What I want from the internet
chrbutler.com
chrbutler.com
Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps.
There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful of destinations.
I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow.
Outside that though I do prefer roads less taken.
On my phone I was given five places to buy modal clothing and a message that "x other similar results have been omitted".
I persisted, I rephrased. I was asked if I was a robot, I clicked on CAPTCHAs, and now Google is willing to give me some results that are relevant to textile design but I still haven't been able to find out what weave patterns are common in modern modal fabrics.
On my work computer Google knows I'm an engineer so it gives me papers on visco-elastic properties of the fabric but it's not actually processing my query well and giving me weaves, it's just saying "I guess you're fancy and technical, huh?"
In 1997 there would have been a text/image website with forty diagrams of various weave patterns and it would have come up in the top twenty results.
I would like a little more 1997 in my internet, please.
In 1997 there would have been some place that made it, or someone interested in it that would have made the site for their own interests in spreading the information.
Today there are countless entities looking to scrape a penny from your view in any way possible, and will create an ocean of spam in order to capture that revenue.
At least with search engines we cannot go back. That internet is dead. Any new system you create to bring back the old internet will attract the previous group because your system would be valuable, and like parasites, they will steal value from your system.
If what the GP wants exists, and none of the given options are any bit similar to it, why do you think the amount of spam is relevant?
If Google couldn't find a real thing between a mountain of invented low quality content, you would have a point. But Google keeps pushing unrelated results instead.
I click on it and search for the keywords I gave and they aren't in the result.
Put the search in quotes. Nope.
Add +, -, whatever. Uh-uh.
Inspect the source. Search for the keyword in hidden keyword tags. Nada. The result is not fake, it's just not a result for my search.
Google is no longer a search engine. It is only a suggestion engine. It is the Mega-Clippy. "You look like you might want to buy Modal underwear!"
This works for the majority of searches but it's useless for research into any novel corridor. And now Bing using ChatGPT to get closer, for sure, but only until they figure out how to inject advertising into it better.
We really needed the first big search engine to stay focused on search instead of suggestion and they chose not to. That's where we are.
Oh yeah, and anyone with enough holodeck processing power can make an artificial video of you saying and doing anything they want.
I like technology and modern cities in the abstract. They provide people with easy access to certain things that were historically scarce. Some of those things are life saving, like cutting edge medicine.
But I can't live in a city. I hate the noise, the crowds, the people, the crime, the pollution and the vast majority of the time I'm not in any sort of immediate need for what they provide. Fine for the odd Saturday adventure one or twice a year. Any more than that and no thanks. I always come away feeling stressed out, anxious, tired and worse off for the experience.
Ironically, online shopping and remote work is what has made living in a city unnecessary.
I'd be very sad to lose YouTube. It's the jewel of the internet.
YouTube being subsidized has driven any competitor out of the space. Since YouTube has a monopoly, your content will get copied and posted over there even if you don't give permission. Since YouTube is backed by Google, they are larger than lawsuits which could bring them to heel.
If you wanted YouTube to improve, split it out from Google again.
Vintage films, tutorials for the most niche practices, 4K videos of exotic locations, a better music selection than Spotify: all at your fingertips on one site.
Yes, there's also some people on soap boxes yelling into the crowd. I can usually ignore them just fine.
There was a natural aspect to it, that people who wished to spend time would discover wild things, and not organized boring monetized stuff.
Of course people wish for a little bit of help, then someone provide it (Google, later facebook) and the magic starts to fade away.
No more strange shores.. it's urbanized, with robbers and scammers, fluff and administration to "protect".
You can still find great content in videos and music from amateurs, but the professionals "outshout" most of them; and the best amateurs end up getting sucked into being professionals. Once your livelihood is on the line, things change.
Such sites may still exist, but heaven help trying to find them amongst all the "professional" recipe SEO spam that exists today.
Except that the internet never was books, and was only text due to technological limitations.
When we started networking all the computers together, we (myself included) had this vision of an information utopia where everyone would be able to access all of the information previously locked up in books, magazines, and newspapers.
But that never really happened. Instead, people started making new content — the faster, cheaper, and lower quality, the better.
