The internet isn't dying, it's changing
coryd.dev
coryd.dev
"Dying" is an appropriate analogy because if the decline gets far enough, it may as well not exist to those people who are affected.
At least, this is what I mean when I say the web is dying. Most of it is already nonsense of no value to me and comes with ever-increasing security exposures. There's not a lot further it can go before there is no reason for me to use it at all anymore.
You could have made the same argument about settler colonialism: No, the culture of the indigenous population isn't being destroyed. How can it be dying when there's more and more people living there?
The article us a rebuttal to [1] where someone is complaining that Reddit is going public. For some reason this strategy, or indeed the need for reddit to earn revenue, seems to be shocking to the author.
To anyone with half a brain, and has seen the internet since it was an infant in the 90s, its obvious the internet is not dying, it's "growing up". It's waaaay better now than it has ever been, and a pale shadow of examples it will become.
Yes we can pause to reminisce, yes we can fondly remember the yesteryears of carefree childhood, we can fondly really the lazy days of summer. All while forgetting the sound a modem makes when connecting.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die...
the physical technology can improve independently of the (imho decline of) quality of the sites you visit.
On some topics it's nearly impossible: - medicine - cosmetics - cooking/nutrition/recipes
For many other topics, it's only really possible by finding forums where people who are not blog spammer discuss things. This used to be possible by appending "reddit" to a search term, but this is getting harder as Reddit's quality is decreasing.
I recently wanted to understand better the position of the rising and setting sun, and it did an excellent job of explaining where my mental model of the sun was inaccurate.
I'm not really sure that test tells you anything about the state of the web in general, and less the state of the internet, other than (perhaps) how good one site is at one specific query.
Plus you've picked categories (medicine, cosmetics, nutrition) which are rife with commercial interests, endless fringe theories, and plenty of "bad science". And, to be honest, the searches I've done for recipes over the past few years have all been very successful. But hey, maybe I'm lucky.
Then, companies like reddit came on the scene with tons of borrowed money. Suddenly those forums were less attractive because, why pay money to host it somewhere on vBulletin when reddit was free? Just make a subreddit. And reddit was cool with that, for years. That's what it was for, afterall, and it barely ever made any damn money but the users didn't care. Why should they? It's not their problem. And Imgur came alongside it, too, to provide image hosting.
Then, the money dried up. Interest rates started creeping up. Suddenly all these services that had been free to use^1 for a decade or more suddenly had to put on grown up pants and be profitable, and not just regular ordinary profitable, but VC profitable. They had to go public and be big corporations and be worth billions of dollars. Then the enshittification starts. Service quality suffers. They start walling things off that had been free for again, a decade or more. Staff get fired and replaced. Companies are bought and sold. And soon all these "FREE" services are not only not free, but are markedly shittier than they were before.
And before the free market peeps come roaring in to explain how nothing is free, yes it was. It was free for YEARS, no not for everyone, you needed someone willing to buy an instance on a hosting service or whatever. But these sites came in to service a userbase that was already getting everything they needed for free, also for free, but centralized. And then once everyone moved over, only then did they put their hand out and demand money for doing exactly what enthusiasts already were, except they did it with massive platform sites that were bloated as fuck, mired in technical debt, subject to constant and often unwanted changes, scrutinized by advertisers with zero investment in their users who could blow away everything they'd put together in an instant because it was unsuitable to run Toyota ads beside.
So yeah, I get it, Reddit needs to make money. But maybe that being the case, they shouldn't have gone into a business that was demonstrably, provably unprofitable.
1: Yes yes you aren't the customer you're the product congratulations for having the most obvious observation about the economics of social media hot off the presses from 2011. Good for you.
Secondly, it's not like reddit is the only forums on the internet. The internet is as full, probably fuller, of communities than it's ever been. If you're only used to reddit (which clearly you're not, since you're here) I encourage you to explore a bit and find out where else you'd like to hang-out.
Thirdly, it's easier now than ever before to host your own forums. That way you can offer the free service you desire to many other people. And it'll cost you next to nothing since you can literally host it from home.
The change that is constantly happening brings opportunity.
I'm always grateful I was endowed with a full brain, I'd hate to be so easily impressed. My condolences.
Why do you think it's better?
I think we have different definitions of "better."
Having to wade far more websites that want to sell something isn't better. My time is a finite resource.
Because of this, its worse.
It's faster. It's always on. I can host at home, I don't need to host on someone's else server. The web part more secure - most everything is over HTTPS now. I can buy almost anything I want online. I can easily find information on just about anything. I can easily find videos showing me just about anything. I can (formally or informally) learn about any topics, to whatever depth I like. I can correspond with people all over the world, in real-time. I can work remotely from home. I can do remote support by seeing people's screens and see what they are doing. I can keep up to date with world affairs by reading a couple well-selected web sites. I can monitor the health of hardware remotely.
I could go on. But if a few web sites selling stuff is your main objection to the whole internet, then, I suggest you're letting imperfection get in the way of magnificent.
