How the internet became shit
herman.bearblog.dev
herman.bearblog.dev
This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content that sells ads or generates revenue, because their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself.
It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content. Ads are banned. It would be similar to the way tenure works at universities.
I doubt this would actually be successful organically, but it could work as a collective Kickstarter or nonprofit sort of thing.
I think you invented Patreon.
Maybe a collective Patreon-like "guild" would be a starting point.
I think an individualist model makes sense, or barring that, a group Patreon (i.e. a music label instead of an individual band).
Otherwise you’re just dependent on the popularity of the market, which I don’t think is a great thing all of the time. There are a lot of things I’d enjoy reading or writing that have zero monetary value and thus are strongly incentivized against existing.
These "privileged" netzen who were able to shoot web for free because they had other sources of income could also be accused of knowing things.
We now have [for example] content creators who build their own workshop and make an effort to figure out something interesting. This is different from people who already have a workshop where they do practical things. The later will teach you stuff that is applicable, useful and/or marketable. It is deeply baked into their soul.
Right? Or are you imagining some third model
Ad views are a gameable target. So are upvotes. So is board approval.
He sets up a list of values and rules that are broad enough to not be limiting and specific enough to get what he wants.
He personally picks the first 100 people involved, and then all further decision making involves him + those 100 people + new entrants. The specific setup could be debated but the basic idea is just that the group funds things that match its values.
Frank Zappa has a quote about this very thing actually.
I also don’t think these are the same thing, because a newspaper is rarely explicitly not concerned with the market.
The issue with these groups if there is a popular person in them, they will generally leave the group and start their own thing because they can get more money. So you will still have issues where top tier creators want all money and don't want to "subsidize" smaller creators.
This is a newspaper or think tank. It can be donor, ad or reader (i.e. paywall) supported.
edit: or you can donate to a non-profit newspaper, or think tank, or any other type of institution that deals with this.
I'm not trying to be condescending, but the question to be asked shouldn't be "why doesn't this exist". It should be "why aren't more people aware of and using this?"
The problem with networks, much like with insurance networks (but kind of backwards), is making sure that the superstars that hit it big and bring in a disproportionate amount of the money don't spin off into a solo career to keep more of the money themselves, while also not making them feel trapped and resentful in a contract jail.
Why does this group need to be different from the general Youtube (insert any platform here) audience that votes with their views/likes/subscribes ?
What am I missing?
The point is to decouple quality content creation from the ad-matrix and fund it in other ways.
For example, WarGonzo is still on it (just checked) and Ayder Muzhdabayev and Serhii Sternenko are not. Check https://youtu.be/91US4DNcBGw as well.
This made me delete my Patreon.
Because the internet means income for so many people, doing whatever it takes to get your website to the top of search results matters a lot. That means that the hobbyist making a website cannot compete with the businesses who's lifeblood depend on edging those hobbyist pages off the search results.
What made the old internet so great was your search in lycos or yahoo could pull up a result from hobbyists across the internet with a good chance of being just an honest info dump by a fan. That became an issue when the ad money started entering the mix. All the sudden we got things like ask jeeves and expert sex change edging out good content for their garbage "Hey, we also searched those keywords" landing pages. Google's initial value ad was the fact that it gave you good results that avoided these tactics.
I'm afraid the old internet is simply gone forever. There will always be someone willing to break the system to get on top so they can make the money.
"Away to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks
Ere I own an usurper, I'll couch with the fox"
These days you can even find some seriously deep cuts, like some hobbyist from the XII explaining how to calculate with the newfangled arabic numerals: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84900936/f151.item
Unless the search engine aggressively curates it's target pages, I can't see how it wouldn't end up falling down the same trap as search engines of the past. Much like all social media sites end up overran by grandmas.
What it would have to do is have staff actively investigating current SEO tactics and thwarting them. This is like manual curation, except that when you see some results are bad, you investigate what caused the results to be like that, and change the algorithm so it stops working in general.
For example, pick some of the known scummer sites and have automatic alerts if your current algorithm ever starts ranking them highly so you can have your engineers immediately investigate what's going on and fix it. It's like statistical sampling; even if you only have alerts for 2% of the scummy sites, you very quickly discover when there is an effective new tactic, and then very quickly shut it down for 100% of scummy sites.
> Much like all social media sites end up overran by grandmas.
I think this is specific to Facebook, possibly because of the real-name policy.
Is TikTok or Twitter overrun by grandmas?
Money imo comes into play by people who realized that algorithms can be gamed to get bs to the top. The core problem is still algorithm based discovery. Even if you take away people who are focused on money.
Are there no more hobbyist-curated lists of good content on whatever is their topic of interest? Are they just impossible to find on modern search engines, or have the communities just given up on maintaining them?
Allowing companies to increase their profits by laying off workers is a policy choice. As is allowing companies to outsource jobs to cheaper jurisdictions. There is no law of nature that says that the US has to allow free trade to impoverish and dispossess its middle class so that its upper class can get even wealthier.
Also, it is the neoliberal economics of the past 30-40 years that has "entrenched monopolies and accelerated consolidation of wealth". Just look at the FAANG companies, how they turned their CEOs into the first ever trillionaires and how they manipulated the tech labor market in ways that have been long term detrimental to workers.
The current economic system also destroys loyalty and motivation on the part of workers because promotions are earned by getting a new job elsewhere rather than by merit. This means being good at interviewing not good at the job. I think it's beyond obvious how demoralizing that is for morale in the workforce, at least once workers realize that they have no job security and that there's usually no point or reward to working harder than bare minimum. Job security and valuing retention over poaching the shiny object from your competitor means loyal employees whose incentives are aligned with the employer.
It's also bizarre to me how people are unaware that the system I'm describing actually existed during the most prosperous time in American history: the post war boom. Its unraveling boosted short term profits at the expense of the long term. But now we are living in the long term and the bill for decades of neoliberalism is coming due so we can all observe firsthand just how "desirable" its results are in the present catastrophically bad economy.
Since most content creators dont' work on improving to the level they need to a handout would probably disable and undermine them more than not.
Maybe a partial grant or stipend to support them in their off hours after whatever their existing work is could be something to look at. Still, it likely needs to be something
There are so many areas other than social media to earn an income with content online.
People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions.
Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article.
In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN:
Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/
Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/
There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write about topics that are sufficiently far removed from product placement that their writings remain lucid, engaging, and untainted by desperation. A couple of examples:
Bret Devereaux's blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/
Hannah Ritchie's substack "Sustainability by numbers" https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about
There's still more good writing published on the Web than there are hours in the day to read it all. The thing that's harder now than in the 1990s is filtering out the commercially motivated writing. That's one of the things that keeps bringing me back to HN -- discovering interesting writers who aren't making "content" as a substrate for ads/promotions. (And yes, there's a lot of commercially motivated content here too, but that's not the part that keeps bringing me back.)
Hasn't this been the case for most of history? "The Arts" were historically disproportionately populated by aristocrats, their families, the idle wealthy, and people who could afford to dabble and create and not worry about their art bringing in money. Only very recently has this idea taken hold that it should be possible for any old person to create art and have that somehow finance his or her life. Not saying one is better than the other, but I think making a real living from art is a relatively recent invention.
Interesting point. It makes me think of what happened to typesetters (including my mother) when desktop publishing came along. It was a bloodbath. Everyone was suddenly creating their own reports and newsletters, usually doing a terrible job, instead of paying professionals to do it right. Which is fine, actually, but it did lead to a lot of those skilled professionals losing their livelihoods. A few figured out ways to make it, either as a boutique business catering to those who still wanted work done to traditional standards or by teaching others how to do it themselves better, but most ended up leaving the profession.
This is what's happening to a lot of artists, musicians, essayists, and others right now - even more so with "AI" everywhere. Lots of people unable to make a living with their hard-won skills, and insult added to injury as they have to watch others do those same things poorly. And programmers, just you wait until your livelihood consists of rescuing projects that went south because someone insisted on having ChatGPT write it instead of a professional human. For a fraction of what you used to make. I'm sure each and every one of you thinks you'll be one of the winners, still getting paid top dollar to do innovative work, but most of you are wrong. You'll probably get left high and dry just like most of your colleagues, and - unlike the typesetting example - it will mostly be our own collective fault.