The old content remained locked up in libraries. Some of it managed to move behind paywalls, but the vast majority of the information — and lessons — learned in the last 500 years has been forgotten because it's not free and easy to access.
We had this naïve vision that with everyone online, people would rally around the best of what humanity had to offer, and we'd all be exposed to the planet's best art, literature, music, and knowledge. Instead, we got mostly the exact opposite of what we set out to build.
I guess I don't really agree with that. Yes, a lot of very detailed information (and primary sources) about things is in research libraries, at least some of which are not open to the general public. But that doesn't mean all that information is lost. A lot of historical information is accessible to the (admittedly relatively small percentage of) people willing to put the effort into digging it up.
When it comes to new technology and the impact it will have people are almost always wrong. The printing press not only made better books, it created oceans of shitty ones.
We didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the time to warn us.
But we've had Sturgeon's Revelation[0] since 1957, and the idea has existed much longer. Why would one expect anything different just because it's "on the internet?"
"[The internet] is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."
Like, the internet is banal because we're (the rich world) all on it. It's not a weird little niche anymore. So it's now subject to all the (rich) world's problems. Racism is a problem on Twitter not because of content moderation difficulties or the lack of sufficient compute power to run sufficiently intelligent AI, but because it's a problem off Twitter too. Getting nickel and dimed, scammed, deluged by ads, or tricked by dark patterns is a problem on major platforms because it's a problem in meatspace too. We all know this, because our main fear with AI (the latest and greatest tech) is that it will soon also have all of these problems, and just amplify them even more than the internet did. It totally will!
But FWIW I think cool things are happening. Wireguard and Tailscale are cool. I hate to admit it, but some Blockchain stuff is cool. MLS is cool. ActivityPub is (maybe) cool. You just gotta get out of the browser.
Those two domains are orthogonal. Perfect privacy won't make racism or banality go away. It may make it harder to be targeted by ad farms, but it will make it easier for scammers and other bottom feeders to infiltrate and exploit online communities for personal and sometimes political ends.
Instead of being flooded by spray-and-pray spam, users in online spaces will be targeted by more sophisticated attacks based on estimates of psychology and interests derived from their public posting profile.
The DFW quote sums it up nicely. There is no technological fix for a lowest common denominator culture which rewards predatory greed over sincere mutuality.
The rest of your post I agree with; mostly that was my point.
None of that is really possible with Gemini.
Images can be inlined by the user agent.
I agree with this. The internet is a great tool. The web is extremely problematic and growing less useful over time.
Too many people think that the internet and the web are the same thing.
Really? I'm so happy and fortunate that hasn't been true for me. If the only thing I could reach was the web, well over half of the usefulness of the internet would evaporate.
> It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet.
I agree. Even just setting up an RSS reader and finding a little community of blogs to follow can take a lot of work. Interact with those blogs, whether that's by submitting comments to individual posts, posting responses on your own blog, or doing something fancier with IndieWeb protocols [0], takes time and know-how. Hacker News, subreddits, etc. can remove some of that friction, at the cost of less personalization and more spam.
There are so so many cool ideas in the small internet. Project Gemini [1] comes to mind, as do linkrolls and the Marginalia search engine [2]. There have been a lot of folks finding meaningful communities in the fediverse recently too. I think the small internet both benefits and suffers from this fractal of different tools and communities: among so much diversity, it's simultaneously difficult and rewarding to find your place. I hope that over time, we'll be able to reduce the difficulty and increase the reward by building better tools for discovering and participating in these communities.
Anyways, even if we're hard to find sometimes, there are a lot of us who feel at-home reading our RSS readers, posting to a blog from time-to-time, and maybe even making new tools to make these activities easier. I feel certain that over time, we'll be better connected in ways that make us happy.
You mean spam. Any system in which does not quickly and harshly punish spam will quickly be crushed under its weight ruining the perceived value that attracted users to the service in the first place.
If you know of an independent creator and they do something you like, share it.
> I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion"
I agree whole-heartedly with your share it sentiment, but if that was your original point, it was unfortunately obscured.
Then you read articles whining about how hard it is to find interesting content and escape the prison of social media.
It's not because independent creators don't exist. But there are a lot of barriers to getting traction at all.
