Or is it just doomed to the vapidity of sterile commercialization?
It feels like everything is serious these days… and ‘humor’ is only of the commercial variety. Joke communities and circlejerk communities are considered ‘hate groups’ now. Mods will ban you for sarcastic comments on ‘serious’ topics, and even on non serious ones, and everything is politicized either by trolls, bots, or whackjobs.
It’s boring when you can’t joke anymore. I miss my internet communities of 5-10 years ago when you could joke around, and even people of different beliefs and persuasions could laugh at themselves.
Now everything is so deadly serious. It’s a complete bummer. And any sort of ‘edge’ or sarcasm or sardonic remarks are ban-worthy.
I guess it’s just poe’s law run amok? I feel like mods could tell the difference 10 years ago and the non-jokey psychos were just ignored.
It should theoretically be possible to set up an old school forum, train some ai bots on old school forum user data to get them to talk like morons and then boom, an old school forum full of computer generated shitposting. This way you could have a computer generated vintage internet experience from the comfort of your own home.
This reminds me of the old gpt2 and 3 subreddits, before this “AI” boom, and no one had ever heard of GPT. Every subreddit was condensed to a single user, with the GPT trained on only that sub. So you’d have things like TIL-GPT makes a post in the GPT3 subreddit: “TIL you can…” and a full comment section from from GPT users like Movies-GPT, WorldNews-GPT, PCMasterRace-GPT, etc.
Reading through them had the chance to be wild. When the posts would make just barely enough sense, but random enough to be unhinged.
I don’t know how much was automated, or if people would toggle runs of X amount of new posts, or what. But eventually people made subreddits for posting screenshots of the best GPT’s talking to each other.
You could always see patterns and then go to the real sub, and see how accurate they were. GPTs from gaming subreddits unironically posting circlejerks, from conservative subs being lowkey racist, etc.