHS is a perfect medium for horror. Everyone around today is a little put off by it for a host of different reasons. When it flubbed up, it wasn’t always obvious why. It doesn’t age gracefully and it’s easy to cause problems within it on purpose. Even when it’s a little broken, the VHS player will still try to play it, where optical drives refuse if too much data is missing. When an optical drive stops, it just freezes on a frame, it doesn’t distort what it’s trying to play like VHS players sometimes do. Of course, all analog horror is just a recreation of the effects of old and damaged machinery. Some method-purists go out of their way to get ahold of real VHS tapes to do what they want to do, but in the end, it’s still getting uploaded to Youtube, an entirely digital platform. The mystique of the VHS haunts us today where CD players and digital files don’t because when the newer two corrupt, you’re spared the horror of the corrupted footage. VHS is the only one capable of the level of jank required to be horrific.

What Is A V-Tuber Concert?

Elizabeth Technology November 28, 2023

A V-Tuber is the colloquial name for a virtual entertainer puppeted by a real person. A digital character onscreen blinks, moves their hands, looks around, and opens their mouth to talk at the same time as the person controlling them behind the scenes does. The software to do this is quite complex – the program controlling the model often works through a camera pointed at the real user (although some people do use things like pedals and controllers to control the model’s actions). A one-to-one real-time movement-matching simulation like the kind V-Tubers use are no easy feat, and they’re always getting better. The more recent ones are good enough to dance live with!

Why Have Concerts With These Things?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, the V-Tuber’s onscreen model can do things humans just can’t! The model can wear outfits that defy gravity, it can jump off cliffs or up through clouds, it can jump through sparklers and fireworks onscreen without ever risking anyone being burned, and it can do all this while still tethered to its owner and dancing in time. Speaking of which, while pre-recorded routines are possible, the singer is often still singing and dancing live offstage as well, although the complexity and mix of the routine can vary from show to show. It’s still live!

Secondly, a V-Tuber is mainly recognized through their model – not their own face. This grants them anonymity that many pop stars and internet celebrities don’t have, as well as a break from a cutthroat pop industry that insists singers be young, size 0, and pretty for as long as possible even at the expense of their health, both long and short term. The V-Tuber model does not suffer to meet these nightmarish standards, and the singer behind the model can focus harder on their voice and dancing.  

Even for the ones who focus on video games and livestreaming instead of dancing and singing, the anonymity of their V-Tuber model is a serious plus. While it doesn’t eliminate the risk of being doxxed, it makes existing in public a lot easier! Walking around a Twitch or gaming convention anonymously is just not possible for YouTubers who show themselves on-screen. For V-Tubers, it’s the default.

A Matter of Movement

With the pros out of the way, there are cons: namely that if they started out on a platform like YouTube, they may not be ready for a concert. A performance at a Cosplay Arts Festival in July of 2023 went viral on TikTok because the person on screen, the V-Tuber Dacapo, wasn’t dancing. The most movement came when the character model’s bangs were swept out of his eyes during an intense part of the song, which made his many fans in the crowd go absolutely nuts, and even that didn’t come with an animation. While the person behind Dacapo did sing the cover of the song themselves, the model wasn’t rigged for anything more intense than looking around and moving side-to-side – the most movement he could do live was sway. One arm was frozen in place holding a cigarette as a stylistic choice, and this was not changed for the concert. Neither was the framing of the character, who is normally only seen from the chest up. This culminated in a performance with some very technically impressive singing paired with the sort of setup you see from livestreamers, but blown up twenty feet tall.  (He has a replay on his official channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2FNn8d5o4A&ab_channel=DacapoCh.%E3%80%90ARP%E3%80%91)

It could hardly be called a waste of money, because the concert itself was free with the purchase of a ticket to the cosplay con it was hosted at, but it felt stiff. That model is part of a group of V-Tubers pulled together by the Thailand-based Algorhythm Project, which put Dacapo into a boy group with a couple of other singers. He debuted under that project – he was the fastest-growing member of it. This guy didn’t get famous by accident. For them to not have an alternate model for concerts, or at least modify the current one so it could move more freely, feels like an oversight! Especially when other V-Tubers prove it can be done.

That said, the next concert will probably be better – no performer has a flawless first stage show, no matter what their tech looks like.

Sources: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/vtuber-dacapo-receives-support-from-ironmouse-after-concert-sparks-backlash-2206437/

Are We Forgetting How To Curate Our Online Experience?

Elizabeth Technology November 23, 2023

If you’re on TikTok, you may have heard of the Bean Soup fiasco. A woman made a recipe video for an iron-rich bean soup, only to have a comment section full of people asking if they could omit the beans. While this should be a problem with an easy and obvious answer – don’t make a bean soup if you don’t like beans in soup – it demonstrates a larger problem with the direction the internet is headed.

