Addiction Ruined the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Addiction Ruined the Internet

superhighway98.com

16 pointsmidef9 comments

Either that or SEO ruined the internet... (referencing the link that SEO also destroyed the internet)

In my opinion the internet is ruined (is it really?) by greed. Slowly we accept ads in our streams, run software on other peoples machines to allow others to take control, have our darkest secrets about our interests tracked by invisible and malignant scripts on every website.

How unimaginative are you that you would share it all with advertisers? And I though internet destroyed my fantasy...

Even if that was all predictable, you can still be angry of course.

Greed has destroyed the internet 100%. At first it was a medium that was difficult to use and that enforced a natural barrier to entry. You had to want it and then maybe made contributions because you wanted to give. Now everyone wants to take take take.

SEO is greed. There would be no need for it if it didn’t turn into money at some point.

Greedy behavior ruined the internet. Addiction is a symptom. We're all guilty to some degree.

I think substituting data for wisdom is a big part of the problem.

If we get what we measure and we're measuring greed metrics, what's the surprise?

Clicks, users (ironically named), leads. Data is great for spotting and creating problems, but not so good at coming up with solutions.

More data won't eliminate greed, but it can help in exploiting greed for more greed, so more data it is.

Politicians and advertisers have been data driven for decades. Look where that got us.

Is anyone doing data analysis on the effects of greed on the economic well being of citizens? That would be ironic.

It seems like until the data says what we want it to say, there's a problem with the data. Maybe the problem is outsourcing being humans to data.

Sorry for the rant, thanks for reading.

There were a few papers I read that reported on how obesity spread through online-only (no physical contact) social groups. I have not been able to resurface these off late. If anyone has a link I'd be very grateful.

101ism also ruined the internet. People won’t look anything up.. every forum is ruined by people asking the same intro question over and over again (example: “What’s there to do in Yosemite?”)

Same for restaurants, fitness, investing, cooking, Linux, etc.

Yelp, AllTrails, etc exist for a reason. A whole swath of internet users seem allergic to looking things up, instead of asking about their own use case. (What’s there to do for a 16 year old? What’s there to do for a 17 year old? Etc etc)

All the way back in Usenet days it was mitigated somewhat by frequently posting the “Frequently Asked Questions” digest, but people still managed to ignore it.

Laziness is human nature. And it may even be a feature, not a bug.

I think this change is paralelled by gradual changes to search itself. Google seems to be aiming to deliver short answers to such queries without users leaving google at all. It's like a library card catalog that doesn't want you to actually pick up and read a book. I think this is also part of why tech companies push voice search so hard, because it better confines the user to the search provider's ecosystem where they can be spoon fed curated information. Companies then pay to influence how users are steered by the "search" results. End user freedom is less profitable.

That's an annoyance of how the internet experience is shaped, but hardly a reason for why it's fundamentally ruined now.

That said, the problem also attributable to how much more content there is- it the amount of data is overwhelming, the rise in clickbait and content farmers dampens the signal-to-noise ratio, and so sometimes the mere act of asking people, even anonymous people on an online community, feels more authentic and reliable.

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