Transcription
If you go and use Google search right now, you'll find that it doesn't really work anymore. At the top of your page is almost always going to be this AI generated summary. And if you're looking for something like a business, like I was looking for a dog groomer near Austin, you're going to find most of the top results are sponsored. So, they're results that someone paid to show you rather than necessarily the best results.
If you go on Amazon, you'll find something similar. I had to go and buy slippers for my father-in-law cuz he's staying with us and he wanted something to wear around the house. So, I typed in men's slippers and the first six results for men's slippers are all ads.
The internet has come to be dominated by all these big platforms and these big websites. We're on one of them right now. And the vast majority of these platforms, maybe even all of them, just seem to be getting worse. And I wanted to talk a little bit about why that is. And it was really helpful when I started trying to think about this that I started reading the work of Corey Dtoro. Doctoro came up with this really useful term called "inshitification." Dr. is a science fiction writer. I actually found out about Dr. O because of his stuff on DRM, like this story unauthorized bread. But he's also sort of a philosopher of the internet. He writes about how the internet used to be good, what went wrong, and what we could do to make it better. He noticed this pattern that platforms follow when they grow and they start to decline and they eventually die. Once you learn about this pattern, you see it everywhere.
So here's how do describes it briefly. Here is how platforms die. First, they are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die. You can see this pattern basically everywhere, but Amazon might be the easiest example.
So when Amazon first started about 30 years ago, it was just an online bookstore and it was actually a really useful thing to have. Before the internet, some books were just hard to find. It would take a long time for them to arrive. And so Amazon was like offering something that was valuable for customers. Amazon started growing very quickly and soon it was selling way more than books and it was selling just about everything. and it did everything it could to make Amazon the best choice or at least the easiest choice for customers. And sometimes this would even go as far as selling products at a loss. They were trying to undercut their competition and just see, you know, who would go out of business first. The goal was just to get as many people as possible to start using Amazon. And that's because platforms like Amazon and Facebook, basically any online service, benefit from something called network effects. These platforms become more valuable and useful to individuals when more people are using them. Facebook is basically useless if none of your friends have Facebook accounts. But then once everybody has a Facebook account, it becomes very hard to not have one. I remember like back when I was in college, maybe I'm showing my age a little bit here, but this was where parties were planned. So if there was going to be a party that weekend, often times you found out about it because someone would make a Facebook event. When I deleted my Facebook account in college, I had to then rely on like word of mouth to find parties. So those platforms were kind of sticky. They keep you there. The fact that everybody is on those platforms makes you want to keep using them.
So these platforms need to do whatever they can to get a lot of people on very very quickly. And for a while they'll do this by making it just a really great deal for consumers. such a great deal in fact that we often don't think about the consequences of joining these platforms. In the case of Amazon, it means that most of the media that you buy is locked under some form of DRM or you are trapped permanently into Amazon's ecosystem. Lots of other places do this too. And for all these platforms as well, it's just true that they are collecting heaps of our personal information. We didn't we don't think about any of those consequences because these platforms are just so good to use at first. That's the first part of the sort of inshitification cycle.
The second stage is when platforms turn against their users and they start to abuse them. What happens is they start to prioritize business customers. Amazon actually literally would subsidize sellers for a long time. They had very low fees or they would make it really easy to sign on to like Audible or something and Amazon would cover some of the cost. But they have to promise things to their business customers which usually means that they make the user experience worse. This is when Facebook introduced an algorithm where they started suggesting content to you. And so Facebook instead of having a feed where you got to just see whatever your friends had posted with the intention of you reading it would now be cluttered with content from news organizations that Facebook just had thought might be relevant for you. We don't think about how big of a deal that shift was in the case of Facebook anymore because every platform is like this. YouTube is primarily driven by algorithmic recommendations. So is Twitter. So is Tik Tok. We take it for granted that this is just how the internet works. But actually it was a big shift and it was a move away from a kind of self-curated internet experience to an experience where it was mostly about serving businesses. These platforms become more businessfriendly and they become less user friendly.