Algorithms

The internet as it exists today defaults to a conveyor belt of advertisements with some entertainment slotted in, unless one goes out of their way to leave the big websites and visit smaller ones. Youtube’s front page algorithm shunting people into extremist circles is well documented; TikTok’s For You page is always studying your actions to make you stay longer and watch more ads. Social media websites like X, Instagram, Facebook, et cetera are much the same, relying on algorithmic interpretations of you as a person to feed you things you’ll stay and look at. Even apps like Spotify have plenty of algorithmically generated playlists to supplement the ones you made manually. If you’re not on premium, every once in a while it’ll put one on for you in the middle of yours and just… not tell you.

While this is convenient and profitable for the websites, it makes it hard for users (especially younger users who don’t remember the times before Google) to stray outside of the box. People are told constantly that websites are spying on them, that Facebook knows their blood type and zodiac sign, that Target can figure out someone is pregnant before they do, all to send them ads and make money. Now that it seems inevitable, it’s almost viewed as a trade instead of an invasion of privacy: this website can show me ads, sure, but it better know what else to show me.

To go back to the bean soup recipe mentioned at the start, users are asking if there’s a substitute for the beans because they were served the video on the content conveyor belt they’ve been using instead of subscription features, so the content must be for them. TikTok shows them videos they like and doesn’t show them things that they dislike. Instead of simply searching for another recipe, or trying substitutions themselves, they ask the content creator to fix the algorithm’s ‘mistake’ and show them something without beans in it, as if it was a choose-your-own-adventure and not a pre-established recipe.

Made for Me

To clarify, the algorithm didn’t make a mistake. TikTok occasionally tosses in videos from other niches to see if the end user will watch them too. If they don’t, they don’t get those videos again. If they do, they get more. This is a good thing, even though it creates friction, because it makes it harder to end up in the horse video corner where the only videos are videos of horses. Unfortunately, the people who want to be in the horse video corner will occasionally be shown a video about welding, or maybe grain silo fires, something tangentially related but not about horses.

The conveyor belts work too well. They make the user too comfortable. The user doesn’t want to subscribe to creators when the ‘For You’ page will conveniently shovel them that creator anyway. They forget where they used to go to find the content that they used to like, and instead rely on that website’s conveyor almost entirely. TikTok defaults to the “For You” page, not the page they themselves curated by following people. So does Youtube, where you have to click into your subscription feed. So does Spotify, where generated playlists and recommended podcasts are shown above yours. Other big websites like X slot in recommended tweets between subscribed ones; Threads, X’s competitor, doesn’t even have a purely chronological feed.

To use the websites, users must accept being shown things they don’t like; at the same time, they expect the high-quality experience that they’d be able to build themselves if the websites weren’t pushing their algorithmic feed as a replacement for it, because the building would take work but the algorithm is already made.

Side Note: You Can’t Use TikTok For Search

TikTok is a perfect storm of misinformation and poor-quality search results sorted by the wrong metrics. The app offers up a ‘popular search’ at the top of the comment section, linking to the most common search their users make after watching a given video. The problem is that the search has the same inflammatory power that headlines do! To clarify, the popular search is user-generated, not made by TikTok or fact-checked in any way. A user may see ‘[x] creator embarrassing Christmas party picture’ and continue scrolling through videos without looking, assuming such a thing must exist if searches for it exist. Or, they see ‘[x] creator is dead’ in the search and panic, assuming this must be because they missed an announcement somewhere.

Even if they do question the search and tap it, they’ll end up scrolling through videos made to exploit the search instead of answer the question. Trying to find out what slang means on TikTok is near impossible, for example. The top videos put the slang or acronym in the tags and description of the video, and then the video itself will be just music or a video of the creator looking around in front of a wall, no definition included. To be fair to those creators, even though it’s annoying, nobody should be using TikTok for research. It’s a social media app. It’s not easy for users to fact-check creators, it’s riddled with people pitching colloidal silver and borax drinks casually, and people often exaggerate or even lie about what credentials they have. TikTok is for fun and shouldn’t be for anything else. If you want to learn about an acronym, visit Google. To suggest searches in this environment may have been what users wanted, but it’s not good.

Unfortunately, the users themselves are not encouraged to search anything off the site because no app or website is designed that way. You’re supposed to stay on the site. The site doesn’t want you to leave. You probably don’t want to leave the site to find your answers, and many other apps and websites try to enable that urge to stay.

Nintendo Just Kind of Banned Gaming Tournaments

Elizabeth Technology November 16, 2023

With little exception, having age-appropriate gaming tournaments is a good thing for a game (and the company behind it). Big communities getting together to play their one-on-one games means people bringing guests who might be interested enough to buy a set of cards or minifigs after and play in the next get-together.

