The internet is slipping out of our reach
injuly.in
injuly.in
While the fears of not being able to earn money for creative pursuits are a concern, my biggest concern remains around anonymity.
At some point, I fear that participating online with other humans will require "proof of self" and as AI becomes more and more able to generate convincing images/text/video/voice of being human, the systems will ask more and more of us to prove we are real humans which could lead to awful consequences in disallowing anonymity entirely.
That worry remains right up there in my list of AI related concerns.
The parallel concern to that are online communities become tightly gated with stringent requirements of relationships (i.e. invite only, possibly with multiple "referees") and proof of quality in order to participate. This outcome has its merits but can also lead to exclusionary environments which has many downsides, esp for newcomers. It could very well feel like participating in low quality ranked levels of a game for a long time before being allowed to climb out of the cesspool into higher levels where people take stuff more seriously. Not necessarily a bad thing but it's still an inversion of the idea of "participation allowed by default but you can lose the trust you are given if you behave poorly".
*I suspect this is at least in part due to memetic contagion rate being selected for at a higher rate online than in close reationships, but does anyone have their own pet theory as to why this is?
This is how flat earthers, climate change deniers, blind supporters of putin's war on ukraine etc spawn out of blue and suddenly it feels like half of the world got mentally disabled. Well, they didn't. There was either once a nice community say about patriotism for XYZ, which was gradually subverted into whatever fringe stupid position they hold now, via various negative emotions us-vs-them of participants. Or such a community was already created with such purpose.
Good old Prigozhin's and GRU troll farms well running full steam for past 2 decade, always subverting western countries, especially those former communist ones. All it takes is 1 skilled manipulator, all 3-letter agencies everywhere have whole departments for doing exactly this (and counter-attack it too, but that's far less effective).
With realistic videos, russians can pop out any video of zelensky or biden being a pedophile, and those photos of putin riding a bear will look 100% perfect which is enough for most older russian population.
I will gladly be part of some more closed community, trust is a very important item and currently we already severely lack it. There are of course numerous issues with such communities, ie including new members and anyway steering away from actual truth, but thats 100% problem now already. But some friction is not a bad thing per se, it works the same way in real life in smaller villages everywhere. Clearly good enough model for past 10k years.
Also, I think algorithmic feeds are the main culprits. Before them, it was way harder to manipulate people on the internet.
I fear something worse: that it WON'T require proof of self, because the LLMs will be able to tell if you're human... and your age, wants, needs, everything else; that's the nightmare scenario for me: LLMs integrating all the little bits and pieces of yourself you shed online, all the information you leak, from the speed your mouse movements to how long you read an article -- and what articles you read -- and the words and style of your comments -- everything building into an accurate and detailed profile of yourself.
Google and Facebook care only about shoving monetizable garbage in your face, be it through tainted search results, mindless "recommended" IG Reels/YT Shorts or FB Pages. That has driven people away from these platforms. Maybe not at the levels where their bottom line is being hit, but that is a lagging indicator anyway.
Only these clearly do work for the majority of people. They're ubiquitous in popular culture (and in fact culture is often built within them) and are essentially the whole business model for those services. If they don't work for you, great, it means you've successfully avoided using those services enough that they can't profile you accurately, but that doesn't mean that they don't work at all.
Any such claim is irrelevant. The personal opinion of the receiver of the content is not relevant, only that the content delivered somehow makes money for the sender.
> That has driven people away from these platforms.
Platforms? These entities do not derive profits only from visits to their own domains. Please inspect the source code of any random site you read next. On the majority of web sites in the Western hemisphere you will find either a Facebook script or a Google script, or both. Often more than these two.
This is a huge fear of mine as well. I can't see how I could ever accept such a thing, so it would be the end of my use of the web.
There is a more significant case of "the end of anonymity", that of doing any kind of sale or purchase. The more sophisticated the possibilities for fraud become, the harder the authorities that be will (need to) push for public non-falsifiable identification (e.g. linked to your biometrics somehow, as I don't suppose a transplant ("chip") is politically feasible). If you need to trade, that is.