So the platforms got the users in the first stage and then they started to abuse those users and bring on business customers and then they turn on the business customers and that's the third stage of the initification cycle. By then the platforms are so big that it's hard for users and for businesses to leave and so they are willing to put up with quite a bit of abuse because the leaving cost would be just so high and that's when for instance like in Amazon's case they can start jacking up the fees. I know people who sell on Amazon for a living or who built businesses doing this. I also know that Amazon can basically kill your business with fees or with a change to their algorithm. Amazon actually now makes billions of dollars by asking businesses that sell on Amazon to pay Amazon to be higher in the search results. The difference between being the first result on a page and the second result on the page is massive. So, you are highly incentivized to start paying Amazon in order to win. I mean, it's a pay to- win cycle. So, Amazon also made self-publishing easier than ever and actually help people build like real careers self-publishing. But now, you want to do whatever you can to be near the top of the search results in whatever micro genre you write in. One of the ways to be at the top of the search results is to pay Amazon. So, again, Amazon kind of introduced a payto-win component to their algorithm. I've heard from writers that these ads are actually almost never worth it. uh that discovery is just so bad that the ads just don't do much. But it seems to me that what has happened is that Amazon decided that they were going to take advantage of the desperation of these writers to gain some exposure. They do this to writers, but they also do this to small businesses and sellers.
On top of that, it seems like most of the results for a thing like a backpack on Amazon are going to be basically identical. They're going to be from brands that you've never heard of. And what I think is often happening is that these sellers are essentially just getting cheap goods sent over from overseas and then they are quickly relabeling it. And that's why you can buy 15 identical backpacks. The only thing that's different is the brand name that's on like a tag or a little label. It might not even be on the product itself. Then there's fierce competition between those brands to just be near the top of the search results. They know that this is a system that they're going to try to game and they're going to try to win. and it it's pretty cutthroat for them and it's really bad for users. But as long as Amazon remains just very convenient, people will stay. At this point, what you have is like this weird hostile relationship between users, businesses, and the platform. You've got three different groups. All of them are in some ways being hostile to each other. None of them are working together. And what benefits one group very rarely benefits the other two. The platforms and the businesses want to make users behave in a certain way by I don't know shoving ads down their throat. The businesses have to fight with the platform in order to stay alive. The businesses also have to fight with each other in order to compete. And the platforms just are trying to extract as much value as they can from both the users and the businesses in the process. And Dr. points out that this is a tight rope that these companies have to walk. And if a platform can't keep things perfectly balanced, that's when they die. one major scandal, one bad policy is enough to tip things over and eventually these platforms start to decay.
And I think he's right about this because I lived through one on the inside. So to explain this a little bit, I'm going to tell you a story about when I used to work in tech. So after grad school, I went into tech. Worst decision of my life, but I worked in tech for like 5 years. And in the middle of the pandemic, I started working at PayPal. PayPal is still around. PayPal has not died, but PayPal compared to what it used to be is a struggling company. There have been multiple rounds of layoffs and it seems like there's tons of competitors and people no longer think of PayPal as like the default payment processor on the internet. But when I joined PayPal in 2020 or so, it was amazing to be there because we felt like we were on top of the world. One of the ways that employees felt this was that we actually got our bonus in PayPal's stock and we would be told we would get this many shares and if the company was doing really well, they might double the amount of shares. If the company wasn't doing that well, they would lower it. Maybe you get zero cuz the company couldn't afford it. And there was at least one bonus cycle where I, who was kind of new to the company and hadn't done all that much, received a massive bonus because they doubled everyone's stock grant. And at the time, PayPal's shares were selling for like $250 or $300. Nowadays, PayPal sells at like $75. It's like a third of what it used to be. So, at least one time I got a really big payout from working in tech. I was able to sell almost at the peak for PayPal because I was new and my bonus wasn't like that big, but I paid off my credit cards and I bought a new guitar. Like, so it was a substantial bonus. And at the time, the old CEO of PayPal was just telling investors, "Hey, things were going nowhere but up. Things are looking good." Everyone was really optimistic. And then things took a turn. As soon as e-commerce started to slow down because people, you know, started going outside again, the stock starts to plummet and PayPal looks around, they get scared and they think, "How are we going to change things? How are we going to make more money?" And instead of, I don't know, making the platform better. It seemed like they just started to claw back as much value as they could from their users and those businesses. They raised seller fees. It seemed like it was getting harder for sellers to prevent scam, so it became a more hostile environment for them to do business. I always was keeping an eye online of what people were saying about PayPal. I started noticing people were just saying that it it felt more hostile and that uh they didn't feel good about using PayPal anymore and they wish there was an alternative.
So, when platforms start to decline like this, they get scared or as Dr. Oro jokes about it at a talk at Defcon, they start pivoting and they look for new ways to make money. You remember the Honey scandal that was online a couple of months ago? PayPal owns Honey. So, the money that Honey was making was actually money that PayPal was making. Around the time that the stock price was declining was also when PayPal introduced buy now pay later options and more credit options to get people to just spend as much money as they could on the platform. And they even launched a crypto wallet. Honey ripped off creators and people who use affiliate links. And it was not that good for consumers anyways. It wasn't actually offering much of value. Buy now pay later is a scam that is used to trap people into debt cycles. And PayPal's crypto wallet charged fees that were higher than places like Coinbase. There's no reason to use PayPal for this because the fees they were charging were significantly higher than a place like Coinbase. And then way after I left, PayPal launched its own crypto token. Like, who wants a crypto token from PayPal? You can kind of smell the panic. PayPal still exists, of course, but it's smaller than it used to be. And there are a lot of competitors, and I doubt PayPal is ever going to be able to bounce back. And maybe one day it's just going to wither away and die. I don't make predictions like that, but I don't know. I think they're too far gone. They got scared. They tried to extract too much value and they overplayed their hand. And that's how platforms start to die.
Now, when platforms are trying to extract as much value as possible from their users, one of the chief ways they do this is by showing more ads. You might have seen this number that says that the average person sees between 5,000 and 10,000 ads per day. I was like, "Wow, what a great statistic to be able to include in a video like this." Well, I decided to look into those numbers a little bit. And like a lot of things you read on the internet, it turns out to be basically made up. But even if it's not true that you're seeing 5,000 ads a day, it's almost certainly true that you're seeing more ads in your life now than ever. This isn't quite what Dr. O means by inchitification. But I think that the rise of ads in absolutely everything is just another example of internet decline. Because ads used to be the price that you paid for free content online. That was the bargain. Watch this free content like this YouTube video and you can compensate the person who makes it by watching some ads. Now though, you pay to remove ads from things you already paid for.
When online streaming started, one of the big value propositions for customers was that unlike cable, it didn't have ads. So you could just pay and you could simply watch what you paid for. Now, Netflix has ads unless you pay more. HBO Max has ads unless you pay more. Prime Video has ads unless you pay more. Even things like a Kindle from Amazon with books, you have to pay more if you want a version of the Kindle that doesn't have ads. If you just want to have a device that lets you read the books that you paid for and you don't want to be shown ads, you know, when you open it up, you have to pay an additional fee. But I actually think that HBO Max having ads is the one that like annoys me the most because HBO when it was a premium cable channel didn't have ads. So the the online streaming service is worse than the old cable channel. You know, I recently subscribed to HBO Max. Actually, I wanted to watch Righteous Gemstones and I ended up watching the final season and then I immediately canceled my subscription because I was constantly being inundated with ads. I'm paying you so that I can watch this show. It's not exactly like a cheap subscription and I have to watch ads in between episodes or I have to watch an extended ad so that I don't have ads breaking up the show itself. And these are shows that aren't made with advertisers in mind. They aren't made with those natural ad breaks like um like a network television show is. So, it felt even more unnatural. I mean, I was just I was just incredibly annoyed. I unsubscribed and I I I hope I have the willpower to never go back.
Let me be perfectly clear, though. Like, I make money from ads. Um, and I I always want to acknowledge this when I talk about this kind of stuff online. This is one of the paradoxes of my career. I often will make videos about how the internet is stealing your attention or the fact that you're being exploited so that people can make more money or the ways that you're becoming addicted to screens. And part of the reason that people want you to be addicted to screens is that it's going to make you, you know, more receptive to more ads. But my whole project is funded basically by people actually watching ads. I even take sponsors sometimes, too. though now I put the sponsors at the end so that you know if you really don't want to watch it there's something you can do and there have been some creators who get angry at their audiences who use ad block and I think often times it comes from a sense of survival it's them saying look I make money I can only do this if enough people watch ads and like that's true but if someone watches my videos and they're using an ad block I can't blame them that's because like the number of ads you see online is just egregious if ads were targeted They were really just the price you paid for free content. They were fairly minimal and they basically just really it felt like a fair exchange. Watch just a little bit of ads for free content, then I would I would say it would be reasonable. I wouldn't like it, but I could at least understand it.