Some companies even make guides for tournament hosters, partially as an investment in the community, partially so any tournaments hosted using that pack won’t reflect poorly on the parent company. Others go even further and sponsor tournaments themselves, like Capcom with its Street Fighter tournaments. Copyright permissions are handled differently by different companies in different mediums, but generally the tournament event can use their game’s imagery and names to advertise for-profit events as long as the event follows rules established by the company.  

If done right, the players have a fun and exciting time, the game company gets a bunch of free (or subsidized) advertising, and everybody wins.

Nintendo’s decision to ban large tournaments in this environment is nothing short of bizarre!

The Announcement

Nintendo’s announcement regarding tournaments using their games boils down to: no huge events (200 spectators or less IRL, 300 or less online), no use of Nintendo copyright properties to advertise (including game names), no merchandise, food or drink sold in-person at the events, and no profit (ticket prices and winning pools are capped to ensure this). Organizers also can’t raise the prize money from ticket sales or use modified versions of the game, either, and must obtain a special license from Nintendo before the event takes place. While Nintendo is legally well within their rights to do this, why would they? Capcom enjoys a huge amount of positive publicity thanks to it’s 2D fighter tournaments. Magic: The Gathering is known for drawing large crowds to events, and Wizards of the Coast, its owner company, is pleased to see it. Nintendo was not.

As you may guess, this severely handicaps future tournaments! Smash tournaments, one of the cornerstones of the early online competitive gaming communities, have just been slashed pretty hard. For context, Smash Summit has had final winning pools in the five-digit range since 2016. Smash Ultimate Summit has hit the six figure range. Smash tournaments have been running since the last decade. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of players have passed through these tournaments hoping to win, and the spectator count is magnitudes higher. Nintendo may not have set out to make tournament-ready games, but by golly they did, and now they want to take it back.

What Now?

Playing a game competitively is very, very different from playing it for fun. People dedicate huge chunks of their life to trimming off inefficiencies and practicing. For many, it is literally a second job, during which they may stream their practice to make some money off of all of the hours they’re investing into learning. The people viewing those streams then go on to watch them in the tournament, bringing money in for the tournament host, too.

Nintendo effectively just crushed an entire industry. Rather than work with the fans and try to spin their tournaments into advertising the way many other companies do, they instead decided that the current tournament fanbase was unreconcilable with their goals and simply cut them off. Already, Smash tournament organizers (often retired tournament winners themselves) are promising they’re going to keep going until they personally receive a cease and desist from Nintendo. They don’t really have another choice – players aren’t typically interested in switching games and losing all their practiced skill to switch over to Street Fighter or any other 2-D fighting game.

Who knows what happens next. Nintendo owns the intellectual property that this industry is built off of, but rug-pulling it like that has generated a lot of backlash from adult fans, even ones who weren’t watching tournaments before. It echoes the move that Unity just made, and before that, Adobe. The average consumer is getting sick of companies squeezing them out of stuff they already spent their money on. Nintendo may have underestimated the negative press from this announcement, but whether or not they’ll walk it back remains to be seen.

Sources: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/fun-sponge-nintendo-places-strict-094104104.html

https://kotaku.com/smash-bros-ultimate-switch-nintendo-tournaments-1850955614  (warning – link contains foul language sourced from tournament competitors’ tweets in direct citation)

Degeneration of AI

Elizabeth Technology November 2, 2023

ChatGPT has gotten worse at a number of things since its introduction to the public. The problem with publicly-fed generative content programs like ChatGPT is that they will always be both producing into and siphoning from the same pool of information. As more of its own text ends up in the pool, the chatbot forgets more each day what color the pool used to be (or what people used to sound like). The pool gains a noticeable purple tinge, but unfortunately for the creators, siphoning out the individual particles that are turning it purple is borderline impossible at this stage, so the best they can do is add more new information to try and dilute it back to its original quality, which isn’t a real solution either.

ChatGPT has already scraped a ton of data. A large portion of the open internet has been fed into the machine. Finding more at this point requires dealing with large companies and their copyright laws (think publishing houses asking authors to allow their books to be scanned) so fixing it by adding more human text is not the easy way out, but it is the easiest out of the options available to that company, up until they start including books written by AI into the mix, and they’re back at square one.

What To Do About It

The unfortunate side-effect of having an automated writing buddy to make whatever you want, for free, is that free access to a sellable product makes a lot of less scrupulous people stop caring about whether or not the product is any good.

This is relevant – people trying to give tips to kids who don’t want to write their own graded essays are telling those kids to fact-check what it writes, but people slinging AI-written articles don’t even care enough to read over it once and filter out inaccurate information. As a result, passable AI content that’s true is less common than passable AI content that isn’t! ChatGPT thinks there are freshwater species of octopus right now. It thinks that because there are accounts of freshwater octopus online that exist in the same state of mind as sightings of Bigfoot, and it simply extrapolated that these two tropical octopuses (which are very much saltwater ONLY) are actually freshwater, for some reason: https://www.americanoceans.org/facts/are-there-freshwater-octopus/

While this article has no listed author, this is such a bizarrely inaccurate and yet specific mistake to make that a human author seems unlikely to be the culprit. The idea that a human author on this ocean fun fact article website just randomly grabbed at two scientific names for octopuses out of the hundreds of species known, but didn’t bother to do even a shred of research into what kind they are is the sort of thing you’d see on a skit show.

