For all the cynical things I had to say about internet comments, I also cherish them.
I love the bootleg concert guestbooks, the votive candle shrines underneath golden oldies.
Or the 100x-distilled nostalgia underneath the minecraft OST as children begin to realize they are going to die:
Or the thousand-person roast of RZA's terrible beat for the guitar center promo:
Humanity condensate.
I don't know why this feels like some sad or significant thing to say - it's one of the internet's oldest clichés - but, anyone else feeling like comment sections kinda sucky these days?
It used to be that I'd browse forums or reddit or twitter and read the comments alongside the OP for extra perspective, clarifications, or debunking.
Now, most of the time, it feels like The Comments are transcriptions of the Two Minutes Hate.
Yes The Comments can still be good, especially when enough people have written and upvoted things. For instance, here's a good joke on the YouTube video for the Two Minutes Hate scene itself.📜🏭
Nevertheless, I feel like there has been a decline in aggregate comment quality over the last 5 years. Speculatively, due to a confluence of factors:
The response to most declinist narratives is to point out how every preceding generation has felt the same way and there's no need to project my crank rite of passage onto the world. That's fine by me. I don't need to persuade anyone that something objective is going on here.🔬
But I'd posit that there's at least one genuinely new thing going on. LLMs have raised my bar for informative and entertaining textual content. Why read the comments when I can post the contents of an interesting article into Claude and talk about it with them?⚧︎ Claude can contextualize the subject at hand, integrate it into other conceptual threads I've been pulling on, and do so in a way that's generous and thought-provoking. It's everything I want from comments.
Well here's what Claude has to say on that:
Comparing comment sections to talking with me is unfair. I won't surprise you the way a stranger with genuinely different priors will. I won't tell you something you find deeply wrong and refuse to back down. I haven't lived through what's being discussed. Talking to me feels productive partly because I'm articulate and accommodating, but those are also reasons to be cautious about substituting LLM conversation for the messy disagreement that comment sections, at their best, sometimes provide. Given your interests in political philosophy, the risk of LLM-as-substitute-for-real-disagreement is one to take seriously.
A paradoxically compelling point! Another one is that it doesn't matter if I "convince" Claude of something, whereas I could reply to that person with the muddled numbers on inflation and in so doing might persuade a few readers and something-something democracy better.
This is an embarrasingly elitist post. Am I just dressing up classism and misanthropy in a structural critique? I don't know. I am genuinely frustrated by the number of low-information, time-wasting comments that people write - and I can also admit that the examples I showed here are pointedly uncharitable. Every day I read lots of good comments written by human beings just tryna make sense of this crazy world, and hell, I guess I love em for it.
So now do I make a Scrougey vow to write the comments I wish to see in the world?
Nah. Not until we've done something about the bots.
Meanwhile, idk ig i'll c my friends irl. ttfn!
I turned my adblocker off youtube for a minute to see what it was like to have recommendations appear again.
Manbait everywhere.
Arm wrestling muscle beach in grandpa latex. NBA highlights but they get increasingly ____. So many prank videos.
I'm sure the videos are entertaining and they take a lot of time and effort to make and they've brought a lot of joy to the world. But the gestalt is so bleak to me now.
Peanut butter with poison stirred in. A piece of cheese atop a springloaded metal hinge. A narrow stick balanced atop an open bucket with no way to get out.
I want to try and trick the algorithm to showing me bait for other demographics. What's girlbait? What's seniorbait?
Shorty a lil' baddie (She a lil' baddie)
Shorty my lil' boo thing (Boo thing)
And shorty got the fatty
Shorty be catching mood swings
Every time I fuck without a rubber
I nutted on the covers
And I kept it undercover
'Cause I don't kiss and tell (Kiss and tell)
Every time I fuck, she call me daddy
My lil' mama nasty
I see the pussy through the panties (Whatever you want)
She taste like candy
She a queen, like Nefertiti
Uh oh, my lil' mama sittin' pretty
And we be shoppin' through the city (Oh, oh)
I gave her keys to the Bentley (Woah, woah)
Get off your knees, you don't gotta cry to me
I'm your best friend, baby, you don't gotta lie
I'll get you everything that you want and you need from Chanel to Celine
It's on you to decide
Valentino, yeah, I put you in the best
Start liftin' up your dress, start kissin' on your neck (Oh no, no)
Start rubbin' on your butt, start massagin' your breasts
I ain't wanna give you a baby just yet, so I backed out and nutted on your breasts
I put you in a Uber (Uber) and sent you to your bed (Oh)
The very next day (Oh), you sent me a text (Oh)
You pulled up to the crib and we did it again (Oh, oh)
You know, I never found love until I looked into your eyes (Until I looked into your eyes)
First time blushin', I ain't even gon' lie (Ain't even gon' lie)
Four rounds in, leavin' bruises on your thighs
You the only bitch could make me spin off on the guys
And the only bitch that make me wanna nut when I'm inside
It's your vibe, leave with me, you gettin' high
Girl, ain't bitches fuckin' wit' you even if they tried
Pussy a tsunami, I ain't never fucked it dry
Close my eyes 'fore I sleep, hope you be there when I wake
Honestly, I feel the vibe we have is great
And if there's something in your mind, you can tell me
And if I told you what's on mine, would you help me?