I looked at the YouTube homepage and sometimes the entire top shelf is an ad. So, if you don't have YouTube Premium, this platform is overrun with ads these days. If you're looking, I don't know, at news articles, there are there are videos that start autoplay as you're scrolling a news article. Like, why is a video autoplay while I'm trying to read something? Well, it's autoplay because advertisers want to distract you and they want to get your attention. Going online without an ad block is like walking through Chernobyl without a hazmat suit. Like, I don't see how you survive.
So far, everything we're talking about basically is a product of corporate greed. Because platforms want to extract value from customers and businesses, and in fact, they want to extract as much value as possible, the experience of the internet just becomes progressively worse. There's one final aspect of this that I want to talk about. It's the role that AI and bots are playing in sort of the degradation of the online experience. It's common to hear about the dead internet theory. The idea that most of the content you see online is the product of bots of some kind. And in the last 5 years or so, I think people have become more open to the idea that most of what you experience online or some great proportion of it isn't being made by humans and for humans. There's some research that indicates sometimes upward of 50% of web traffic is just automated activity. I think like a year ago I would have laughed this off, but now I think it's almost certainly true.
YouTube and Tik Tok are flooded with AI generated content now. And unfortunately, like the problem is people love it. They love like the stupid AI baby Tucker Carlson yelling at AI baby Ted Cruz. They love the AI generated like young versions of celebrities. They love the AI nostalgia photos. They love the AI narrators telling Reddit stories over clips of Subway Server. They they eat it up. Sometimes it's because they can't tell it's AI generated, but some of this is so obviously AI generated. And the sad truth is that most users just don't care. People want to rant about AI slop and how it's making the internet worse, but for a huge portion of internet users, they don't see the problem. And there are strong economic incentives for this kind of content to just keep growing in scale. As long as you can monetize AI content on platforms like Tik Tok and YouTube, it will be economically rational to keep pumping out as much slop as you can.
I opened up YouTube the other day and I had some music recommended to me and I was going to do some writing later. So, I thought, "Okay, I'll listen to this synth music that YouTube recommended while I write." So, I start writing and I'm listening to it. And after a few minutes, I get this weird feeling like, "Am I listening to something that's made by AI?" And it turns out it was it was way buried in the description, but it was AI music has now flooded parts of YouTube. And they use they use AI to make the music. They use AI to make the album art. They use AI to make some animation so that the video looks a little bit more interesting than just a static image. And these accounts can post album length videos every couple of days. And I have a feeling it's probably the same people behind much of this content. So they're probably posting an album a day just across various accounts. It would be impossible for a human to make music that fast. So the people who are making this AI music, they don't need huge amounts of views or streams to profit because it's so cheap and easy to make. they can just flood platforms with this content and they'll quickly turn a small profit and eventually this will accumulate and they're going to get pretty rich off of this. I've even seen some reports that now Spotify has started making its own AI music and AI artist and letting it be streamed on Spotify. So basically they are cutting off the humans from the music making process and keeping all of the money for themselves. You know Spotify's big problem for their business model is that they have to pay for content. They have to pay bands or podcasters or whatever for the rights to let their music be streamed. They don't pay much per stream, but it adds up. I would bet this is Spotify's single biggest expense. If they could just replace those music artists with AI music, well, they're going to save so much money and they're going to make so much money for their shareholders.