Included in that image is my search bar on today, October 17th, 2023, and this is the first result that pops up in answer to my question.

Now, both of these incorrect articles may be fed back into the machine and spit out something even more wrong. All of the easy ways to flag articles like this are discouraged by the nature of the beast itself. Some people don’t like AI being used to write fluff pieces because it took that from a human, some don’t like it because they know it’s not accurate, but either way they don’t like it. So instead of owning up to it, sites like the ocean site don’t list an author at all. No author, and no disclaimer of AI usage means that the programs feeding ChatGPT can’t filter it the easy way by looking for labels. The hard way doesn’t work either: AI detectors are routinely wrong, having evolved as an afterthought and not a precaution. If the program listened to an AI detector, there would be no content to feed it on at all.

The snake is starting to eat it’s own tail, and if it’s not corrected, it will continue to get worse.

Why Does Every Site Want To Be TikTok So Bad?

Elizabeth Technology October 12, 2023

TikTok’s Appeal

TikTok is a unique website that could only exist in today’s era of high-speed data streaming and widespread high-quality digital cameras. Despite the difficulties of navigating copyright law, popular music is scattered across videos. Users argue back and forth via stitches, debunking and re-bunking arguments into infinity. Vendors host livestreams that are always on, demoing their wares. Small businesses get snarky, get personal, and get sales by showing their methods online. Oceans and oceans of content, more than anyone could ever watch, live at your fingertips on TikTok.

Platform Revenue

TikTok is pretty profitable, something its predecessors Vine and Musical.ly can’t say. TikTok’s incredible hybridization of sponsored content on top of ads and a token system is truly something to behold! The best is the token system: TikTok does livestreaming, and livestreamers can earn money from ‘gifts’ which are bought with tokens, which are bought with real non-imaginary money. Once the livestreamer gets the gift, it’s converted into ‘diamonds’ (not tokens) which can then be converted into cash or more tokens so the streamer themselves can buy gifts for other streamers. If that sounds confusing, it’s supposed to be! Tokens are imaginary money. TikTok scrapes a little bit off the top of each conversion because that’s the entire point of imaginary money. Twitch does this too, with bits, but because the bits themselves go directly to the streamer, it’s easy to track what the conversion rate is. 100 bits is about 0.70$ – how many ice cream or cowboy hat gifts does that same 0.70$ buy? Every extra step wards off the buyer thinking too hard about it.

And then there’s the sponsored content. To advertise a product you’ve been compensated to review in the US legally, you must have a disclaimer somewhere in your content saying that you were sponsored to make it. The more obvious the disclaimer is, the less likely the person making the video is to get sued. Platforms are motivated in a roundabout way to do the right thing and help creators make these connections or sponsorships as obvious as possible, because if it’s hard to make money, the big creators who bring in ad revenue will leave, and that’s no good. TikTok handles this pretty well and allows multiple levels of disclaimers to be applied to videos. Businesses promoting their own stuff on their own channel can use the ‘promotional content’ disclaimer. Businesses promoting their stuff via influencers on other channels can use a ‘sponsored content’ disclaimer. TikTok will even let them link directly to their own shops within their videos and channel descriptions once they’re past a certain follower count. What it lacks in customization, it makes up for in sheer opportunity to pitch product.

Not to mention the ads. Because ads on TikTok can be skipped immediately, the average user’s relationship with the ads is not nearly as adversarial as it is on a website like Youtube, where unskippable 15 second ads deter people from even clicking on videos they aren’t certain they’ll like. Some people download adblockers specifically to make Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. more enjoyable while they browse. Instead of trying to innovate some way to stop adblockers, TikTok just made the ads skippable. If a user can leave any time they want, they may stick around and watch a bit instead of spending the mandatory 5 or 15 seconds frantically tapping the ‘skip’ button. People like buying things! They like shopping! They just don’t like walking through the perfume section and being forcibly sprayed with a perfume they don’t like in order to access the mall.

The Bad Parts

Such a website comes with downsides, however. The full extent of TikTok’s data harvesting is concerning, but nobody seems really sure how much should be illegal – especially since many American-based companies are also harvesting comparable amounts of data, sometimes from people who don’t even have accounts on the relevant platforms, like Facebook and Google. If another website with a track record like Facebook tried to introduce such a data-gobbling app themselves, it might not have seen so much success. Until TikTok has a big conspiracy blow up in the states the way Cambridge Analytica did, though, users are inclined to enjoy the product and not think too hard about how well it knows them.