And if you try to even comment on the topic in a discussion of this sort, odds are good people will act like it is a nefarious plot to self promote. It's maddening.
Exactly! That's what I meant by tragedy of the commons. It sucks for everybody, consumers and creators alike, and there is no satisfactory solution. I empathize, I am an independent creator myself, and I know the pain. For what it's worth, it helped me to change my mindset from sprint to marathon, and accept that success, if any, would be slow.
I also feel that the modern web's lust for stats is doing more harm than good. If one's follower count isn't growing, the dopamine dries up. Falling listener stats? Enjoy that depression! Better to ignore the stats and use "is this still worthwhile" as one's compass when possible.
I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining, stop expecting to make money from writing as it's simply not realistic and "get a real job."
People here want a quality experience online. And they want it for free (including ad-free).
Often while they, themselves, make good money for writing the code that runs the internet. Somehow, that's different.
This crowd likes to point out that the early web had this kind of content, but they forget that the early web was composed mostly of perspectives from folks who had those luxuries and honestly had been only writing for a few years on the web. I remember trying in vain to find anything about the rap scene which was huge in my low-income area and in a lot of low-income America at the time but the truth was, none of the rappers who ended up making it in the mid-90s ever were situated in a way that would make it easy for them to use the Web to put their content out there. That's why everyone on the Web at the time was into heavy metal even though rap was flourishing in the US. The demographic that used the Web wore khakis at work and listened to metal at home.
I've (and my friends) just learned to ignore this content. It's a yearning for a more country club like internet. The neighborhood was a lot quainter when only the golfers with their luxury cars lived here. Now the riff raff wants to bike or drive their Mustangs and it's all lowest common denominator drivel.
"Freedom isn't free." Neither is a free internet. Someone has to somehow put in the time and effort, etc.
You need to either find a way to pay some of these people or accept that what's here will mostly be the hobbies of the comfortably well off and can disappear at a moment's notice on a whim.
You've fundamentally misunderstood what I want. If a "writer" wrote it as part of their job, I don't want to read it. I mean, I might, but that's not what I would be "whining" about here.
I've kept blogs most of my life. I'm after similar content to what I would post.
I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to write. No offense, I'm sure it's great and worth all the money.
The quality experience is enjoying other people's gardens, and the point of having the garden is to share it with other people, not to have a ticket booth or a billboard. At least, that's the case at my blog. Which I've never shared here, and nobody else ever has either. Which I find totally fine.
Writers don't write to get paid, but they need to get paid to be able to continue to write. When writing seriously for high quality content, you need to treat it like a full time job, with massive focus. So if they can't get paid, then the only people with a voice are those with a comfortable income from somewhere else and a lot of time on their hands. And that's a very small subset of the population.
It's like enjoying food you get for free at a friend's house and returning the favor, but being insulted at the idea of paying in a restaurant.
I make very little money from blogging. I took ads off years ago. It's not some kind of paid gig shilling for some product or whatever.
I have a Patreon that makes too little and I take tips. I try to write what I think is meaningful.
My writing has repeatedly made the front page of HN, often without making a dime.
I've stopped posting it here. I'm tired of feeling kicked in the teeth for "self promoting".
Journalism is in trouble. This undermines political freedom. Etc. And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads.
Anyway, I don't care to argue it. You asked a question. I replies. This conversation is most likely a waste of time.
Adieu.
For me the problem is not ads but the inevitable AdTech pushed under the guise of "ads". Too many sites want me to enable what they call ads but are really incredibly invasive spying systems. Many are compromised and actually deliver malware.
The whole situation is made worse by the "ads" serving up a bunch of shit I didn't ask for. The text content of some article is a fraction of the size of the tracking scripts and auto-playing video. Everyone could save a lot on costs by not serving me a multi-megabyte video next to a 30kB blog post.
I'm just saying we have the means to pay content creators right now and the reality is people mostly expect free content and implicitly assume that if you have sufficient traffic, you are making money and the reality is that assumption de facto has baked in an ad-based monetization strategy.
Micropayments as people would like to imagine them don't yet exist.
Good writing takes time.