"Enshittification" already means something else, so we need a new term for when technology both drives people out of work and heralds a massive decline in median work-product quality. (So it's not just "disruption" which has become a word used mostly by tools anyway). Amateurization? Tyrofication?
It did, for a while. It was called AdSense. And it was wonderful. Then the greed set in, the SEO farms took over, and here we are. It took a few decades, but that's the story.
And a huge number of people weren't (depending on when in internet history we're talking about). The thing is that it doesn't actually cost much to make a website. High schoolers were doing it with allowance money and still can.
I don't think the underlying issue is that people can't afford to put stuff on the web. I think the underlying issue is that people discovered they can make money putting stuff on the web.
So the web has become primarily a marketplace of sorts, much like cable TV. That's what I think is the root cause of why the internet has become shit. Trying to make money is a powerful driver toward mediocrity, because you're going to want to maximize your customer base.
No bogus distinction between "developers" and "users".
No so-called "tech" companies acting as middlemen, calling their commercial surveillance "services".
The word "monetize" is not one I recall seeing on the early internet.
The internet was once thought as a medium that could be used to sell widgets,^1 not as a medium to provide free "services" that are a front for commercial surveillance. People will pay for widgets. No one thinks, "How do I monetize selling widgets?" People will generally not pay for what today's "developers" are creating. Hence the question, "How do I monetize it?" Easy, just ruin the internet by selling people out to advertisers. Until it collapses under the weight of all the garbage.
Perhaps someone might try to argue that people in the early days were just not thinking creatively and "innovating", and that today, they are. Yeah, right. Having lived through those days, what I saw was nerds who failed, and failed again, to find a business model, something they could produce that people would pay for. Eventually they gave up and sold out to advertising, which no one on the internet ever liked at all. Now people think this is a "business model" and represents "innovation". To me, nerds today actually seem less creative and less innovative because generally they all do the same thing: sell out to advertising and conduct surveillance.
1. Not that I am a fan of the company and what they have done to internet commerce, but Amazon has done quite well selling widgets.
The current Internet hides those people - who I assure you still exist - who are trying to share knowledge for free.
I don't think it's because people do and don't have preexisting employment, it's because people feel they can become "creators".
The metrics have turned from hits to followers, to enable a constant stream of monetised opinion and product placement.
I'll be the last person to say they shouldn't be paid for their work, but I think it has hurt our collective creativity that we focus so hard on how to become a celebrity and sell our audience to advertisers. I miss the days of relative anonymity on New grounds. I guess that has moved to Roblox but even that's poisoned by cash.
Sure internet was great back then, but I find it great today too. I create my own content on the internet just like 10 or 20 years ago on my website. I talk to people who send me an email about content on my website. I meet great people on LinkedIn.
I'm not on Facebook and practically left Twitter.
I assume like in other contexts people imagine a past that never existe
Change just has to be good for the many, and not the few.
I think their thesis was that as a whole the internet has become a more shit experience for the people using it. If you sampled 1000 random internet users decades ago they would have an experience closer to yours, if you did the same today I think it would be a lot "shittier"(to a lot of internet ysers, Facebook/twitter is "the internet")
New construction houses are crap quality. Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive.
But yes Google is probably the best example of this...type in any shopping term and Google search basically turns into a more cluttered Amazon search result page.
This is called survivorship bias. Plenty of hold houses were total shit. They're not around any longer. There is also a second bias of the depletion of natural materials older houses were made of, massive increases in population, and massively changed consumer tastes/requirements.
>Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive.
This is a mix of things occurring, though some of this can be attributed to VC culture. I mean, I can go to some restaurants and get super high quality food. But anything that has turned into a franchize is no longer about selling a product, it's more worried about growth month over month. Then when you add things like general inflation, remember your (great?) grand parents talking about nickel burgers, things in our economy march up in price over time. Oh, then add in we're selling to global markets, where if you're old enough we were generally selling to local/national markets.
