The Old Internet Is Dying, and Something Worse Is Being Born | Hacker News Reader

The Old Internet Is Dying, and Something Worse Is Being Born

vice.com

53 pointsrntn67 comments

Right... and instead of writing down the main point, the author isn't doing any kind of favor to the internet by making his/her stand over the course of a 69 minutes long podcast. Nice.

The other day I came across soemthing seemingly unquie and interesting but it was a long YouTube video. I started wondering how many novel things I'll no longer be able to check out becasue everyone is defaulting to videos and audio. Interesting ideas will have a filter based on who has free time. Though maybe there is another side that no interesting ideas are actually being shared through video.

I started playing skyrim for the first time. When I have to search online for help it's so refreshing to get helpful content. No videos and minimal blogspam. Even just forum posts with helpful info.

there are AI summary plugins that summarize youtube videos for you. instead of watching 1 hour video, you can get the summary in 15 seconds. this one I use but there are plenty of others as well https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-summary-wit...

1) a smart person writes something 2) a grifter makes that written product into a YouTube video optimized for slurping up advertising money 3) a grifter makes an AI summary for slurping up… well I guess I don’t really understand the business model but it does not seem like an improvement. Why not just read the book and pay the author?

because time isn't fungible, and 99% of books, esp. about factual-ish stuff, can usually be boiled down to a few bulletpoints.

most books don't require that much nuance, nor "the experience" of reading it

An interesting thing about fungibility is that _something is fungible to the extent that one treats it as fungible_. Yes, dollar bills are generally fungible but I might pay more for one with a serial number with lots of zeroes — it’s good for liar’s poker. I might devalue a dollar bill that you just blew your nose on.

That aside, I’m still not convinced I know what you mean when you say time is not fungible. I think what you might mean is that time is precious and not to be wasted, but I’m not sure what this has to do with fungibility.

Regardless, I think I agree with your main point which is that most written works are low-content repetitive trash. Let’s stipulate that I’m only talking about buying and reading rich, innovative, and/or elucidating works of nonfiction. They all require a great deal of nuance, I assure you.

Is there a search engine for video and podcast content? What if the information I'm looking for is a 30 second blurb in a video or podcast that isn't part of the main subject or keywords? Its lost. If it were text it could be indexed very easily.

To be fair, things do seem to quickly be moving in this direction. With the rise of language model driven speech to text, and visual to text, this is probably a few years out at most.

I use Matter(iOS) for reading and annotating articles. It has the capability to load transcripts of videos and podcasts so you can read them as text. It's pretty neat.

Wow...Voices fit for print. At least they got to express themselves.

This and the most recent hbomberguy video (4 hrs about plagiarism) is a perfect microcosm of the issue, actually: The population at large does not want to read, they want to be read to.

You can spend a year and some change writing a book and it will die in obscurity, then some youtuber will read your book word for word into a camera in a weekend and make millions of dollars. A text article that takes 20 minutes to read will make all of $30 in ad revenue. A podcast episode will have a $300 sponsor spot at the front and back. A youtube video can make tens of thousands of dollars in that runtime. If you publish to a paywalled site, hold on, dont you know that information needs to be free? Here's an archive link.

You can browse a website for some tech product and learn absolutely nothing about it. They aren't capable of describing it in text, and most of their customers aren't able to read anyways. Contact us so we can read the written script at you.

I'm in IT consulting.... every new batch of noobs has someone who tries to do everything in chat and email. If you start booking meetings and making phone calls, you will be three times as productive. Your tasks will not be [pending customer] EVER, all your deadlines will be clean, the clients will praise your communications, and you'll get promoted at your year 1 review instead of year 2.

support your favorite writers, friends.

It's all very frustrating if you're a very pragmatic and detail oriented person, but I guess it makes sense.

Humans have only been reading and writing for about 6000 years (and mass literacy has only existed for a few hundred years).

Compare that to a 200k+ year evolutionary history of verbal and face-to-face communication.

So maybe it's understandable if most people prefer the latter.

I never thought about it like that... And to think, I learned this by...reading.

Shouldn't there be reading avatars that do this? Do those not exist? Seems like there's a huge market being missed - in both designing avatars with accents, inflections, and personalities, and the writers being able to make money by providing those avatars - which they themselves may have created - content to read.