TikTok is also terribly addictive. Their algorithm is very quick-footed when it comes to figuring out what will keep users scrolling. It’s ingenious. Users can scroll for hours and feel like they’ve only been on five minutes. It’s constantly learning, too. If you stop engaging with videos for a certain fandom, it will notice, and show you less of it. If you start engaging with conspiracy videos, TikTok itself will do nothing to steer you away from videos offering genuinely dangerous advice. TikTok is especially riddled with people selling incorrect or dangerous health tips as fact: there’s an entire cottage industry trying to get their viewers to eat only meat, or only organic vegetables, or only the keto diet, or only bone broth, or only 800 calories a day. The worst part of clickbait articles saying ‘eggs will kill you’ is now combined with the worst part of algorithmic content. There are videos on TikTok right now trying to sell colloidal silver as a cure-all. The only thing colloidal silver does is turn you blue. It has no known health benefits, but the people selling it are allowed to keep selling it in spite of this.

To be fair to TikTok, this is a problem every website has (even non-algorithmic ones like Tumblr), but to be unfair, TikTok is uniquely equipped to get people addicted to conspiratorial thinking because it will never stop showing those people videos that tell them how smart they are for seeing poison in everything.

What If I Didn’t Want TikTok

It’s really no wonder everyone else is trying to keep up with TikTok.

But the question none of these sites want to answer is: what if you don’t want TikTok? What if you joined Twitter or Instagram or Tumblr on their own merits, and not because you somehow couldn’t access TikTok, which is a free app and webpage, and only needs a phone number or an email to use for credentials?

What if you didn’t want TikTok because it is TikTok?

Is there any way to avoid it? We’ll see. Video is a much more data-rich medium than text or images, but at the same time, hosting data has gotten a lot cheaper. If videos don’t turn a profit, users will see their social media platform of choice start to quietly discourage videos. If they do turn a profit, if they generate more clicks and engagement, then the videos will stay, and the web will evolve, leaving small pockets of picture- and text- heavy websites living on the fringe for the users who don’t like TikTok.

Pros and Cons of Having Five Big Websites Instead of Many Small Ones

Elizabeth Technology October 5, 2023

The amalgamation of smaller websites’ features into bigger websites comes with ups and downs.

The Pros

1) Hardiness

The way that servers used to work, individual clicks counted towards fractions of pennies of hosting costs, and bigger websites that had bigger requirements got better rates because they paid more overall. If a smaller website got linked to from somewhere bigger, and the ordinary traffic quintupled, the website’s owner could be out of a lot of money. The other option was to simply let the traffic take the website offline temporarily, which was also ugly: it made DDoSing smaller websites for political or social reasons pretty easy. Big websites with big servers and lots of through-flow don’t have to worry about that. DDoSing Facebook, for example, would be almost impossible, and would cost a ton of money in equipment and electricity to even try.

2) Family of Services

Amazon’s numerous smart home devices are undeniably convenient (although it comes with many trades). You can simply ask Alexa to turn on your Smart lights, add frozen onions to your shopping list, ask it what a new air fryer would cost from Amazon dot com, and ask it to order it for you all without getting out of bed. None of that would be possible if Amazon were not a sprawling mass of other, smaller services purchased or created for the sole purpose of supporting Amazon.

3) Ease of Communication

While smaller websites alongside websites that allow for small, closed groups to communicate (like Mastodon and Discord) have an easier time controlling their user culture, bigger sites like Reddit, Twitter, MySpace, etc. can connect people with what they’re looking for much easier. Crowdsourcing an answer to questions that don’t exist anywhere else is something that forum sites excel at.

Additionally, social media is so common that some businesses extended their official helplines down into Twitter or Facebook to make it easier for customers to reach them wherever they can be found online.

The Cons

1) Tangled Services

The new Facebook (Meta) app Threads requires an Instagram account to log in. Threads demands a lot of info about you. If you made an account, saw some bad news about Threads, and wanted to leave, you wouldn’t be able to do so without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is holding that account hostage.

When big websites buy smaller websites, the services can become entangled, or watered down for profit-making reasons. If there’s no substitute, then tough luck – you’ll put up with the downsides or you’ll leave.

2) Being Presentable

Trying to bring up a site to meet censorship requirements held by giant access chokepoints like app stores or parent websites can make a purchased website stop working. For example, trying to make Tumblr fit into the Apple App Store’s standards crushed it: Tumblr’s NSFW ban caught plenty of art and random unrelated pictures in the crossfire thanks to an open-sourced, poorly trained algorithm being deployed to moderate, and a big portion of the userbase left never to return. Is the website better now? Not really, but it meets the App Store’s standards.

Similarly, if a web services vendor the size of Amazon decides they don’t like a website and won’t be supporting it any longer due to content concerns, that website may simply vanish as a result. Whether that’s fair or not, giving one big company the power to decide what is acceptable behavior starts getting ethically tricky.