You want more of it, you should find a way to make it pay and, no, implicitly assuming an ad-based revenue model where you don't have to take a crowbar to your wallet and put it open and explicitly blocking ads and wanting nothing to do with them adds up to "Hello? Exactly how do you expect creative to make rent?"
You can currently pay as little as a dollar via PayPal and it's like 67 cents for the recipient (or was last I checked). Lots of people just feel that's not micro enough and not frictionless enough.
From the creator POV YouTube and Kindle Unlimited approach this model. So does Spotify, to an extent.
But the payments are much smaller than the value generated. And creators are at the mercy of gigantic centralised content distribution machines which can destroy your career on a whim, or because of an unfortunate outbreak of stupidity and bureaucracy.
There isn't anything like a federated micropayments system which would offer aggregation and payment services, but would be run at cost - a bit like the cultural equivalent of a credit union.
I'm all for a bit of nostalgia, but we must admit that the internet is indeed dead, we surf an encyclopedia thats mostly a money machine poisonning everything it touches. It ruins everything, everywhere.
Assuming I'm correct in my assumption that there is none, I find the lamenting the loss of "the structure that a personal website, can-to-can structure, an RSS feed, and a browser provide" (emphasis mine) deeply ironic.
And no, email newsletters are not a valid replacement, no matter how much you benefit from pushing them.
Maybe you should contribute to the internet you want to see?
The idea of the internet as a body that has gone comatose, that isn't really reacting or changing, is a good metaphor for me, matches my feelings. There's still so much potential, but we aren't in an interactive phase; we are continuing along only with the inertia we had.
But we could collectively wake up at any point, could restart creating interwoven connected experiences of our own.
No special algorithms and just the plain slightly spammy but endearing internet :)
https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/bad-bot-traffic-r...
I think the author ignores another reason that people (especially us techies) don't like to admit: The majority of people don't care about following a list of personal websites. Instead, websurfers just get whatever snippets of information they want (e.g. food recipe, medical trivia) from whatever website happens to have it and then move on.
The disinterest in personal websites comes from both the websurfers and many content authors themselves.
Some examples from the content creators...
Clay Shirky's essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" happens to be on the HN front page right now. But he doesn't maintain his personal website anymore. He gave reasons for it[1] and even said he regrets letting it rot. But even today, his personal website remains empty and previous links all return 404 errors. But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cshirky
John Carmack's old personal website "altdevblogaday.com" is gone now.[2] But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack
Those 2 guys are obviously internet-savvy and need no lectures on personal websites -- and yet they chose to abandon them.
As to examples for websurfers, if you ask normal people if they sometimes search the internet for a cooking recipe, they'll say "yes". But if then followup with "Can you name a cooking website you got a recipe from?", most will say "no". The average websurfer cared more about the recipe and not the particular website. Sure, some will make a mental note of the domain url and maybe even bookmark it but many won't.
The lack of interest for following "little websites" continues to be reinforced with tools like ChatGPT. Most people would rather get some synthesized information instead of visiting a bunch of different websites they don't care about.
I think this past comment about RSS not being relevant to regular people is uncomfortable for some to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707
I bought this internet yellow pages book in 1995 when the consumer-accessible internet was new: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Internet+Yellow+Pages+1s...
That book represents a different time when indie websites were a purposeful destination to visit. I notice that a lot of people don't bother doing that anymore. Me included.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31041194
[2] requires Wayback Machine: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm...
The content creators you list may have changed how they publish their content to reach a different/larger audience, and that's totally fine. It's a good thing that there are different groups of people who spend time in different corners of the internet. If you want to make a big splash, of course you won't (just) use the tools of the small internet.
There may be some people who want the "small internet" to make some sort of grand comeback. But I think most of the people interested in it are looking to build out a more intimate community of people who want to do the same. And that dream is already being realized for many. With an internet this large, even this niche can be a large group of people.
>But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cshirky
Sort of. He hasn't posted anything since last year. [ADDED: I'm wrong. Pinned tweet threw me off.]
He posted this one April 23 (about 15 days ago): https://twitter.com/cshirky/status/1650298747237064704
I think the default Twitter webpage view is confusing because the pinned older tweets (Dec 31 2022) are shown before the most recent tweets.