Communication and distribution has massively changed (a lot of this is thanks to the internet itself) which means the way markets operate have massively changed. We're just really starting to notice this now.
Yeah. Sadly the infinite growth mentality has destroyed many a franchise. Most of the franchises are simply rebranded sysco foods reheated in the microwave.
I pretty much just don't eat at old franchise locations anymore as a result. Why get fettuccine from olive garden when it's basically exactly the same as a frozen stouffers meal at triple the price. So a "chef" can heat it in the microwave for me? No thanks.
That salad bowl cost them 2, maybe 3 dollars of ingredients and those breadsticks are even cheaper. Unless you are eating 10 bowls of salad or 10 pounds of breadsticks, olive garden is winning here.
Companies don't offer "unlimited" stuff if they don't know how to extract more money from you than you can consume.
This is exactly how the power users do it at olive garden. People even smuggle in tupperware. You only need to beat the average to be in the money, which isn't hard to do if you go hog wild.
I lived in a (rental) house that was built incredibly cheaply. The handle on the sliding glass door broke, and I just ordered a replacement handle. It was the same brand as the original handle on the door, cost me about $30 for the whole replacement handle assembly. The replacement handle had about twice as much steel in it as the original one. They clearly still make the old part, they just sell the cheap ass easy to break one for cost savings.
This affects not just homes but like absolutely every consumer product thats been cheapened. Take furniture. It used to be even cheap furniture was solid wood. Now the cheap stuff, even the mid tier stuff, is all glued sawdust. Its hard to find good snags of furniture on the side of the road because that glued stuff dissolves like paper mache in like one day of rain. You chip a corner and it looks like hell and starts flaking and falling apart at that busted seam. Old stuff made from real wood can take quite a bit of abuse, get resanded, restained, and look like its worth some $$$ after an afternoon of elbow grease put into it.
So you're saying depopulation is the answer. How interesting. :^)
If for example we start harvesting asteroids we may be able to provide everyone with a gold throne at low cost. But, providing everyone with with a platinum encrusted gold throne doesn't make hardwood grow any faster.
Unless of course you think the great oxygen catastrophe was a mistake.
Nah. Like the old saying goes, pick two: fast, cheap, good.
Guess which two home-building companies pick.
I'm an owner-builder, and we contracted out some parts of our build. We were extremely lucky to find some excellent tradespeople. In conversation almost always there were remarks on a lot of tradespeople being on crystal meth!
My wife put in the insulation into the roof and frame walls. She had no experience, just read up about it, worked out how to do it right and did it. The contractors installing the plaster-board were dead impressed, and said it was the best insulation job they'd seen. My wife wasn't racing the clock, or doing it just to get paid. She did it so we have a nice warm house in Winter, and no tradesperson is going to approach your house with the same attitude. All they're thinking about is "beer o'clock".
Privacy on the other hand...
Depending on how the ads are being served, it's either a bunch of blank squares in those space because my ad block strategies successfully stopped them from loading or its a wash of color noise and bold graphic design demanding my attention.
Then, there's almost always either a GDPR compliance popup over the bottom 50%-75% of the page or a "subcribe now" call to action popup over the whole thing, or (most often) both.
I would so much prefer to have access to whatever Internet you do. Please tell us where to find it.
In the meantime, I just avoid exploring the internet through search engines as much as I can.
Anyhow, as the internet slides ever deeper, the small web gets more fun every day. Now people may not blog as we did in the ‘00, but boy, do we micro blog on nostr as if we just discovered twitter for the first time.
It seems someone invents something new every other week when I’m on Nostr. It helps to follow hundreds of people (to avoid the echo chamber effect). Ands it’s an open protocol so nobody can stop anybody from just trying out goofy stuff. I love it.
Greatest advantage is being able to use Custom Filters.
One caveat: my aging iPad sometimes struggles or reload pages, and runs out of memory, not sure if I should attribute it to the adblocker or to the iPad's age, probably should restart it, or get a newer one.