3) Standards for Banning

Being banned on some sites means being banned from their entire family of services. Meta in particular holds a lot of enforcement power because of the vast array of products it has (Instagram, Facebook, VR services, etc.) and some cost money. Unknowingly violating the ToS of a site could result in being kicked from multiple other places.

This also creates the problem of restricting access to ‘official channels’ of businesses or the government. As said above, some businesses want people to be able to reach them on social media. Oftentimes tweeting at a company gets them to respond quicker. Getting banned for something unrelated restricts access to help.  

4) Genuine Conspiracies

Conspiracies about everything from Flat Earth and Indigo Children to Cambridge Analytica and 9/11 Trutherism riddle social media. Cults can recruit through Facebook now! On an even larger scale, misinformation campaigns designed to undermine elections or start fearmongering also target the people on Facebook.

Big sites make a better target for the big, organized attacks using deliberate misinformation, although small sites are not immune to it – on a forum like Reddit, where everyone is a stranger and everyone is on the same standing, arguing something insane but confidently can sway people who’d never agree with someone who was standing right in front of them, saying the same thing.

5) Trends In Site Design

You may have noticed that Instagram and Tumblr both became more video-focused after the success of TikTok. Facebook launched Threads after it started to look like Elon Musk’s “X” (formerly Twitter) might stop holding the average Twitter user’s attention. Most major social media works with the same handful of advertisers, and most have similar, but not identical, designs. 

When something is trending and working for another big website, the other big websites want to hop on and do the same, whether their original userbase wanted that or not.

Getting a Bit Too Casual With Data

Elizabeth Technology September 14, 2023

“Normal” Discourse

The internet is not and has never been a place of decorum and manners. Small pockets can be – big open areas accessible to everyone are not.

Direct, face-to-face society requires one set of rules, between strangers at the grocery store or family eating dinner together. Familiar, non-anonymous internet requires another – Discord servers and forums expect a certain level of politeness from members, but it’s a little looser than face-to-face. Jokes might be a bit ruder, and advice might be blunter, but that can be a good thing if users are trying to be constructive instead of destructive. Tone tags, a recent development that has been semi-successfully introduced in these tide-pool like communities, help ease communication further.

Past that, we get into public social media. To say people are ruder (both by accident and on purpose) is an understatement. While most people are nice just because they are, there is a small percentage of people who are nice to avoid social consequences, and once they think those consequences won’t apply, they start trolling. They may not even be doing it on purpose! The online public assumes bad faith. If something can be read wrong, it will be.

As a general trend, the bigger an online community or space gets, the worse the mood gets. Strangers get meaner to other strangers than they do to their online friends or strangers in real life. They’re more casual. They’re ‘stans’, hyper-fans of their favorite singer, who will defend them from any criticism to the death. They’re bizarrely obsessed with correcting information in forums that don’t have the space for nuanced discussions of the thing being corrected. In real life, they’re polite, but online, they don’t need to be. There aren’t any consequences outside of a potential blocking. That is, until terrible data security comes into play.

Bad Data Security

The online public is rapidly approaching the same information saturation as the in-person public. Trolls used to be mostly anonymous – now, when someone leaves a weird or mean comment on someone else’s Instagram or TikTok page, there’s a solid chance they’ve left their real name, video footage of their face, and possibly footage showing the outside of their home or major local landmarks somewhere on their profile. You could find that person. This is no longer a fuzzy, indistinct image of someone smashing on their keyboard from their parent’s attic – it’s a thirteen-year-old who just posted about their football team winning the regionals, and the guy in the Tiger mascot suit totally tripped and scraped up the head part when they all went to a local family burger joint named ‘Buckley’s Burgers’ on Swanrise Blvd. after the game ended at 8 PM, Eastern time. Their full name is in their bio, as well as their diagnosis of anxiety and their real age. Friends of theirs are shown on their profile. They probably even have their Instagram linked. Anyone could find this kid. It would be a matter of three Google searches to find the town that restaurant is in, schools in the area, and then which of those schools has a tiger mascot. That’s all it would take.

Nightmare Combination

Being so casual online about being mean, and also being so casual about the data they’re releasing, makes doxxing and cyberbullying easier than ever. The average cyberbully has enough semi-private information to send their target into a breakdown. Sure, everyone knows that people are mean online, but the data – that’s totally new. This upcoming generation of children has not been taught to avoid sharing this data. The generation of adults currently making up most of the internet does not care anymore. Constant whistleblowing about how Facebook is harvesting everyone’s data has made the average Redditor, TikToker, Instagrammer, et cetera complacent about what they’re sharing because ‘Facebook knows anyway’. Yeah – but Facebook is selling to advertisers, not giving this information freely to people who would just love to make a point out of showing up somewhere to bump into their nemesis in public.

Worse, some corners expect users to freely give out info that could put them in danger for safety’s sake. Age is a big one: labelling accounts run by minors as such is supposed to keep both adults and those minors safe, without forcing either of them off the platform. Adults can block minors, and minors can block adults, and both get to stay in their bubble and only interact with who they are ‘allowed’ to. But it doesn’t actually work that well. Firstly, kids lie about their age to get accounts with more permissions all the time, and secondly, adults do too! Having a minor marked as a minor is not a magic forcefield protecting them from harm. The same goes for mental illnesses, neurodivergencies, disabilities, and more. Demanding these labels be in a bio before a member is allowed to comment in a forum or on a video means that member now has to show the entire online public that they may be easy to lie to, that they could seize if DM’ed pictures of flashing lights, that certain pictures or audio clips might trigger PTSD episodes, and more.

If you’re a part of these platforms, remember – you don’t owe strangers anything more than base-level politeness!

Clapback Culture

Elizabeth Technology September 7, 2023

In Good Faith

The culture of the clapback has been around for far longer than social media. It’s the snappy one liner that turns an argument, the callout for hypocrisy or manipulation that makes it clear to passerby the other guy is a fool. It goes back far enough that it’s written into myth! For example: it is rumored that Diogenes barged into the philosopher Plato’s lecture with a plucked chicken, shouting “Behold! A Man!”, after Plato defined a human as a featherless biped. That could be considered a clapback.

Plato and Diogenes knew each other pretty well, and Plato’s students knew of Diogenes well enough to know he was a nuisance, albeit a funny one. He was a philosopher, but he was also mostly just some guy, and by poking holes in the way Plato and others were attempting to define the world, he was forcing them to come up with better answers to these questions of meaning. His approach fundamentally altered theirs, and they were forced to consider ‘what is Diogenes going to say about the thing I’m saying?’ when pondering before sharing their ideas.

How Does That Work Out Online?

The spiritual identity of the clapback has not actually changed that much since Roman times. What has changed is the way we talk to each other in general. Social media makes reaching for clapbacks about a person’s background significantly easier than it was even ten or twenty years ago, and what people are calling clapbacks are becoming less like what Diogenes was doing to Plato and more like… doxxing, and/or bullying, especially now that the average Instagram user is much worse about data privacy than they were even five years ago. As a result, people online who think they’re making a clapback are given a huge arsenal of information to hurt the poster with, and end up overstepping a snappy comeback well into cyberbullying.

These two things have not combined well at all!

 TikTok is a shining example of this poor mix. It’s filled with kids, teens, and young adults who don’t think twice about edgy jokes and also don’t think about their posting history. In a world where clapback videos go viral on the app, it is inevitable that some of the people trying desperately to get internet famous off of the philosophy are going to completely miss the point. Instead of calling out hypocrisy, or forcing people to think through what they’re saying before they say it, they just point at something unrelated and say ‘haha, blue hair. Opinion Irrelevant’. It’s usually done to negative comments, but there’s a spectrum to how negative a comment is, and some don’t deserve what they get back in response. Especially since it’s so hard to tell when someone is actually saying something seriously, or if they’re just trying to be sarcastic and failed. There is a view- and like-based incentive to read things wrong and overreact. While commenting on a mental illness a troll has written in their bio stops them from commenting, so would blocking them.

One example: a user on TikTok made a video of a teen’s profile where a dove emoji and the phrase ‘fly high [name]’ were visible in their bio. That’s generally recognized online as a memorial for a dead loved one. That user made the video to make fun of the kid for daring to comment anything even slightly mean when they had a memorial on their profile. Another one came from ‘person A’ posting a video of themselves, and ‘person B’ leaving a vaguely impolite comment about their hair, not the subject of the video but certainly visible enough in it to comment on. Person A then proceeded to dig through a full year of Instagram photos to find a single image in which self-harm scars were barely visible in order to mock person B… for making a hair joke.

That is an insane thing to do! Worse, since neither of these were obvious grabs, it’s not even really a clapback. It’s just being mean.

Is There Room For Better Clapbacks on Social Media?

The thing about clapbacks is that they’re usually funny for most of the parties involved, even the person getting it. Someone has said something dumb or lacking self-awareness, and someone else points it out. The humor is in finding an obvious contradiction, not just saying something mean in return! For maximum effect, it has to actually be related. Diogenes storming in with a chicken, calling it a man using Plato’s criteria, is funny. Commenting on a dead relative being dead? Not really, once the shock wears off. Clapping back on someone for commenting on your hair when you both have goofy hairstyles? That’s funny. Digging through a year of photos for a 15 second response video? A lot of work for basically no real payoff.

When Does DIY Not Make Anything for Anyone?

