855 karma · joined August 9, 2013
Mastodon isn't the entirety of the Fediverse and is decentralized, so artists can just start create their own instance if they really need to. But, there are actually already multiple art related instances, like mastodon.art.
> "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here". "Always Raining Here" is a Canadian slice of life romance published in 2025 by First Second books and is now available in bookstores across Canada. Hazel and Bell have been working together since 2011, with a focus on telling stories set in their home province of British Columbia."
I wonder if it's something region specific.
> La tienda en línea ha sido suspendida momentáneamente
> Si es tuya y quieres reactivarla, entra a tu Administrador Nube.
> ---
> The online store has been momentarily suspended
> If it's yours and you want to reactivate it, go to your Cloud Manager.
Edit: I'm assuming they were using some kind of site builder with ecommerce functionality, I know that some small creators use their site at least in part for merch, sometimes entirely.
I was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.
For context, oembed data about your page could be seen as information you're basically happy to share, so other sites can create things like previews.
That's not necessary, there are other companies that just use different UA strings for the different tasks. They appear to deliberately make it so that if you have nothing to do with Meta and block their content scrapers, you also break basic functionality for people who happen to share a link to your site in their products.
For applications people spend a expected to spend a lot of time in, the user may even be able to select the theme.
But, things like CSS custom properties have eaten into some of the basic use cases like palette swaps, assuming they're supported in the default theme.
> you didn't create anything in this case. Not the images at least. Which then casts doubt on the rest of the writing in said blog post.
The topic is "AI-generated images" in blog posts. Which, no, most of those aren't being generated with any of the more sophisticated techniques you're listing. And if they are, they're less likely to be the images people are complaining about and that are being discussed here.
People are complaining that search engines are overwhelmed by AI-generated writing and images. Several people in this thread are stating that they click-off when they see it. It may be developing similar to banner ad blindness, where people saw the pattern of spam and low quality output and developed a reflexively mental filter and stronger dislike of them. What number of potential readers is an acceptable loss? Most blogs are small, so probably not many. But even worse, as many have said here, it also harms their perception of the blog.
Outside of the many outright spam blogs generating tons of images, a lot of people creating the "AI-looking" art that people say looks "bad" or "obvious" are actually also putting time and energy into it too. Those things don't automatically equal quality or trust. In some cases they consider themselves the serious AI artists. These creators don't always know that their images "look like AI," which is part of why it's becoming a perceived quality signal. They'll say it doesn't, but people mistake some of my pieces (not AI) as AI. Art is in the eye of the beholder. (Incidentally, if you're reading this, ensure you're actually getting meaningful, critical critique and feedback. That's something that's an important cultural component in many creative communities.)
I take issue with how poorly phrased the comment's arguments are. Saying that people "didn't create anything if they used Photoshop", they didn't create with whatever "synth" is supposed to be, or that scientific research isn't real because of calculators are bad comparisons and inaccurate.
The author may be trying to make a point similar to the photography one mentioned elsewhere or something like "Well if AI generated art isn't art, art must not exist?" I'm literally confused by the post and honestly can't make out the point with how hyperbolic and outright wrong it is. It just reads as mud-slinging to me.
> What about the synth example
Does "synth" mean synthesized music? What about it? A synthesizer is generally deterministic and the musician is making a decision about exactly what nodes are being played. The use of something like an arpeggiator is predictable and deliberate choice (I'm not going to go into the artistic integrity tier list of every synthesizer module.) Text prompt-based generation is a much higher level of abstraction which often makes several compositional and stylistic decisions for the user, even with advanced prompting.
Comparisons like these are unconvincing, which is part of why the other comment isn't good.
For some group of users, images they perceive as "AI" now carry a spam association. So, is your music actually rising above the cacophony? Do people even see your banner ad? Do they instantly get a bad taste in their mouth?
Go ahead and use AI-images in your blog post, I'm not gatekeeping or going to stop you. If they're so great, use a bunch of them everywhere. But, I (and people in this thread or that I know) will assume it's blogspam and click away. And, if it's commercial setting and I'm your competitor, I'm going to view that as potential opening for differentiation.
- Doesn't come across as consistent: You said pictures "serve as a great intro," making them a valuable addition, but simultaneously "nobody" is going to take the time to draw them? Why wouldn't an author take the time if pictures are such a great addition to their piece?
- It's also not true: you said "nobody" does this. I'm telling you I have. Here's another example[0] in this very thread of somebody who does the thing you're claiming "nobody" does.
Aside from that, the amount of time it took to write the post isn't even necessarily relevant. I think for many it's about trying to fully express an idea, presentation, enjoyment, clarity, compulsion, polish, [display in search results], or 100 other things.
People did it before and they do it now. Everybody doesn't do it, but it's not true that "nobody" does it. That could be part of why people's brains are honing in on it as a heuristic.
If pictures are so important, why would "nobody... take the time to hand draw a piece of art" or find a one of the many free stock photos? When I was actively blogging, I would doodle quick images to include all the time for this precise reason.
[Edit: Further, these don't really line up with what the comment you're responding to is saying. If all you did was write a prompt for an image, it gives the impression that you may have done the same for the text. At that point, if I care about what the AI has to say, I can just write a prompt to an AI myself.]
Would you please expand on that line of thinking?
Does this come off as wildly tone deaf to anybody else? "We love your product and what you do, but could we get it without associating with or paying you in any way?"
