Does Internet still care looking onto steganographed/enciphered data?
As far as I remember the old Web, riddles and puzzles were quite common, everywhere from old social media and bulletin boards to blogs and their webrings.
Y'all may remember things such as Cicada 3301 and that 11b x 1371 cryptic YouTube video; of course, unless you're not a millennial or zennial as I am.
How could these puzzles and riddles, useful for learning a plethora of things such as Math and ciphers and steganography, messages hiding in plain sight, are seemingly gone, nowhere to be found across the so-called modern Web of nowadays?
You're currently facing one of those puzzles, except I'm just another dust in the wind so, to which extent it's still a thing nowadays?
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Letting aside any attempt to fit a text into a steganography (it's not easy to decipher a hidden message, but it's definitely harder to craft one; yes, both the title and the previous text conceal three hidden messages), what truly happened, what is happening? It's been a while since I stopped seeing and spotting such puzzles and riddles online.
I expected to find it the most across Fediverse and Geminispace, said to be places where humans are supposed to enjoy content with layers of depth and meaning... but, since I've been wandering around, even long-form content without hidden messages seems to be met with (seems like humans can't trust lengthy texts such as this one, believing it's AI-generated), as I observe my attempts on "being the change I crave for" being met with this... void... from the cold Web of nowadays.
Given how Web is essentially defined by human users (although Dead Internet has been a thing for some time), does this have something to do with the collective tiredness going on in the world, with humans too tired to try and focus on reading beyond the visible portion of a text they see online?
Perhaps it's just the online analogous manifestation of "Dark Forest Hypothesis" (i.e. there are humans who'd engage with said content, but they're hidden and keeping absolute silence, afraid of the possibility I'd be one of the ones they're hiding from)?
Perhaps I've been just an unemployed and pedantic guy in a world where humans are too busy with mundaneness so they can't afford the time to deal with all the effort required to read online content (textual or artistic) with all the depth it requires?
Or is it just my neurodivergence being unable to find meaningful connection with this neurotypical world?
Maybe the concept and practice of "hidden messages" are somehow associated with evil things or groups of people so humans refrain from dealing with something which would (in their minds) be potentially "dangerous" or "illegal"? (I once asked about the recent deactivation of the global live feed from mastodon.social and I got a reply explicitly conflating my interest in digitally-guided spiritual gnosis with "unsafe content", two things completely unrelated).
My experience is that they're still around in lesser numbers. You just need to know where to look. Personally it seems to me like most have moved into videogames and game lore spaces. Pretty sure a lot of kids call them alternate reality games now. Half a dozen new ones come out from the slowly dying garry's mod map community every year. Also other games have used these sorts of puzzles too, like noita, elite dangerous, and risk of rain 2 that had its most recent dlc page on steam initially drop with no fanfare and entirely ciphered. Really cool stuff. Due to the connection with games it also crosses over with cheap jumpscare horror stuff like slenderman and five nights at freddys, so a lot of people consider it juvenile now, like the incredibly obvious hidden text in this comment.
@wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com @asklemmy@lemmy.world
Exactly. One such example is the "TikTok time traveller", something that became quite popular among TikTok youth when the "time traveller" (who was actually some kind of security personnel employee who had some clearance to get to usually-crowded places before commercial hours, before getting crowded) used to post ARG videos.
But past, grand "ARGs" often used to involve physical breadcrumbs such as the geocaching mentioned here by hendrik. Cicada 3301 distributed and glued pamphlets to public utility poles around the globe.
The closest thing kids got to IRL-based ARG puzzles nowadays would be that "Pokemon Go" game (that is, if this game still exists, given how its underlying purpose, which was crowdsourcing the training of delivery robots, was achieved)
Yeah, pretty much this.
Also, maybe some niches within esoterica spaces (which is particularly the field that currently interests me the most) still persist, especially considering how the knowledge involving Hermetic Kaballah still covers ciphering-related concepts such as Gematria (letters as numbers, numbers as symbolically powerful) and sacred ratios.
Unfortunately I've been struggling to find these spaces since I left a Luciferian community I used to participate. It feels to me like either esoterica didn't join the Fediverse, or esoterica groups could only be found in hidden invite-only instances (many of the interesting occultist art I manage to find is from mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Instagram).
Exactly. Kerbal Space Program too, with a SSTV easter egg when the player gets to Duna. Considering the way games are being "vibe coded" and enshittified nowadays, it's becoming more and more of a relic from a golden era of gaming, sadly.
It took me several minutes looking at your comment in search for a hidden message until... LOL! Now I'm thinking if it would be appropriate for me say "I spotted it" or "good one!" given the subject in your hidden message 🤣