Social Media: Going „Dark Forest”

The Dark Forest theory, from Liu Cixin’s book The Dark Forest (part of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past/Three-Body series), goes a bit like this:

We’re all creeping around a dark forest. Everything is a threat to you in a dark forest. If you make a sound, everyone else in the forest will hear it, turn your way and kill you before you kill them. Even if you had no intention of hurting them. Because the rule is, everything is a threat to you, so you shoot first, every time.

Yancey Strickler modified the analogy for his Dark Forest Of The Internet:

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments.

An increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.

Via: Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations for 13 April 2025

Tagged as: ads, darkforest, internet, media, socialmedia | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Sonntag, 20260215, 14:20 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)

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Social Media: Going „Dark Forest”

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