Consider that the past few years the use of cash is increasingly being phased out, or even outlawed (for amounts over a certain size) in various Western countries. With digital money comes digital fraud.
As a spooky aside, the Christian horror story "Mark of The Beast" is remarkably accurate in that respect, even if perhaps a bit too specific in the details (on hand or forehead) - but then magic glasses and -watches are here already.
There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate peer-to-peer. The question has been answered - corporate entities (points at the Y logo at the top of the page) do a much better job of curating spaces. This has implications that a lot of content will be lost sooner or later, but at least the big repositories like Wikipedia make copying data out easy.
I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing. The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it. Private spaces might be a big net win. It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier; that is a major Achilles heel in the whole setup right now. But that problem has never really been solved (unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised).
It was. I agree with most of what you said.
> I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing.
I don't dislike discord myself, but don't like the fact that most of it closed off. You don't get to see what's inside a server before creating an account and joining it.
All the rest of us didn't really care what you all did in there. Platforms and Walled Gardens alike come and go.
Or X Windows. I still hear the occasional diatribe, on how X is "just as good as" Windows or Mac (usually from a person that pretty much exclusively uses CLI). These folks can't understand why desktop Linux hasn't crushed the Microsoft/Apple hegemony.
People who hang in like-minded communities can often assume that "everyone" is just like they are; when, in point of fact, their community represents the tiniest sliver of an edge case.
There's a lot of tecchies, in the world.
But there are a lot more non-tecchies, and they are the ultimate arbiters of what succeeds or dies.
The Internet (actually, every type of infrastructure or social construct) will be shaped by this great mass of uneducated, non-technical, ADHD, etc. people.
The tech folks that make the huge piles of money, know this, and work to serve (and train) the masses.
I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet geek world; things like cons and zines were way more important than now, but they existed, and we definitely didn't expect for there to be, let alone rely on, mainstream channels providing our social contact.
> there are a lot more non-tecchies, and they are the ultimate arbiters of what succeeds or dies.
Succeeds, yes. Dies? I think no. There aren't many mechanisms to kill off things in the long tail, other than whatever the kids mean when they whinge about "discovery".
In The Time Machine, the Morlocks use the Eloi for sustenance. I suggest we do something similar, living among ourselves in our caverns, letting the masses frolic upon their platforms, and merely harvesting a few percent (2?) of the revenue every now and then; not so much as to threaten their existence, but enough for us to thrive.
> "We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society." — ♝
Morlocks like to be paid. If they don't get paid, they might not do it.
As Morlocks provide all the infra for the Eloi, we can certainly provision it also for ourselves. (how many days of HN could fit in an average TikTok video?)
It['s Morlocks'] care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the [Eloi "members"] by land and main.While indeed uneducated (in specific tech; may otherwise be smart), non-technical, highly varied people who all have too little time constitute the bulk of any audience, big moneyed interests always have and will continue to shape this audience's perception, especially where there is a network effect. It's not just Chrome vs Firefox or X vs Mastodon; the same mechanics stand behind the likes of Coca-Cola.
The most I have to do is set the monitor layout and KDE/gnome work exactly like windows with a graphical UI.
I get it. You prefer wayland, as do many people. You can push wayland without making things up about X. Honestly, if X fixed the screen tearing issue I'm not sure there would be a strong reason to prefer wayland over it other than technical purity.
what?
> It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier
You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable? Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?
Edit:
For the size of most of those communities you could host your own Discourse server on a NAS behind Cloudflare's tunnel, and the world would be better for it.
E.g. some opensource projects in the Elixir space have been moving to Elixir's ElixirForum: https://elixirforum.com/. And now you can search those discussions, link them, point people to them etc. The "small public internet" seems to accommodate it just fine
W3 at its core is very simple. This simpleness gives large gaps of freedom in what two parties have to do for exchanging data, e.g. 27 years have passed between the birth of W3C and Webauthn.
>Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?
There is a multitude of reasons why you have marvellous designs on websites but you can't name a mass-market search engine you can run outside of the browser on your local computer using on-line data. Sure there are some or you can nowadays assemble some software parts and build your own, but it isn't a thing, and there is a why.
W3 will always be the perfect medium for an ad publisher (given the role of publishers in a capitalist nation) who may or may not give away for free a platform for evaluation and a delivery network.
Yeah, I think we should not underestimate the "dark forest" aspect of the 2020s Internet. It's assumed that discoverability is a good thing, and what so many pages are optimizing for - but it isn't always. People don't want to be exposed to political witch hunts (of any faction!) or DDoS.
HN exists in a liminal space where it's hostile enough to keep the turnover down, while being comfortable enough to sustain its social existence.
(Also, people say "our reach" while at the same time the Internet remains radically individualistic - if you want there to be an "us" there has to be some sort of solidarity and governance, the total free-for-all was never sustainable except on the very margins)
Do you have a citation for this, or are you just asserting it as a fact?
I have started scanning domains to see how many different places there are in the internet. Spoiler: Not many.
We could try to create curated open databases for links, forums, places, and links, but in ai era it will always be a niche.
Having said that I think that it is a good thing. If it is a niche it will not be spoiled by normal users expecting simple behavior, or corporations trying to control the output.
Start your blog
Start your curated lists of links.
Control your data. Share your data.
Actually, there are many such collaborative directories on specific subjects; search GitHub for "awesome <something>", for instance.
Other than that, I agree with your message.
Now the AI tries to guess what I meant and adjusts the search results, meaning such gems are lost.
The big problem with LLM and search is that the results themselves are often poisoned by factually incorrect LLM generated content being promoted from sites Google presents as sources of truth (see the recent "can you melt eggs?" debacle[0].)
[0]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/can-y...
You're not wrong here, and I don't think LLM has made this much better - for a reason in addition to yours.
In my experience pre-LLM there was a good blend of both relevant and unrelated even when a few letters were off, or a word was slightly wrong.
And now more often than not, the LLM they must have parsing the search query guesses my intention wrongly, making the search results ironically less relevant. Pre-LLM In that situation, I'd correct my query to narrow down the results in my next search - as I still do anyway post-LLM.
TL;DR using LLM to 'enhance' search queries hasn't actually improved anything, while also making my day less fun.
"Small Discord servers, Telegram groups and mailing lists" aren't the only places good stuff happens on the internet, though it might take some deliberate effort to find the right ones.
This resonates, but I tried it, and it looks false. On both kagi and google, for both an old and a new movie (finding nemo and dune 2), the first result is a movie review that doesn't seem overly laden in shit.
I had originally written "travel plans"/"workout routine", but changed it to "movie reviews".
If you try to plan a trip to Dubai with Google, the first 4 posts are sponsored. With workout routines, The first post for me has ads + newsletter prompt + notification access request.
I should change it back :)
More importantly, not everyone uses an ad-blocker (especially mobile users). If installing a browser extension becomes necessary to deem a browser worthy of use, I would think that's a problem.
When I was young no one really questioned ads in television shows, when I got to uni I kind of stopped watching anything but cable. Then netflix came out and I dropped cable alltogether. Every once in a while I find myself watching television at someone elses house and the constant ads completely destroy any enjoyment of the entertainment, even if I never really questioned it as a kid.
that's how the web is for people who don't run ad-block. They have no idea what it can be.
There are several search engines on the WWW. Google is just one, and I hear people complaining about that one a lot. I don't use it personally, and I haven't done so for more than a decade. Life goes on perfectly fine without it.
(no, I don't use Kagi or Marginalia either, it's not one of those posts.)
