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Comment by jacob019 | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe we can get something like the old web back from before it was dominated by search engines, click farms, and silos like Reddit and Facebook. If the platforms are dominated by garbage, then curated blogs, sites, and small topic based communities have value again.

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We need a new internet for that. Half joking but not really. One that is strictly p2p and has no distinction between client and server. All applications run client side and sync with a trusted and opt in friend of friend spanning tree. Looks more like organic neighborhoods. Incentivizes closer relationships but can still leverage networks in higher degrees through friend of friend connections. Essentially something like BitTorrent and bypassing BGP and incentivizing local clusters of information exchange that get mixed with “curators” who dip into multiple networks helping networks replicate information they want access to.

Latency matters less when it’s all run locally and can even be done predictably with local ai for many scenarios. That with local application rules that get verified by whoever is peering through/with you on a app.

Another part that I came across as a separate inquiry of possibility was kind of a OS on top of such a structure where you wouldn’t need anything than a “terminal” as all your computers are on a virtual machine overlay. It’s be interested to have every possible computation be hashed so once it’s done it just need to be retrieved so you can treat all peers as a type of addressable memory to not only information but computation and data.

It’s something I wanted to build but then I lost motivation because I can’t possibly be sane or unique now can I?

I’m reminded of PGP signing parties where people built a web of trust via key signing.

There may be a resurgence of this kind of thing as people use social heuristics to decide if any given creator is likely to be producing generative content or not.

Yep, this is the way forward. Long time ago, I also started some groundwork to build something like this, but had to stop it due to lack of time. As this would be a multi-year effort, with no commercial gains (which is a feature in my view).

Your vision is intriguing. The emphasis on decentralization, privacy, and a peer-to-peer model to reconstruct the Net is something we need now more than ever IMO

A project I've been experimenting with, Bison Relay, makes strides in this direction. It's a p2p platform that offers zero knowledge communications with end-to-end encryption, so messages are seen only by their intended recipients. It integrates with the Lightning Network. Each message involves a microtransaction as a spam prevention measure, and users also have the opportunity to monetize their content in a simple way... our internet now is "free" only because we ourselves are the product, as we know!

In its current form it's like a Telegram + Twitter and soon it will have sites and "eBay" like stores, all completely p2p

check out its github or website, you need an invite to join tho RN

A few more details on why and how BisonRelay :

https://blog.decred.org/2022/12/14/Bison-Relay-The-Sovereign...

https://blog.decred.org/2022/12/09/Trapped-in-the-Web/

https://blog.decred.org/2022/12/02/What-is-wrong-with-Decred...

We need a way to filter out the low utility or information sites that are only there for SEO, marketing or even misinformation. And we need to do so without censoring. This is a wicked problem[0] to solve, but one worth tackling explicitly as a society. Otherwise, the first mover gets to decide what deserves censorship and gets to control public speech.

My modest proposal: an internet constitution or bill of rights that solidify the right to free speech online as well as a court system to enforce and disambiguate the rules. Following this you have laws against fake reviews (basically fraud), and allow court cases when harm is caused by knowingly false information. Then, for the blogspam and AI generated stuff, you let jurisprudence and representative democracy decide how to tackle this.

What about all the cost of this? Honestly, it might be worth it considering the importance of the internet today.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Way too overcomplicated and authoritarian. The reason why the old internet was good was because it had both a high barrier to entry and a low perceived utility for commercial exploitation. Gemini gets it right by just starting over and limiting their protocol to prevent general appeal and exploitation.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

There is already authoritarian control of the internet going on. I believe the solution is to make this control of the internet explicit, transparent and have the people be able to influence it. Of course, there is nothing wrong with starting your own version of the World Wide Web and that’s definitely also part of the solution.

Route around the problem

I half wonder if something like the Yahoo directory could make a comeback. A human created directory of high quality websites rather than search.

Me to...on on the one hand you could leverage the power of many individuals, unlike in earlier days. On the other hand, SEOs would just inflitrate that space and it would turn out just as shitty.

The influence of money on information quality is important. When you can pay OpenAI to have the LLM recommend your product over competitors, they'll practically be Google but search = LLM.

OpenAI don't seem resistant to money.

Not looking good. We need competition and informed consumers.

That community was so small we could already have that in a webring, but it is also unglamorous just like the 90s web, so it would be confined to that group.

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