Publicly free content from users devolves to garbage content. I think the Chat GPT effect is they're realizing its easier for companies/entities to generate garbage that is at or exceeding the intelligence of comments by actual people (a low bar). Sure there are pockets of usefulness but this is tiny amongst the firehose of garbage.
If all that is publicly available on social platforms is just garbage nonsense, people will just stop going if any barrier is thrown in front of them. The internet as a technology stack is fine. This is how social media dies (hopefully).
A potential saving grace: I bet within a year or so it will be easy to self-host LLMs that are easy to fine tune and run. Then there will be a few open source tools that you can use yourself, privately, to capture your level of interest while reading, and periodically make a reader/summarize/filter agent.
This is not scary if people can fairly easily run it all themselves, keeping their data private. It would help wade through crap, and there is some irony in using LLMs to have personal filtering and summarization.
Compared to future versions of ChatGPT, Bard, etc. the models that individuals can self host will be much weaker, but I think that they will be strong enough for personal agents and eventually be cheap to run, and affordable to fine tune.
On every large platform, this hasn't been the majority for a long time.
Hah, this might mean that we'd be one step closer to the dead internet (conspiracy) theory actually being reality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
What an interesting concept.
The clock is ticking until you’ll need to decide which internet package you prefer, based on content providers and limited by region.
At least Yahoo will probably come free with the base package.
Those sites never fit my definition of open anyway (free, permissively licensed technology and content). The ones that do are smaller, aren't a monoculture and seem to be pretty untroubled so far. No one wants to scrape the little Mastodon or Lemmy instances or other small community sites I pay attention to.
Big deal if something is a threat to the social media business. The social media business is a cancer which should be destroyed anyway. Go outside and engage in real socializing instead of the depression-spawning, teen-girl-murdering version peddled by Zuckerberg and Musk. It's much better and once you change your habits you'll never look back. Maybe it has something to do with all the vitamin D you get from being outside.