Category: Other Page 18 of 182

Via Perplexity.ai query on the topic, it did a good job summarizing.

The dark forest theory of the internet posits that users are retreating to private, closed online spaces to avoid the hostile environment of the public internet. This theory draws its name from Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel, where civilizations hide to avoid detection by potentially hostile aliens.

Key aspects of the dark forest theory include:

1. Users seek shelter in private channels like Slack, WhatsApp groups, Discord chats, and invite-only message boards.
2. These “dark forests” provide psychological and reputational safety, allowing users to be more authentic.
3. The public internet is seen as a competitive, predatory space filled with advertisers, bots, trolls, and attention-seeking behavior.
4. Communication in public spaces is viewed as risky, potentially exposing one’s existence to hostile entities.
5. This retreat to private spaces is a response to the increasing noise, manipulation, and surveillance on mainstream platforms.

I’ve definitely been feeling this and reacting accordingly for years and years, and even more so lately, as I trust less and less mainstream apps in the hostile information space opening up to us in the coming months. I’m mostly abandoning Slack for that reason, and for it being an over-priced way to keep in touch with a small group of friends. I will be setting up the end-to-end encrypted Rocket Chat on a Digital Ocean droplet in the coming days, and have corralled some other remainder Dark Forest activity over to Signal.

Jay Springett has a good audio piece on this topic here as well. Worth a listen:

Looks like this 2019 post from Y Strickler is one of the original pieces on this topic, some choice quotes:

Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet, because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay quiet. […]

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. […]

These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. […]

Love this, another awesome blog site that has no tracking or analytics, like my own.

If yer wondering how I know Blogroll.org’s traffic levels, where folks are coming from, email open rates, etc.? I have no freakin’ idea and I’m okay with that.

It’s actually quite liberating. You should try it, too.

Besides way back in the beginning, websites had no clue either. Old school, baby!

Mentioned that I have quit checking news recently (and in fact blocked the sites I used to check using a Firefox extension called Leechblock to remind me of this decision). But I still need “something” to check in on to keep a loose contact at least with the outside world. I’m not on social media anymore though, so that isn’t an option. Too toxic, too full of bullshit & algorithm chasing. So what have I filled the gap with?

Two things. First is my regular Fraidycat RSS headline feed. When I find interesting sites, I plug them in there to keep track of them over time. This used to be sort of an after-thought after checking the news. But now it is one of the main jams. Second is a site called ooh.directory and its recently updated page, which acts as a sort of aggregator of the latest posts by blogs which have submitted their URLs to the directory (there’s also a page for newly added blogs, and a page for a random set). It’s kind of like an old-school blog aggregator, and because included sites seem to be largely self-selected by contributors, its overall content quality is high, and also pretty random. Because of its format also, it seems to not have really any of the drama (that I can tell) which you might be inundated with on social media.

I do still occasionally look at random news articles that might come up incidentally as part of checking my regular RSS sources, but I no longer seek it out, and frankly don’t plan to go back to it any time soon. This new configuration seems a lot healthier.

Source:

See, The Algorithm is doing more than shaping your feed. The Algorithm is shaping you, and everyone on the Social Network. The Algorithm rewards and punishes us at random, leaving us to guess what the secret factors are. The Algorithm encourages us to self-censor, or to create content we don’t care about. We just want to be heard. We just want to share and connect with friends. The Algorithm knows this and knows how far we’re willing to go to get what we desire.

Well, I refuse to be a slave to The Algorithm. I’m not going to try to guess what The Algorithm wants. I’m not going to play its games.

I realized I feel completely calm after the initial sadness. Why worry about the Apocalypse once its underway? Dystopia is my “wheelhouse” and something which I am oddly adapted to handle. This is what I’ve trained for all this time. I don’t have to wonder and worry anymore about which timeline I’m in (the hell one), just harden down for a very long winter. Gonna read Radio Free Albemuth again. Aramchek forever!