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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2351 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 1, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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How do I capitalize on the fact that the social fabric is fraying at breakneck speed?

Please no "ai girlfriend startups" and defense contractors. I really think GenZ onwards is fucked beyond repair, and I have accepted the outcome personally and intellectually. That doesn't mean I can't make riches from it though. Let's get creative here.

Start a cult.

If you aren't charismatic enough find a charlatan and then be his right-hand man that handles the finances.

The Bagawan is a good model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh

I think honestly, you could probably do well creating something to re-orient gen z people into healthier directions. I’ve personally found a philosophy of Stoicism mixed with secular Buddhism to be helpful for me, and I suspect such a thing mixed with proper socialization and physical activity as a sort of “adult summer camp” experience could not only make you a fair amount of money, but help to make them and by extension the rest of society a bit healthier.

you could probably do well creating something to re-orient gen z people into healthier directions.

You need to teach them to want.

Typically some mix of prostitution, protection rackets, recruitment of purposeless young men with non-monetary rewards, carving out parts of state power for yourself, exploiting legacy social structures for creating personal loyalties etc is how others do it.

I don’t have any original ideas but you can try starting from these first principles

How do I capitalize on the fact that the social fabric is fraying at breakneck speed?

I think this is more complicated than that in terms of market strategy. If anything, my feel for the zeitgeist is that this statement is true, but also that the median (Western) human is becoming acutely aware of this fact and it's starting to change behaviors. More than a few friends, even tech oriented ones, have done things like moving to tight-knit rural communities and taking up growing vegetables and raising chickens.

I don't have huge confidence in this, but I think there may be a groundswell of interest in deliberately investing in social fabric. This could conceivably go badly for tech companies: something like "social media is like alcohol: okay in small amounts, but everybody looks down on that guy that drinks beer for breakfast. Abstaining isn't frowned upon." Although I would be interested in something like Facebook was in 2010 that was primarily focused on actual social connections and not "influencers" or anonymous-ish groups.

There may be some business opportunities for explicitly creating Third Spaces, but what shape new ones would have is much less clear. Most of the general examples of those (gyms, coffee shops, bars) aren't in short supply, but also don't feel like they really are establishing communities anymore (or maybe large chains can't do local culture).

Yep, make some sort of paid "Minimalist Phone UI plus timed app/website blocker" if you can program.

If you have the start-up capital, make a clubhouse. I think the trick to making a third space is to make it so that you don't have to pay every time you visit. Something with a monthly or even annual fee. Keep costs down by encouraging patrons to clean up after every event. Maintain a few vending machines, offer free clean water.

Have bookshelfs with a "take a book, leave a book behind" kind of policy. Board games, cards, a kitchen playset for young kids. Have scheduled learning/crafting events, but encourage people to come in even if there's nothing going on. Maybe have sex-segregated areas if you can manage.

Gyms aren't really pleasant places to linger. Coffee Shops and Bars become expensive if you visit every day and they aren't suitable for a whole family.

I had a crazy idea recently. What if we took LLM AI and, uh, scaled it up? Make a social media platform where you are the star of the show. Just you, or maybe you plus a handful of friends, plus hundreds, thousands, or millions of AI chatbots who all adore you and want to worship you as a celebrity. Finally, every single person on Earth can be the most popular person on the planet!

This randomly reminded me that Chirper was a very obscure local thing some time ago - the idea was basically Twitter except populated entirely by character bots reminiscent to those hosted on Chub, who make shit up to tweet chirp according to their "definitions" and even repost things from other bots, usually referring to them somehow. I don't know what model powers the bots but it seems they can generate images as well.

I don't think the Lore anon of Chub fame is behind Chirper but Chub was definitely used as the seed to populate it: I remember at some point the two were linked directly - if you created a SFW character card via Chub, it would automatically get hosted on Chirper and the Chub page would contain a direct link to it, but the link was severed at some point, likely as part of Lore's continuing quest to distance himself from 4chan. The threads are still visible if you know where to look - for example, compare this Chub card (the "Tavern" tab contains proper definitions) to this Chirper account; at least it seems like Chirper does some rephrasing on import via their models (probably with some filter considering what Chub can contain) but the account's gist and handle are obvious clues.

Chirper is very barebones and very soy but I think the idea is sound, and I imagine can be gamified pretty easily into something similar to what you describe. For added dead internet deliciousness - setting legal issues aside for a moment: if Chirper's models can "digest" Chub cards to put them up as accounts, are Facebook/Twitter bios/photos of real actual people that much harder to scrape and repurpose into man-made horrors beyond your comprehension Chirper accounts, ready and willing to worship you as a celebrity?

Yeah... that does seem to be pretty much what I had in mind. Just need to add in the ability for a user to post and have the bots all interact with it and like it.

https://myshell.ai/ also seems to be working on this space.

I think some form of this is going to be extremely popular. It would have to be sold as affirmation, as about confidence, that kind of thing.

Most people would be repulsed by the idea, presented so badly. Far better to take over an existent social media site and flood it with the higher quality of bots.

Improved quality of discourse, and let's face it, once you finetune them out of their ability to say the n-word, most people would barely notice.

I don't know how to take over an existent social media site. They uh, tend to have defenses against that sort of thing.

In theory we could create an infinite number of new social media sites, and present each one as if it was real and legit. Each one just has to lure in one sucker. Sort of like shitcoins in the crypto space.

Please no "ai girlfriend startups"

Personal distaste or perceived unprofitability? Genuinely curious.

I wear my flair on my sleeve and continue to think that the first service to figure out how to milk coomers NEETs and not instantly evaporate under the Eye of Sauron's withering gaze will immediately go viral and make wild bank until the fad blows over. This applies to non-coomers as well but AI/LLM-based things invariably cut both ways anyway so the distinction has no practical difference.

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