It's marginally faster than 20 years ago. There's a 10x raw transfer rate speed up, but I've needed that 5 times for less than 30 in the past week. And even then it was 20% of the the max. I don't want 1Gbit/sec of crap.
> It's always on.
It was always on for me in 2004.
> I can host at home, I don't need to host on someone's else server.
Which I was doing in 2004.
> The web part more secure - most everything is over HTTPS now.
Everything is encrypted now, which better protects randos from looking at it, yes.
> I can buy almost anything I want online.
I though this was great, but was recently reacquainted with how much less work I need to do to see if I liked using something when I played with it in the manner I wanted to use it for.
I don't know where I stand on it.
> I can easily find information on just about anything.
I'd actually say this has gotten a LOT harder than 20 years ago because people keep wanting to sell me things when I'm not looking to buy something. I don't need storefronts when I am looking up how to use something I already own.
> I can easily find videos showing me just about anything. I can (formally or informally) learn about any topics, to whatever depth I like.
I read faster than I can listen to someone. And if I'm searching for something, I want to find it and then get on with my life.
> I can correspond with people all over the world, in real-time. I can work remotely from home. I can do remote support by seeing people's screens and see what they are doing. > [...] I can monitor the health of hardware remotely.
These were all things I was doing 20 years ago. Yes, I can now do it from the passenger seat of a car, but those are improvements in infrastructure unrelated to any of the major players on the internet.
> But if a few web sites selling stuff is your main objection to the whole internet, then, I suggest you're letting imperfection get in the way of magnificent.
Its not just "a few web sites selling stuff", its the fact that "a few web sites selling stuff" have caused everything else to die on the vine.
That's just a matter of practice. Average reading speed is ~230 WPM, listening speed can easily reach 300 WPM (YMMV of course). Note that speaking speed is ~170 WPM. I'd wager you can easily reach 2-3x on most voiced content after a few weeks of practice.
Also note that audio processing is computationally much cheaper than video processing, which I don't think is just a coincidence.
I think that depends on what you value. I've been on the internet from well before it was open to the public, and it's absolutely worse for me now than it has ever been. And getting worse every year.
But I say that because it's worse for the purposes I want to use it for. For others who have different purposes, it may very well be better. That doesn't change the fact that it is dying in terms of how well it meets my needs.
These days, the greatest utility I get from the internet is to use it as a dumb pipe between end points.
but yes, that's not what people normally mean.
We need to start saying it the way we feel reluctant to do:
The Internet is getting exponentially shittier.
SEO-prioritization and poorly-regulated access to AI content generation are some of the emerging methods that help it get worse.Last presidential election, I'm convinced I wasted endless hours arguing with knuckleheads who were actually bots using weaponized early LLM tech. This presidential election the tech will be perfected.
Machines can spit out so much content/chats/post so quickly, anything written or created by living people will just be swamped out. Eventually web search engines will just be so swamped by the automatic machine-gun-like production of content, that the probability of you being able to find anything written by a living person will be indistinguishable from zero.
Life will have been squeezed out by lifelessness; the internet will be dead.
1) It’s impossible to distinguish between human and AI. Breaking a captcha is a resume building weekend project for any dedicated hacker.
2) The turing test has thoroughly been solved. There’s already a trend of accounts on reddit that reply with helpful but obviously ai generated content to farm reputation.
3) Spam and troll content is still an unsolved problem that requires a dedicated team to solve.
4) Communities themselves can be hostile, especially when the majority adopt black and white thinking.
5) Vetting new accounts is mostly done by verifying email or phone, and doesn’t filter out bad actors.
Some of these problems are solvable. The AI ones seem like a tall hurdle. There are some verification methods like video that AI struggles to replicate but it will soon be intractable to distinguish between human and AI online.
many of these communities will inevitably fall into that thinking, even when they start out as a more open forum, due to selection bias, us-vs-them / in-group-out-group, and a tendency for more controversial, angry, or loud posts to get more views.
In all seriousness, the open web is under siege too. Hosting choices dwindled. Cloud providers few. Dark web isn’t the answer. Decentralized isn’t either (the web is already decentralized). We need legislation that protects humans and not corporations. Common carrier. Fair privacy law. Following privacy laws. And ending the piracy of content for the sake of “greater good”.
If I go to jail for pirating movies. So too should authors of bots that scrape content for training their $29.99/mo Alpaca. Or the click farmers driving up engagement for $9.99/mo.
The Pirate Bay is illegal yet OpenAI can pirate the world and get $1b investment.
Cloudflare.
EDIT: To those downvoting, you do realize how much of the internet relies on Cloudflare to connect server and client, right? Cloudflare is a bigger gatekeeper than Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook combined.
Sorry, I have no idea to what you're referring.
But even if that is the case _for sites that are behind Cloudflare CDN_ - that still doesn't invalidate my point that Cloudflare _itself_ does not make the web decentralized. A lot of traffic _happens_ to go through it right now - but if it does "up its policing" in a way which is unacceptable, it is trivial for hosts to migrate away from behind it, in a way which is _not_ the case when 1. your content is irretrievable from the provider, 2. your social network is unmigratable, or 3. your product is built in provider-specific language/tooling.