Sometimes this becomes so absurd that it's it's hard not to laugh at it. After Twitter became X and suddenly they introduced monetization so accounts could actually make money from engagement on Twitter, the platform was flooded with AI content. I mean the platform was flooded with a lot of things after Twitter became X, but one of the things that it was flooded with was AI content. So some of this was just stolen content. They were using AI to edit it and maybe to, you know, do a few things to it to make it pass any kind of copyright filters. I know this because I've seen my own videos reposted on X. But a lot of it though was just AI writing tweets for people. So you would see someone using AI to write threads or to write breaking news tweets. If you look at those popular tweets underneath you'll find tens or hundreds of replies that all are kind of the same. They all sound the same. They all have this bland, soulless, repetitive cadence. And it's the exact cadence you get if you don't do any fancy prompting for chat GPT. And they just rewrite the original tweet or post a really small reaction to it. They make a dumb joke and then you see that seven other accounts made that same dumb joke because this AI is not particularly creative. And it gets enough engagement though that these accounts can make some money. So you have AI to write clickbait and then you have AI to repackage clickbait. You have AI like Grock, which we ask, you know, Grock, is this true? So they can fact check the clickbait. And then you have AI to summarize the whole exchange so that you don't actually have to read it. Eventually, this has to collapse. And I don't know how these platforms come back from it. They become so polluted with this content that eventually advertisers have to say like, wait, this is a scam, right? Like humans aren't actually reading this stuff. Like where is our money going? These platforms feel like they're going to burn down and then hopefully something better will rise from the ashes. But until then, this is the internet that we're left with.
Hey, hey, wake up. Hey, wake up. Smile for the camera. Because of the things that I've brought up in this video or things that I've talked about on this channel, you might think that I hate the internet. In fact, you might think that I think the internet should just be completely avoided. And so then you might wonder why I care. But the truth is I actually like the internet a good bit and I just wish it were better. One of the things that I like so much about reading do was that you could tell that he enjoyed the early days of the internet and he saw a decline and he thought what could we do to make an internet that we actually think is worthwhile. What I really what I really want to see is an internet that's pro-human. That is a place where humanity can go and thrive, not a place where we can just waste all of our time. It can be a place where we learn things or a place where we form connections, make friendships, share ideas. I think that the internet at its best can do all of those things and it's like wonderful technology, but if we're not careful, it's so easy for us to lose that. That's the internet that I want, but right now it's not the internet that we have. It's not as if this situation is inevitable. Hey, we could make a better internet.
And I think one of the best examples of an internet that's working to be better is Nebula. I mean, you've probably heard me talk about Nebula before. It's an independent creatorowned streaming platform. And it has many of my favorite, and I hope many of your favorite thoughtful creators, too. When I joined Nebula last year, I was happy to do it because it was a place where you could go and you could find, you know, video essays on things like culture, philosophy, and history. But it's not just video essays. There's all sorts of stuff that you can find on Nebula. Recently over on Nebula, Bobby Broccley released 17 pages, which is an original documentary about scientific research. This is a featurelength documentary about one of the largest scandals in scientific research in the 20th century. Some people called it the scientific Watergate. This documentary tells the story about this single paper which started this scandal. And it pieces this together with things like archival news coverage, congressional testimony, and new firsthand interviews. And that's actually related to the topic of my next video. I started thinking about the problem of AI fraud and the way that especially at colleges and universities, students are using AI to cheat in all of their classes. But as I started thinking about it, I saw that it was a much deeper issue than I initially suspected. And it raised questions about the value of an education or the point of an education, but also the fact that many professors and academic researchers, you know, commit fraud, too. And I wanted to explore that in a video that's up on Nebula right now because I always put my videos up early on Nebula. I'm always a video ahead.
The reason that creators are able to make new and exciting content that goes up on Nebula is pretty simple. Nebula invests back in creators. It's a platform that really understands creators and what we want to put out into the world. And I want to stress that this is good for creators, but it's also good for viewers. So that's how you get a platform that can make things like 17 pages or it can make a really fun game show like Jetlag. The reason that creators are able to make that kind of stuff is because people subscribe on Nebula and support the platform and support creators. So if you want to watch 17 pages or my latest video right now, you can do that by subscribing to Nebula. Just use this link go.nebula.tv/jaredenderson. I've put the link down in the description so you don't have to worry about it. And you can subscribe today and you can save 40% on an annual subscription. That means it would only cost you $36 for a year of Nebula. And if you do that, you'll be able to support Nebula, but also support creators like me.