Elizabeth Technology September 5, 2023

Do It Yourself (If You Dare)

It’s no secret that a swarm of content creation accounts have made huge empires out of making things on camera. The twist, however, is that the final product is either dangerous, flimsy, or not even useful at all. You can repair flip flops with hot glue! You can make secret shelves with hot glue! You can make little dinosaur planters with hot glue! Hot glue is like 3D printing for people who don’t have a 3D printer! Don’t even get me started on the microwave. Ignore all of the people maimed by hot oil or microwaved eggs.

The content is usually either deeply unhelpful, targeted towards people with specific fixations, barely possible, or moderately dangerous. Lipstick shoes! DIY oil popcorn cookers made out of soda cans! Microwaved poached eggs! Why don’t you go ahead and pop the transformer out of your microwave and use it to burn wood? It’s only like, what, 2000 volts? It’ll kill you, and it’ll hurt the whole time it’s doing it, but the burned wood looks so cool!

This is rage bait. Cheap content not meant for humans to actually absorb and make use of. It didn’t start that way – those channels used to produce content that was bad, but still doable. When they started getting bad, or when people tried to recreate them in a funny way, Youtube (and other social media platforms) started promoting them to the front page because they were getting a lot of views and a lot of interaction. Ironically, by trying to show people how dumb and un-useful the hacks were, commentary channels only gave them strength.

Ragebait is great for views. Ridiculous stuff that could harm people trying to recreate it is also great for views. They don’t think you’ll actually make any of the stuff they feature in the video, but hey, even if you do, you’ll credit them and film it. Right? So they don’t actually need to make videos about DIYs that work.

Good channels showing projects you can do yourself still exist, but the big content farms seem to go out of their way to avoid making useful things. Nothing online can be taken at face value.

Do It Yourself (But Don’t Copy Pls)

Even when the DIYers are showing people things they made that do work, sometimes they don’t mean for other people to actually Do It Themselves. Two DIY TikTok accounts run by people with similar visions for their homes have come into conflict on TikTok: Kaarin Joy, a DIYer, was recently accused of copying TayBeepBoop, another DIYer. Both have posted videos about turning their houses into their dream homes, and both are maximalists.

Maximalism as it exists today draws in a lot of bright colors and wacky, strange, and fun furniture. There are different flavors of it (There’s a sort of Victorian kind, a Boho kind, etc.) but these two both went to the Nickelodeon School of maximalism. One cohesive color palette, a commitment to squiggly lines, and a bunch of brightly colored plastic decorations. Tay received DMs from fans framing Kaarin’s work as “an exact copy” of Tay’s projects, and decided to go through Kaarin’s account and point out the similarities as well as blocking her in a callout video. Were there similarities? Yes. Both are maximalists. Both post DIY content explaining how they did what they did. Both like the color green. Both have orange couches and both created a furniture item that could be described as a ‘moss mirror’.

But having the same style (maximalism) is not the same as copying. Tay’s moss mirror and Kaarin’s moss mirror are both the results of improvising around different problems, and they look completely different for both being the ‘same thing’. The people who tattled on Kaarin for copying were correct on a surface level, but not any deeper. Of course there’s overlap: they both like the same style. It’s like calling out a minimalist for using a lot of white in their decorating.

Even if Kaarin was copying, Tay is a content creator who shows people how she put together her home step by step! If she’s not creating stuff she intends for other people to DIY themselves, she’s doing a bad job of warning them off of it. Tay said she wasn’t even aware of Kaarin until the DMers offered her up as a copycat. Tay then went in expecting to see a shameless copier and didn’t give benefit of the doubt. Tay seems reasonable most of the time, but in this case she was pointing out years-old maximalist trends and furniture colors as evidence of copying. Furniture colors! If you were to buy an orange couch, and put some art behind it, you might be copying Tay. If you were to buy Tay’s wallpaper, which is not only in her house but also something she sells, then you’re definitely copying. Again, I want to believe the person doing the call-out didn’t actually look at what they were calling out. If she was actually saying ‘this wallpaper is copying’, she would be tacitly saying ‘don’t buy my wallpaper’. That just doesn’t make any sense. The drive to create content trips plenty of people up across all genres.

This conflict is almost inconsequential, a result of many thousands of people running out of freshly made TV drama to watch thanks to a strike and turning to online drama instead, but at the same time, deciding that using the same trends to get the same rough vibe in your house is somehow wrong is indicative of a deeper problem with creators. She knew it was petty (she says so in the video), but instead of blocking and moving on, she made a video about it. Personal twists on a larger idea are essential to style movements, not a problem with them.

DIY For Who?

Most DIY content is made, liked, and saved aspirationally. There are so many people with so many cool tips for fixing drywall, or painting a table, or doing something cool with pictures on a wall. The average person is not buying tables every two weeks and patching drywall every three days, though! The DIY content treadmill is a strange place to be, full of strangers who are looking to the creator for tips and tricks on things they may do later, or even admit in the comment section that they have no use for at all, and simply watched because the process was cool.

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