EDIT: has anyone looked into doing something like this?

There are definitely AI-narrated ebooks on the market right now. There is definitely an initial ick factor, but if you can make it through the first ten minutes you will acclimate to it.

I actually don't think there is a technology constraint at play. Kindles can already TTS anything and good AI narration is just a step up from that. 'reading avatars' will surely appear, but for now the sellers benefit from audiobooks being a separate product category.

> This and the most recent hbomberguy video (4 hrs about plagiarism) is a perfect microcosm of the issue, actually: The population at large does not want to read, they want to be read to.

I think long form essays are better done as a video, actually.

If I'm going to absorb 4 hours of content, then 4 hours is a lot of time to dedicate. A video playing while I do the laundry is a lot more doable than trying to read at the same time.

And if you're doing some sort of in-deep analysis, then a video allows for very seamless diagrams, screenshots, and video excerpts.

Different mediums have different tradeoffs. Not everything is best as a webpage.

> I think long form essays are better done as a video, actually. If I'm going to absorb 4 hours of content, then 4 hours is a lot of time to dedicate. A video playing while I do the laundry is a lot more doable than trying to read at the same time.

Yeah, but the difference is that it takes me 15 minutes tops to read the essay, versus 4 hours for that video. Give me text any day of the week - I don't want to spend hours listening to someone talk when I can absorb the same communication 10x faster in text form.

10x faster is a huge exaggeration. Average speaking speed is 150 WPM, while average reading speed is 300 WPM. If you watch/listen at 1.5-2x speed, which many people do these days, we're only talking ~10-20% slower on average.

I would agree that reading is better for things that I know I will want to read. But there is a finite amount of attention in a human lifespan. There are many things I know I wouldn't want to spend my reading time on, but which I would happily throw on at times when reading would be impossible, like doing chores, exercising, or driving. Audio makes it possible to learn more things in the same amount of time.

It's not a huge exaggeration. I'm speaking from experience of how quickly I can process the written word versus a video.

For that to be true you'd have to be reading text at 2000 WPM and retaining as much information as you would from watching a video at 200 WPM. That would imply reading the average New Yorker article (~6000 words) in 3 minutes. Count me skeptical.

Generally anything over 700 WPM is considered skimming, not reading. There's very little evidence that anyone can read above 1000 WPM without severe loss of comprehension, except in the top percentiles of competitive speed readers. Even they are only achieving 50-60% comprehension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

> The population at large does not want to read, they want to be read to.

Says a ton about the infantilization of adults.

Whatever you don't pay for in money, you pay for in your time.

I was pointed to this phenomenon by the book Suburban Nation thirty years ago, and it continues to explain so much.

More recently (last 20 years) with your data and attention too.

I've heard this expression many times before, still doesn't make any sense to me. I vastly prefer my setup based around FreeBSD I've used for the last 20+ years, than the corporate hell that is Windows.

Not much has changed over the years - I still use rc.conf and pf.conf to configure my system. Things are still where I expect them to be.

XFCE is still the same, thunderbird hasn't changed much. Vim is exactly how it was. And the initial learning curve wasn't even that steep.

Meanwhile, Windows is just getting worse and worse and worse for each year. So in that case, I am paying both with my time wasted and with money(though someone elses).

Interesting contrast. No question that Windows wastes a lot of one's time. Probably most people guess that Linux will waste more of their time, because they may not be able to learn easily enough what you've learned about how to configure it and keep it running smoothly. They may suspect that even if they put in a little time, they will nonetheless make fatal mistakes or be left with a system they must replace with Windows after all. So their perception or misperception of the time cost they will pay causes them to choose Windows, and maybe a lot of them are wrong in the long term.

Free BSD is a lot more orderly than Linux. It’s easier to learn and it doesn’t change as much over time.

Linux is also a moving target, which is why I don't like it very much.

Being honest? After hearing her for ~60 seconds I came back here with that impression hoping to find a TL;DR.

But I don't take away any merit to the thesis, she might still be right even the case was not ideally presented.

Just goes to prove that it is already dead... A good old internet would have had full transcript without any adds... But instead it has to be audio only and monetized in all possible ways...