> ...Smaller and faster means more financially feasible so we can give better wages for artists and enable a new industry to thrive in the US.
I've been in Asia this week, speaking to artists and creators. The traditional systems do create challenges, but this just sounds like a U.S. AI-based company giving itself carte blanche to steal the cultural output of another country, wrap it up in and U.S. style business, and eventually push existing artists or long standing studios out of the space.
No, I don't think I want a smaller team of artists and animation professionals doing art and animation. That feels like a very sloppy outlook to me.
[Edit: While I'm sure the process is interesting for some, the introduction especially just leaves me wondering who thought this writing sounded good? Maybe the target market for this is AI investors or people who aren't actually interested in the artistic part of things, and that's why I find it such a turn-off.
E.g. "We could license good music," implying their music is bad? Maybe it would be less jarring if they didn't specifically call out the importance of writing?]
- Shutting down accounts with almost no way to recover them and nobody to talk to.
- Going back on promises of unlimited storage when you buy their products, then constantly nagging you about storage space.
- The worsening quality of search results.
- Cramming incorrect AI answers into the top of their search results, or pushing it in other products.
- Using their control over Chrome to try and end ad blocking.
- The wholesale enshittification and lobotomization of YouTube.
- They have $1800 phones they're putting restrictions around being able to run your own code on.
- The fact that when you search an app in the Play store, the first result is an ad for some other app.
- Their UIs is just death by 10,000 papercuts in general.
- Their engagement in politics, not just lobbying but a donation of $1 million to the inauguration fund for a wildly unpopular president.
[Modern] Google is a big company, with a lot of users, and more than enough problems for those users to eventually stumble into at least one thing that leaves a bad taste in their mouth.
But, public hospitals with low or no cost care exist in some of these places, and from my observation, I do currently think it's a contributing factor to why small businesses are more likely to exist. But, it's only one knob to turn.
"Passive income brain" people are not the only one's trying to "build revenue engines," that same sort of talk exists in corporate America. There are already people that that own companies which are there "to generate passive income for me," right now--there's a whole class of millionaires and billionaires that don't have to work. Passive income people didn't ruin the "content quality of the entire internet" and are far from the only ones doing so. Many of these folks are likely the ones that would have owned a hardware store if America didn't ignore it's regulatory duties while preaching about how "important" small business is.
In the U.S. situation really seems to have fossilized into a few big players/platforms, and they continue to freeze up through the process of things like private equity roll-ups. There's a thread on the front page right now about Amazon's alleged price-fixing tactics, which hurt customers and small businesses. Further: Real-estate is an investment, so for most being able to pay commercial rents is a pipe dream. Healthcare is tied to employment, so people are less free to try and start something other than "on the side."
American's choose "convenience" when shopping and to put people in power that serve these large companies or their owners, not small businesses or communities. Dropshipping, creating a "sweaty startup," etc... it's all just people trying to make do within the system they're trapped in.
Using them can be a pain with the whole cat and mouse thing, but at least it's something (for now... I wouldn't be shocked if google was partially gunning for projects like NewPipe specifically with the Android app installation changes.)
Some people are focusing on the first sentence, but I think this part is key. Obviously, if it's a good idea and you're putting in the work, that's probably a good direction. Critique is useful, defending an idea can help prevent you from being blindsided and help to hone your vision.
One of the things a lot of people seem to struggle with is knowing when it's worth it to keep going and when to let go. When working on something, there can be a lot of people coming from all sides saying, "this won't work," "this will work if you just stick with it", "actually, you're just missing X." There's a lot of noise, and the pushback can be fairly cliche at times.
Sometimes, things like you've mentioned like lack of experience will block them. But, depending on how strongly somebody feels about a concept, when they don't necessarily know if it's a good idea, they may just nurture it and see how everything plays out. It's okay if some things fail.
While I'm sure they do want those abilities, I follow the new tab often that I disagree. And frankly, I don't really have any reason to trust what you're peddling.
Or, based on this thread from yesterday, the fresh accounts are bots and/or disinformation: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes[0].
> the people on it are just so far away from what me (and men my age) deem interesting and seem to be hostile to anything that doesnt fit their very restrictive ideals.
Okay. If you don't want to participate, don't. But, if your other comment about wanting to see a more diverse audience join was honest, then do. Either way.
There's traction. There's a user base. There are people enjoying and getting use out of it. There's plenty of communities and relationships that will go on just fine regardless of what you decide.
You seem to be frustrated about something, maybe that the fediverse isn't matching Facebook in size? It won't. It probably can't, since the commercial incentives aren't there. But, at no point does that invalidate what exists.
That's all I'm going to say about it.
I often talk to people about Signal irl, most download the app but some folks do. Some people actually want a For You feed and will bounce off Loops, Mastodon, or whatever. That's all fine. These spaces can have content about cars or guns or whatever else without eating the entire world.
You said:
> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.
Again, I think lots of people who are already in the Fediverse want that. But, if everybody who likes cars decides they won't join in until somebody who shares content about cars does, that car community may never show up.
You seem to have interests that you feel are undeserved. Just... regularly share things about what you think is cool. Just do it for funsies.
If you really feel strongly about wanting to make a diverse space, cross promote your stuff in spaces with other people who have the same interests. Share a post, share a video, ask them to follow you. Maybe even start an instance dedicated to the topic if that's your vision.