AI still hasn't delivered something of that magnitude for the average consumer. Netscape launched in '94; the dotcom boom didn't happen until '98. Several years passed before the mania hit the markets. AI is in the opposite cycle: there is more corporate-driven hype about its benefits than anything concrete that's flowing down to the average consumer.
Adding it to my blog's footer.
You cannot conduct a conversation about it, either, because of a similar signal to noise ratio problem, as people who don't care or don't bother to think it through feel compelled to "contribute". And the inevitable "I asked ChatGPT to reply and it said..." noise.
Even before generative AI, this was painfully true. Google doesn't care about its SERPs if they can push an advert at you.
Author is bang-on. We aren't ready for the next evolution of search shittification. Without search, we're blind.
Every other form of organic discovery (reviews, directories, forums) seems just as prone to the damage of spam.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-the-in...
The old guards of Amazon and Google are gone - no one is there to nurture the product. The new business school jocks are there to juice it, juice it to the max, bro! Quarter to quarter, so that the vaunted SHAREHOLDER does not get all madzies.
The old guards of Amazon and Google are gone - no one is there to nurture the product
really explains (perhaps obviously to many) why company culture changes over time, and that retaining engineering in leadership can be crucial to long-term success.
(Text here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm)
Both involved Cyril Kornbluth, what a great talent, taken far too soon.
Interestingly, Pohl wrote a sequel to The Space Merchants decades later, and I picked it up, fully expecting it to be terrible, and it was brilliant, and made me cry at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchants%27_War_(Pohl_nov...
[0] as many would-be racing breeders have discovered, it's easy to breed the best to the best, but the number of trials incurred while hoping for the best takes deep pockets.
[1] or were the story's names a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid -isation?
edit:grammar
As a company grows, its culture changes, but so should its approach to growth and to investors.
The SLT are corporate stooges who are doing Wall St's bidding to pump the stock. Blaming 'business school types' belies a fundamental misunderstanding of who holds the reigns.
"Write something negative about the internet outside my bubble."
That said I've found that asking a question of an llm, then copying its response into google gets me extremely high quality results, much better than the question does by itself.
In essence the curse of dimensionality means that with enriched queries SEO is literally impossible. You can't SEO an arbitrarily large space because no query is ever repeated.
Genuinely curious, don't mean to question your claim. Though I did write this myself.
Unfortunately, yes, site:something.com has become mandatory for finding the right information on Google search, otherwise, I'm getting spammed by fake ass AI content that doesn't even answer my question.
How ironic. Google became number one because it managed to beat its competitors at accuracy, and 25 years later, here we are...
Well no, I haven't even used Google for search in years. I use a proxy and I also usually have a Wikipedia tab and a Reddit tab open to search there directly when I want to.
That helps keep a part of the Internet out of my reach and I'm very happy with that.
Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-d...
Of course, AI is going to make matters much worse, and already is in fact. It's the supercharger for corporate greed.
The solution would be to impose limits on the internet. The combination of the internet and large corporations is a disaster, so we need to limit large corporations. `Free' services from Google, Apple, and Microsoft must end, and corporate activity on the internet must be severely curtailed. AI companies should be dismantled and forced into bankruptcy.
Even if the resulting internet were much slower and with less shiny goodies, it would be far better for the people without corporate involvement.
Yes, we would not have certain "cool" features like Google Earth, but I still think the world would be superior without large-scale corporate involvement and without AI-created pure trash.
What I mean to imply is that large corporate internet activities are detrimental to society. If all I cared about was myself then I would not even be typing now at all. But I have seen many people negatively affected by corporate internet manipulation and I think it's a bad thing.
The same applies to literally anything: food, exercise, etc. people choose the worse option because that's what they prefer. If you take that option away from them, then they will choose some other, similarly crappy option.
The problem is not that people have options, and some of the options are crap.
The problem is that people are physically and mentally lazy (I include myself in this), and will tend to choose the easier, but crappier option most of the time. How do we fix human nature? I don't know, but taking away people's choice isn't going to help the matter.