EDIT: a sibling comment[0] helped me realize that what I'm describing is more like "lock-in-iness" than "centralization". Fair. Though - a "gatekeeper" from whom migration costs are very cheap worries me far less.
Astonishing claims require astonishing proof :)
Even here on HN, there are plenty of comments about how someone can't connect to a website because it uses Cloudflare and Cloudflare decided to block them due to a dirty IP address, shady (read: hyper privacy focused) user agent, CAPTCHAs that don't work (see prior factor), or other factors.
Some form of DDOS protection is desired in this day and age, and Cloudflare provides a very convenient service to answer it. Unfortunately, this means the vast majority of the internet is routed through Cloudflare making it a singular point of failure/denial. Aka centralization.
Facebook, reddit, and the rest should be protocols that your server can speak. You can allow/deny access on your terms.
But instead we ended up putting our stuff on other people’s computers and they went and blabbed it all over the internet.
But really we need to make it a requirement for congressional folks (parliamentary too) to divest from corporate sponsorship in order to be in office and that they understand that their seat can be revoked should they not follow the “will of the people” or whatever your constitution says.
In the US, more and more Congress people are on the boards or funded by Big Tech to the point where all it takes is a little one-on-one meeting and your entire stance flip flops. Is the US banning TikTok? Not? Yes? No? Now we aren’t? Oh it’s back on? Nope, nevermind.
I lost hope that Congress would ever understand science after Bush vs Gore.
There's no genuine defense against it and people are increasingly moving to private spaces be that Discord servers, Telegram groups, decentralized networks etc. that are more human in scale. Patreon funded creators and streamers are gaining against public broadcasters etc.
Unless someone has a really new idea how you can make a defensible, healthy 'public townsquare' (which Twitter in its newest iteration is definitely not) that kind of accessible web is wasting away rather than changing.
I think this change is that idea. The thing about a 'public townsquare' is that it's a square for a _town_, not the whole world. Social media today is trying to be a global square and has shown it doesn't work on multiple levels, so the pendulum's swinging back to human-scale communities and I'm here for it.
For how many people does the web actually cease to exist? Many people have seen social media as a dim light for many years now, yet most of the companies involved still exist. They may not be growing any more (or they may not be growing at the same pace), but that had to happen anyway. The world's population is finite. Only a certain percentage will be interested in a particular service. New competitors emerge. These companies had to plateau eventually and will likely decline eventually (as many have before them). No individual company, or even a generation of companies, can be regarded as representative of an overall trend.
Recently I questioned my assertion that the internet isn’t all that great anymore, but I couldn’t really come up with reasons beyond the shitty bloated websites we are served.
It seems like we are lamenting the fact that the internet is providing exactly what was promised.
The only thing we didn’t anticipate was the amount of noise that would come with it.
But it’s easier now more than ever to tell your story online with very little expense.
With that said, I feel like I’m missing the mark and would love to hear other opinions.
Currently, reading a single comment or tweet in good faith is pretty hard. There are obviously countless exceptions, but still, it’s tiring if you keep wondering about “what are they actually trying to achieve with this message?”.
In summer of 2016 we had this wild Pokemon GO phenomena that felt surreal. I didn’t really play much after a couple of weeks, but you could see the energy of different cities around the world by watching people outside. Would be very cool to see other mixes of internet with real life, but for some reason best we have gotten in terms of engagement is TikTok and IG.
You had to have something going on between your ears to contribute. The gate was kept by brains.
X, FB, Reddit... prime example of what happens when you let monkeys loose with typewriters.
There are plenty of good parts of the web. There are still forms and communities where smart people are doing their own thing. GO look at communities around Home Lab, Home automation/Home assistant... The Linux kernel is still getting built on the back of a mailing list, and there are plenty of rich communities around the whole eco system.
The web is still great you just have to look for your corner of it.
TL;DR Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products. We should certainly be asking what on earth has happened to the undoubtedly millions of pages of content that people have created over the years about the various aspects of, dangers, and sentiments around climate change. Are they actually there somewhere, in the background, but for some reason inaccessible through Google search? Are they really just gone? We should also be asking: why would Google want everyone to think there are hundreds of millions more results out there than there actually are? In both politics and economics, a Potemkin village is any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better. Is Google Search - the foundational product for a company worth $1682 billion in July 2021 - really just a Potemkin village for either the US as a country, the Internet, or Google itself?The current crop of tools are improving productivity in developing better software. Which makes me happy.
It's going to be shit trees dropping shit apples exposing the next generation of shit seeds into the soil to generate more shit trees. And every reddit or HN or etc account that does not require actual ID verification will actually be AI bots.
I find myself wishing more and more that AI would hurry up and kill facebook and google, then we could get back outside and start guiding the growth of the internet as a global community as opposed to a couple silicon valley megacorps deciding what everyone sees every day.