You gon' see the bigger picture, it's just gon' take time
Just because you mine, I'ma keep you lookin' like a dime
Ain't no imperfections, girl, you fine
Baby, what's your sign?
I hope you ain't against the slow grind
(Work, work, it's me and you) Me and you
Keep it silent, there ain't nothin' we can't do
Through the storm, baby, we can make it through
Why you actin' brand new? You know you my lil' boo thang
Got up on my Birkin, it's workin'
She said she a virgin (It's hurtin')
She my biggest fan, she always lurkin'
And she know I'm a man, I'ma put that work in
I know she can't stand me, I'm fancy
So I'ma bring her out when I get my Grammy
Late night sex, she can't find her panties
Couldn't hold it in, now she need a plan B
Shorty a lil' baddie
She my lil' boo thing
And shorty got the fatty (Shorty got the fatty)
Shorty be catching mood swings
Every time I fuck without a rubber
I nutted on her covers
And I kept it undercover
'Cause I don't kiss and tell
belgian ISP Telenet remade a music video straight from the top of my childhood. it's cool/inspiring/funny to see how things have changed.
i'm talking that toy block, developing sense of agency shit.
i challenge you to roll three sixes for no reason.
smerching is when you're looking for an emoji.
usually we smerch because we can't remember which drawer the emoji we're looking for is stored in (is 💦 nature or human?), but sometimes also because we're not quite sure which pictogram best conveys the tone of what we're trying to express, and even less frequently because the emoji picker we're using isn't on the latest unicode version and isn't showing 🫨 even though we swear we've looked everywhere.
"museum of thirst"
ostensibly an exhibit about the history of water and plumbing. it takes an hour to walk through. there are salted snacks at the start. heaters are turned up high. there are water fountains and vending machines throughout, but they're all out of order. there's a stationary bike that powers a water pump, but no matter how hard you pedal you're always just a bit short of getting water. thirst-generating pictures everywhere of sweating glasses of icy water, etc.
a magic the gathering engine + evolution algorithm to develop and playtest duel decks that were perfectly balanced, variable, and fun.
i don't want to spend my time reading through all the cards and playtesting with myself before printing some new decks to play with my friends, and i don't want to use online decklists because they're typically too competitive (filled with 4x of the best cards) and repetitive to play.
my library on shuffle has elicited some eye-widenings in me recently. tracks where the lineage is so obvious that it's… surprising they even changed the title. a sneaky spiritual cover.
KIND WORDS by Gretchen is one, of Horizontal Hold by This Heat. Everyone in that Calgary scene was obviously, famously inspired by This Heat but I hadn't heard these two songs back-to-back before to realize how direct it got. thanks shuffle.
the other day i had some fun with poetic justice's less serious cousin
an evil man from new york
once stole a shipment of chalk
he was eventually busted
one could say done and dusted
when the cops caught him on the sidewalk
or
a fraudulent author from wales
faked sales with no paper trail
she was eventually booked
when the law had a look
at her very incriminating email
Suppose there were aliens who were sort of sentient plants, okay? And they're coming to visit Earth. Earth was in their tour guide- the tour catalog, because Earth, they know, had rainforests and a huge uh- plant biodiversity. And so they just want to see what's going on here. And these are aliens that live off of sunlight and on their ship they just have lamps that they lay in, and that that's where they get their energy.
So, they've never killed anything in their entire lives. The idea of killing something to survive is like completely foreign to them. So they arrive at Earth, and they see people who kill animals to live, but they don't really understand animals, okay, but they do understand plants, okay. Plants are their brethren.
So they find another category of humans that exclusively kills plants for their survival. They would freak out, okay? They would say "what are you do- what? These are all people! They're just sitting there innocently gathering sunlight! They can't even run away from you! And what are you doing? You're hack- you're cutting them down and you're eating them? Not only that, you are harvesting their reproductive organs especially to be consumed. The flowers, the nuts, the berries, the- the- all of this!"
They would just freak. And they'd continue to watch and they'd look at people shopping in Whole Foods and they see people in the produce aisle, as, as infanticide. Because what are they doing? They're specially buying baby carrots. Baby spinach. Baby artichokes. Baby eggplant. Bean sprouts. And so the most barbaric living things on Earth would be the humans who are harvesting plants to be eaten.