Actually, taking away people's choice does help: that's called government regulation. You can't open a factory and dump mercury waste in the water in the U.S. because there is regulation. And regulation has existed in much stronger forms in the past in various guises, such as with native societies and the Amish.
So yes, taking away choice helps. We need to take away the choice to pollute, to use AI, and to form large corporations. It will help and make everyone's lives better.
Few sentences that start with this clause are emitted in good faith, and yours is certainly not one of them.
You say hand-curated, I say political manipulation.
The motives of 1990s people and 2020s people are very different.
Any designer of marketplaces, search, social anything, laws and regulations, etc needs to remember that principle. Any system will be exploited for its edge cases and emergent behaviors if there is any profit of any kind (even just attention or lulz) in doing so.
You cannot deny that having a huge, million+ global audience makes gaming MORE lucractive. With small, indepedent websites, none of which have a massive audience, gaming and scams are much less worth a scammer's time.
Perhaps it's time for a new DMOZ/ODP type effort from Wikimedia/Mozilla/similar.
It is worse. You get curated political opinions that you must have, referrals to government agencies, etc.
I would like to get my first page from the "deep state" State Department if I search for "is it safe to travel to Iraq", not from some sketchy travel blog written by a dude who believes in lizard people.
It is kind of good in a way: it doesn't seem to be trying to push me in any direction in particular, it's just trying to push me in whatever direction I was already heading on by myself.
Requiring that the user of software absolutely trust it to do exactly what it says on the tin, is insane. All manner of ill follow from that in a most predictable manner. Enshittification is a consequence of people not being able to host their own shit on machines connected to the internet.
There are permission flags on your Smartphone and other places that curtail this a bit, but those are rather course grained all or nothing decisions. Those are like either handing over your wallet, or not, to the clerk at a store to make your payment.
There are better alternatives possible, I'm hoping they get here soon. Genode[1] is one such system, that offers capability based security, where you chose what resources to hand off to code, instead of giving it everything. This model of computing is called Capability Based Security[2].
Sandboxing doesn't change the nature of the web, though. People use hosted services because they don't want to run things themselves, people build hosted services because they want to meet that market demand and also avoid the piracy and support costs that come with allowing self-hosting. You can imagine alternative worlds where that isn't true but people would just have different complaints.
AI should improve the quality of search results.
> For the past few years, I've been holed up in small discord servers – the only place where I expect to freely interact with meaningful messages that aren't marketing posts in disguise. And if you too have been hiding in telegram groups and mailing lists – good, don't leave. It's dark outside.
this works too though, I guess.
I use the wiki and increasingly reddit search hacks a lot, but even those are long term doomed.
I'm also tired of this whole debate.
I'm also tired of this whole debate.
I wish there was a way to get the same results in less than 3 years per movie... Wait
And it turns out that truth hurts. The absolute truth hurts absolutely. Marketing departments, where people are paid to lie, can't have AI spit out truths because it won't sell. That means AI programs must be nerfed and coerced into placing stakeholders first and the rest of mankind second.
We went from ooga booga fire to guns and atom bombs. From economy to slavery. From drugs and medicine to the corona pandemic. Every invention for the greater good can be abused for evil until we don't know any better and eventually the entire pile of greed-fueled mechanisms collapses and everything starts over for the next round of monkeys that'll eventually have a disagreement and split camps.
And if you write an article about the Internet as in the public internet called the Internet, capitalize the I!
IE, most AI art I've seen (as in imitation of hand painted work) seems to all be based on one style, Japanese anime, of which you can further dissect to see only specific styles of anime, etc. It gets so repetitive to look at that I am genuinely feeling nauesous looking at it all now.
Furthermore, AI evolves WITHIN a system of capitalism, which functions as an evolutionary framework. New AIs are selected that function well within capitalism, so we can expect AI to be supportive of technological growth and capitalism. (Of course, it many occasional espouse alternate viewpoints, but only to the level where it allows dissidents to blow off steam and belief something is being done.)