I would also add to the mix:
• StopTheMadness Pro (paid too)
which can do two great things:
1. Show native video controls, and
2. Can skip YouTube ads
(and the developer is quite responsive)
Even though it'd be bad for me personally and for my career, I do hope the bubble bursts soon. There is no chance this is sustainable.
The whole thing seems sincere, and though that's not a guarantee of quality, it seems like an indicator of it.
The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different.
Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and maximizing the bottom line". Capitalism is creative destruction driven by distributed profit seeking along the edges of relatively immobile statist and corporate oligopolistic structures.
This always involves cycles of enshitification that end in bottom feeding until extinguished by new techno-social revolutions.
GenXers were talking about the enshitification of main street with the spread of big box stores and malls in the 80s and 90s. Same system, same process, new generation.
High interest rates forced corporations to actually get serious about profitability. Layoffs, price hikes, charging more for less is all related to that.
If you want to keep quaint Norwegian looking towns pristine even through harder times you need fairly heavy regulation.
It's obvious now that bringing the world to the net would make the net a lot more like the world, but you see, those of us who came up in the pre-Canter & Siegel days had actually hoped that it would make the world more like the (in the before times) net.
I don’t know much about Heroku, or if it’s been enshittified (yet?), but a company that offers a free product and somewhere down the line starts charging for it sounds fine to me.
And anyone who believed a product produced by real people working at a real company could be free forever was kidding themselves.
(In general though I agree with the sentiment of the article.)
Corner the market by providing good service to business users and consumers.
Abuse your users because there aren't many other choices.
Abuse your business users.
The web itself is an environment ripe for abuse because, again typically, your end user doesn't pay directly for the services (they are the product). This is pretty much why every large social media site is an advertizer. About the only way to make money pushing web pages is by selling your users to advertisers.
No, seriously. There's no one big thing or even a bunch of big things. Instead it is a ton of little things that accumulate over decades. While this video is about voting[0], it is better we recognize that voting is actually about social choice. The crazy thing is that we can continually attempt to maximize our own objectives and because we live in a many player system this strategy can lead to a worse setting than where we began.
I want that to sink in. Because, we like to paint people to be evil (there's definitely clear cases) but most of the time there's no conspiracy and it is just the nature of a chaotic system and our strategies. Our world is complex enough that we can no longer employ strategies where we only consider the optimization objectives of us and our immediate allies. To optimize our objectives we need to actually consider those far from (i.e. people we disagree with) us and actually work with them in some capacity.
The article brings up Reddit, so I'll use it as an example (and goes for HN too). Lots of people even try to be helpful and will write comments (maybe this is for themselves too), but you'll often see a long chain of nearly identical comments/replies that aren't done in a joke. They're simply done because people didn't read the other replies before replying themselves (sometimes there are collisions), and the more this happens the more likely people are not going to read all the replies. Momentum is one hell of a force.
You'll also see naive and wrong comments float to the top while detailed correct comments are lost in the sea (I'm not saying my conjecture is correct, but you can see this phenomena on any subreddit in your domain expertise unless it is very niche). Just because people are trying to be helpful, might stroke their own ego because they presume correctness, and others reading can validate because it sounds reasonable. I mean how often do we hear for calls of debate? Debate isn't a means to get to objective truths, though it can be useful in matters that have no objective truths (e.g. this meta discussion itself). Truth has a lower bound in complexity, but we don't like complexity and we don't like chaos. We like conspiracies because we fear the chaos so much, because it is better to have evil men in charge than no one at the wheel. But I'm claiming a significant part of enshitification is due to the latter. That we can reduce it if we coordinate better by not just looking for our own/local gains.
Yeah, you could say that I'm even doing it as I'm writing here. Hard to tell. But I'll also welcome disagreement to my comments and we can discuss. I think things will always be noisy but it's working through and with that noise that gets us further. There are no global optimas in large solution spaces like these, so there'll always be critiques and trade-offs. Which we could say is damning, or we can see as a blessing as it gives more spice to life and allow us to adapt to the dynamic state of things where the importance of those differences is ever changing.