this forum has gotten quieter than it used to be?

Just how many more posts do you see as a supporting member versus a regular one?
 
Stogies said:
Just how many more posts do you see as a supporting member versus a regular one?
Click to expand...
A lot more.

Besides, it's only $20 to see for yourself. Not a lot of risk for potential reward.
 
Last edited:
Stogies said:
Just how many more posts do you see as a supporting member versus a regular one?
Click to expand...
Many, honestly
The benefits are well worth it
Better deals on items here, more free stuff offered, more forums, and youre contributing to a place that brings you great joy for the cost of a lunch out, basically.
 
There's also a secret member's only lounge with Totino's pizza rolls, Evian bottled water, and a therapy dog.

The pizza rolls have been cooked in the oven rather than the microwave so they aren't hot as lava on the outside and cold as ice in the middle.
 
I see more posts now but not that many more...
 
Stogies said:
I see more posts now but not that many more...
Click to expand...
There are 126.7K posts you can now see that you couldn't see before. 6.2K threads.

This reminds me of the breakfast scene from Reservoir Dogs.
 
Last edited:
Exspiravit said:
The pizza rolls have been cooked in the oven rather than the microwave so they aren't hot as lava on the outside and cold as ice in the middle.
Click to expand...
Air fried bagel bites > whatever the heck you just described
 
hiddencomplexity.substack.com

The dead internet - Or how culture will forever be changed

"Why break when you can divide it"
hiddencomplexity.substack.com hiddencomplexity.substack.com

Certain topics are rather timely, and no other topic fits the times than the topic of “The Dead Internet Theory”. First, as usual, a bit of history is necessary since this is a very niche part of net history. Even if at a superficial level, understanding Imageboard's self-contained culture, and its impact on culture itself is necessary. There a significant reasons why each and every single Large Language Model is trained on a corpus of scrapped data from 4chan. Terabyte worth of data.

From a descriptive perspective, Imageboards such as 4chan have been at the forefront of culture for the most part since their inception. The influence of specific boards (imagine a smaller section of the website centered around specific themes) has always been influential and disproportionate to its size, a true lesson is cascade effects in complex networks. How a small, secluded node of a system “affects” the rest. No wonder the UN, think tanks and even the DoD poured a few hundred million dollars (total) since 2015 into “researching” the boards.



It would take months to dissect each common, pop culture, or even niche “belief” that arose from image boards, but one in particular bears more weight today, than at the time—the Dead Internet Theory. I have the original post here, somewhere, but given how extensive my Imageboard dataset is, there is a chance close to 0 of me finding it. The original post was many years older than the following one, but they are close.






The text is loaded with Imageboard vernacular, and with the conspiracies that often are common among the crowd, but the brunt of the hypothesis is there. Ignore the conspiratorial part, focus on the prescient nature of the text. At the time of the original post, before 2014, I thought that was far-fetched, we were not even close to that level of capability, and we didn’t have the compute.



For quantifiability, a GPU today is as powerful as a 15 million dollar supercomputer of 2015, the disparity in computing power is hard to grasp sometimes. So what could explain the discrepancies in content quality, or what we call what is, or feels organic (made by humans), and what it is not (synthetic) ?
 
And it really has - today I have just 5 pages of new posts and they are 90% stuff for sale.
 
Stogies said:
I am doing what I can!
Click to expand...
61mDg+ANyAL.jpg
 
I'll throw out a pet theory/unpopular opinion? In earlier days there weren't 28 blogs and 72 1/2 YouTube channels devoted to every single niche topic on the face of the earth the way that there are now. In those times, one might visit a message board to share or look for advice on something firearms-related. Now, it's just about the least efficient way to convey information.

For example, you might hypothetically post a thread asking for an opinion on a specific product that's been on the market for a while. If the post generates a moderate level of interest, you'll likely end up with about 30 responses that shake out something like this:

-10-15 of the responses will be from people who have no firsthand experience with the topic at hand but will throw that "they heard..."
-10-15 responses will be completely unrelated tangents
-The remaining handful of posts will be by people that are actually adressing the topic with firsthand experience, but very few people reading the post will have any sense of what level of expertise is being brought to bear to answer the question.

In summary, you can get an iffy answer to a question over the course of a week or two from a message board, or you can google that same question and find the same or better information from a known-quantity source.

Beyond advice/experience posts, it seems like pretty much everything else devolves into something political, which is pissing into the wind 100% of the time.

That really just leaves BST as the single feature that shines vs better and/or more readily available sources of information.

Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom