#oneaday Day 22: Trends Have Made the Internet Boring

See? I told you I’d be back. And I thought I’d talk about something other than Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail. Specifically, as the title says, I want to talk about how trends have made the Internet boring. Or perhaps more accurately, why everyone all wanting to do the same thing all at once makes things deathly boring.

There are a few practical examples I’d like to give. First is a YouTube channel I was introduced to recently called Obscurest Vinyl. This channel is run by a designer and musician who found some joy in creating fake record sleeves for songs with names you definitely wouldn’t have gotten away with in the eras they’re parodying. Songs like the wonderful Pullin’ Out My Pubes (She Loves Me Not) by The Sticky Sweethearts:

You’ll notice from that video that the record label now has some music attached to it. I was initially a little perturbed to discover that the person behind the Obscurest Vinyl YouTube channel had been using AI music generation to create the tracks, though my mind was set somewhat at rest by how he had written the lyrics (which are generally far too offensive to be the product of the typically rather po-faced Large Language Model AI bots) and tinkered with the initial output to make it flow properly, incorporate all the filthy language and sound consistent with the other works from the same fictional “artists” on the channel.

Of course, what the YouTube algorithm then did was go “oh, you watched a video about a fake record with lyrics about someone gluing their balls to their butthole, HERE, HAVE A MILLION MORE OF THEM”. And it became very apparent that Obscurest Vinyl has a lot of copycats out there, none of which have anywhere near the same magic; these other channels are just trying to ride a trend.

This, of course, is symptomatic of one of the main things that is killing the Web right now: excessive Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Have you ever searched for some information on something, only to find a billion unrelated websites all magically having articles headlined “What Time Is The Superbowl On?” or “Where Do You Unlock Pictomancer in Final Fantasy XIV?” That’s SEO at work, and that’s a problem that is only getting worse with the amount of AI sludge that is being fed into the Internet at large. Sites want quick and easy clicks, so they look at what people are searching for — the trends of the hour — then provide a hyper-specific article about the thing.

Helpful? Arguable. I hate it, because I’d rather have the information directly from the original source — in the latter case above, for example, it took me a fair bit of scrolling before I got past all the websites jockeying for SEO juice to the actual website for Final Fantasy XIV, the thing I was looking for.

More than being frustrating if you want the information straight from the horse’s mouth, it just makes the Web boring as fuck, because every site (including a lot that should really know better) are doing the exact same thing. Daily Wordle solutions. Individual articles for things that would have been much better incorporated into an FAQ. Outright copying and plagiarism of other sites. It really is a shame to see what online media has become — and frustrating to see that certain portions of the creative types on sites such as YouTube are more obsessed in chasing trends with transparently copycat material rather than, you know, being creative.

I don’t know what the endgame of all this is. I hope we’re in a “things will get worse before they get better” kind of situation, but honestly right now, it feels unlikely that the “get better” part will happen. The Web gets demonstrably worse, less useful and less fun day by day. And we’ve all let it happen. I don’t know if we can undo that.

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