When did Vice turn to satire like the Onion! /s

I’m amazed how perfectly this link embodies exactly the topic that it is about.

How do you expect them to be paid for their labor?

Voting with your wallet also applies to the supply side.

Either paywall it to keep me out, or just don’t do the labour I won’t pay for ;)

Yes, but everyone knows that this model often doesn't work, because most people won't pay. So they turn to ads. And then HN goes wild with indignation for the audacity to want to be compensated enough to keep doing it.

On old internet no one was getting paid. It was a hobbyist community. People doing things because they wanted to and enjoyed it.

The halcyon days of when you just made a website because you wanted to, not because you wanted to be a trillionaire while eroding the foundations of our society just a little bit more.

Exactly. You can still do that, but you're not going to be able to do it full time, so the quantity and quality is far lower.

EDIT: Far lower on average, of course. Please don't fixate on pedantry. The point is self-evident and still stands. Quality and quantity is correlated with the amount of time you can spend on it.

Quantity maybe, quality? Doubtful.

A lot of hobby projects end up being way better than corporate stuff because they're made with passion instead of by cynical grifters trying to squeeze every cent of ad revenue out of users. Compare something like the nearly entirely ad-free UESP Wiki[0] to the ad-laden dogshit Elder Scrolls Fandom[1], which would be even worse had it not just scraped info from the UESP Wiki.

One is a labor of love, the other is a labor of SEO specialists monetizing your eyeballs the best they can, and it shows.

[0] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page [1] https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki

It's really not debatable, because you're still allowed to make hobbyist projects today. Nobody is stopping you! The nature of the internet today is a superset of the old internet.

> quantity and quality is far lower.

Hard disagree with this conclusion. Doing something full time does not mean that it will be high quality nor high quantity. Nor does not doing something full time mean that someone will not produce high quality in high quanity. Lots of great things are the product of people doing things in their free time.

Hard disagree with your hard disagree. Any skill benefits from dedicating yourself to it full time. Yes, there are talented amateurs, but they're on the tail of the distribution. There is a selection bias because you don't tend to see all the mediocre work produced by untalented amateurs.

Who is likely to be the better piano player, the accountant practicing 5 hours a week, or the concert pianist practicing 30 hours a week?

Keep in mind we're talking about the Internet. It's very easy to find the tail of the distribution on the Internet.

The quality of the old Internet was higher on average. There is a lot of awesome content today, but they are hard to find amid an ocean of SEO, clickbait, social media and other random garbage content. The old Internet was a collection of passion projects, so you saw a lot of quality information exactly because people weren't being paid to produce it - they simply loved to do it.

> but you're not going to be able to do it full time, so the quantity and quality is far lower.

This is totally a market-driven perspective, expecting quantity and quality linked to full-time work.

Not everyone aims to monetize or dedicate themselves full-time to their online interests. Pursuits can be purely for enjoyment. It's okay if they suck sometimes. Not everything must cater to consumer or market demands, though that approach is valid too.

And that's literally still allowed today.

On the one hand, I agree there was a different vibe on the internet 20-30 years ago. It's what I grew up with and I'm nostalgic for that period.

On the other hand, I feel like nostalgia blinds us to the fact that tech has always had a commercial side. The only reason the internet became accessible to people outside government and academia in the early 90s was because commercial ISPs came onto the scene. The web became a lot more useful when for-profit companies like Google started indexing it. The computers we used to access the internet were only affordable because of decades of Moore's law driven by the semiconductor, home computing, and video games industries. I don't think the thing we're nostalgic for could have existed without the profit motive.

We also shouldn't take for granted the amount of creativity enabled by modern platforms. We might be nostalgic for hobbyists making their own websites and chatting on IRC. But today we have orders of magnitude more hobbyists creating videos on YouTube and collaborating on Discord. Platforms like Patreon make it possible for people to turn their hobby into a career by connecting directly with their audience. Every aspiring game developer can make a video game in Unity and publish it on Steam. I can choose any topic I want to learn about and watch free lectures from experts at MIT and Stanford, or find high quality videos made by the most interested and dedicated amateurs. None of this existed 20 years ago.

And the next big thing to look forward to is local AI. With both the models and the hardware getting better and better, that's the next big thing.

And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom.

No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies being able to monitor your every move. So you could say it's way better even than the old Internet.

> And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom. No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies

Don't get too complacent. LE agencies already know this and all of that can still be surveilled, just not through passive intercept.

This is actually the epoch I trust the least. We've had decades to refine spyware and condition people to install random binary blobs to do most anything. Auto-update and new ownership break provenance. Netherlands recently made it legal for police to hack anyone given probable cause.

AI isn't safe or private unless it's air-gapped. I suggest you start figuring that one out while you still have time.

Yes, air-gapped and the entire operating system is running off overlayfs + tmpfs, so no data persists after power off. There's also a problem with TEMPEST emanations from the computer's display - the problem is almost non-existent on mobile devices such as smartphones, which are very well shielded. So disable the modem physically, and run everything locally.

Of course the risk of targeted surveillance still exists, and nothing is going to stop a hidden camera from being placed in your home.

But in most cases there would be no reason to ever place the average person under such surveillance. So the bulk mass surveillance of the population would be hindered. And they won't be able to persecute people for reading or viewing certain things anymore. So that puts an end to the morality policing that has been enabled by the Internet.

I remember when e-commerce first started and people were (rightfully) concerned, and sometimes outright terrified about "giving your CC number out online :o "

This is going to blow your mind but people used to make stuff and share it on the internet for fun not to get rich

Yes, and it's still possible today. But if you want someone to do it full-time, like the people running Vice and producing their content, they need to be paid.

Is that really true though? Anything like the old passion sites would be lost to SEO amongst the deluge of garbage content, thanks to the sheer volume of people at least trying to use the internet to get rich. The quality on average is certainly garbage level, it's like looking for a diamond in the Great Pacific garbage patch.

So maybe it's technically true anyone can make a diamond today, without the profit motive, it's just that nobody will ever see it amongst all the average shit tier stuff you find everywhere you look. And that's literally the "something worse" that has replaced the old internet.

I think people are saying they wouldn't pay for this labor, and because of that, it's riddled with ads.

Why all labor needs to be paid through currency? Whenever I express my opinion to my friends, I'm in theory "doing labor" but with no expectation of getting cash out of it; instead, I'm getting paid by the satisfaction of hearing my friends' opinions on my opinions, and getting new information. Or perhaps simply changing the world a little for the better if my opinion can influence others to do good things.

The old Internet was about that, the new Internet is about associating a microtransaction with every single piece of content.

The new internet is about funding people enough to be able to produce content full-time. Nobody is stopping you from producing stuff for free, but you can't live off of it.

The irony that this page is covered in ads and clickbait content is hilarious

Essentially the main problem is that a lot of people want to try (even if they mostly fail) to monetize everything--and I assume a lot of people here aren't innocent of that.

Sounds like the real problem is that the consumer is not very good at communicating their wants, leaving people to guess at what they might be interested in.

> As the web declines, we pause to talk about the death of criticism and what happens when someone rips off your work.

So if I paste the transcript here on HN, would that prove their point? As currently, I'm not in a position to listen to an hour-long podcast?

Let's be fair, I'm never in a position to listen to an hour long podcast about a news topic that could likely be covered in a handful of paragraphs.

And I'm almost certainly not going to read an unedited transcript of an hour-long interview. Interviews are good but they take a fair bit of editing to be really readable in print.

With my browser full-screened and set at 133% zoom for the sake of my eyes, literally 100% of the screen real estate is either ad content (the largest section of which appears to be trying to load a broken image or video, so it's just a huge black rectangle with a tiny missing-image icon in the center) or the navbar, header banner and section header. I can't see any of the actual article without scrolling down.

The old internet has been dead for awhile. We got the web we were willing to pay for, and we'll keep getting it until we stop.

Was already hesitant clicking a Vice link, but uggh, no transcript? Flagged.

Case in point as others have mentioned. "Old Internet" would be an article.

Maybe OP can share some bits they found interesting in it?

Kagi search has a feature to summarize a search result without visiting it. Basically reverses SEO bloatednes and reduces content to the main points. Plus, has a search lens "small internet" favoring sites without ads and trackers.

The Old Internet is already dead. And Vice was one of the perpetrators.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com