The internet is already over (2022)
samkriss.substack.com
samkriss.substack.com
The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either.
A few things affect this:
- Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The internet experience is getting gradually worse.
- Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s.
- Artificial intelligence. The situation will only be exacerbated by letting AI loose on the internet. Whatever humans can do online, AI can do much, much better—or worse, depending on your perspective.
The outcome of these things will be that countries will have a more restricted and censored version of the current internet. We'll follow China's example, and have a European internet, US internet, etc.
The internet will survive. It will just be very different.
This only applies in media that allows censorship, and controls visibility. If it doesn't, the bigots are easy to identify and weed themselves out. If it foes, the bigots can form bubbles, and foster tribalism.
Funny how well a simple word replacement can work.
You can reduce anything to "a name thrown at people you disagree with", and anything can be "a known, studied phenomenon". Especially if researchers can safely study it when academia is captured by an ideology that's hostile to certain viewpoints. ;D
> the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them
I have a feeling you're describing a personally held belief rather than a societally accepted definition, which would explain why yours seems to single out specific groups and views you (assumedly) disagree with.
“Woke
When this term became popularized, initially the meaning of this term was when an individual become more aware of the social injustice. Or basically, any current affairs related like biased, discrimination, or double-standards.
However, as time passed by, people started using this term recklessly, assigning this term to themselves or someone they know to boost their confidence and reassure them that they have the moral high grounds and are fighting for the better world. And sometimes even using it as a way to protect themselves from other people's opinion, by considering the 'outsider' as non-woke. While people that are in line with their belief as woke. Meaning that those 'outsiders' have been brainwash by the society and couldn't see the truth. Thus, filtering everything that the 'outsider' gives regardless whether it is rationale or not.
And as of now, the original meaning is slowly fading and instead, is used more often to term someone as hypocritical and think they are the 'enlightened' despite the fact that they are extremely close-minded and are unable to accept other people's criticism or different perspective. Especially considering the existence of echo chamber(media) that helped them to find other like-minded individuals, thus, further solidifying their 'progressive' opinion.”
> This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of FITNESS, you will probably end up being FIT eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the FITNESS with humor. FITNESS is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist.
> This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of CRYPTO, you will probably end up being A CRYPTO-BRO eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the CRYPTO with humor. CRYPTO is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist.
Very deep.
Personal interest plays a role of course. To varying degrees?
Basically, if there exists a strategy for an ideology to spread under censorship, it is hard to believe that removing restrictions would make it any less effective. Bigots won't out themselves and discredit themselves on an open platform just because they can, they are not idiots.
I would also like people to let go of the idea that the internet is Serious Business. People who live their lives on Twitter, discussing political matters of grave importance, people getting 'canceled' over inane shit is just ridiculous.
It should go back to trash talk and funny memes, and cat pictures and sharing baking recipes.
Or another point of view: Those who call for internet censorship and country-level firewalls are NOT looking for the world to get better and instead are just afraid of losing their control over the population. Which is why you first see those measures being employed in openly totalitarian systems before now being slowly adoped in supposedly free societies whose rulers like to claim to represent the population they rule over.
The internet will continue to exist, certainly. However, it does become a more hostile and unpleasant place over time. Because of that, it's much less useful to me than it used to be and that trend doesn't appear to be changing.
Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
This was my internet experience in 1999. I think the derangement has been a constant over time.
But "more hostile" includes not only advertising and tone, but spying, overtly hostile actors such as crackers and other criminals and so forth.
> Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you
I don't count this as part of the general degradation of the internet, though. That's more about the online gaming community. Things were that way before the internet was the most common method of online gaming.
I agree many aspects are growing... overtly bad. I think LLMs are well on their way to rendering the mainstream internet, search, and social media effectively worthless. The signal to noise ratio is unfixable.
I still get value from my habits, which haven't changed for decades: niche forums, personal websites, blogs, podcasts, youtube. I would be satisfied as long as those remained more or less intact, the rest can go. Requires a lot of curation though.
I think this "genteel internet" that came pre-Web was much shorter lived than the periods after it. It reminds me of crypto where the initial halcyon period of Bitcoin seemed full of hope but once the technology had to scale it just couldn't keep its initial values due to both technological and social issues.
I do have a strange nostalgia about those days. It was a culture that didn't exist in meatspace, and there was something fun about that.
However, when covid hit and my wife and I started playing games, I quickly learned my wife severely disapproves of typing "kys" to others in games, and now I try to only say positive things. It is a better experience, but then again I'm now a parent and hoping to spare my children from interacting with college me.
Needing to be polite in every aspect of our lives because of this stupid demand to collapse down to the lowest common denominator of humor or mental fortitude is ruining the Internet and making the world and media less fun. It's also Orwellian. There's people who want to dox you and make sure you get fired or never get hired for being mean in a CoD lobby. That's psychotic. Those people are mentally ill, and we've let them run the show and tell us what to do. And of course, it's symbiotic with corporations and advertisers who want things as anodyne and rated E as possible since that makes the most $$$ (if only we can collectively accept more mediocre art and experiences as we forget what better ones we had).
I'm glad the pendulum seems to be swinging back as people are figuring out that having had less for fun for the last 10 years accomplished absolutely nothing worth caring about.
I'm staying in romantic land, it beats the heck out of the government moderating which information I see for my own good.
Needless to say, it's going to be a bumpy ride until we figure this out.
FWIW, I don't have a dog in this fight, and I'm speaking as a neutral observer. I don't like the idea of giving more control to governments either. But it's clear that something has to be done to defend countries from this type of attack. Traditional military might can't defend you from an invisible enemy.
shrug Certainly a better place than a disconnected world.
A prime example of why gatekeeping is necessary and working.
I had a chat with a former politician and he was definitely pleasant, but extremely cynical, he pointed out instances of corruption everywhere. Although to be fair he was probably just being realistic not cynical. Cynicism is a good filter against dumb trends, hustler types and "emperor's clothes" situations.
If you want to find a platform with true signal to noise golden ratio, you either have to find one on the rise, NOT made by a well known name, and place a timer on it, or you have to find one people think is long dead.
There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests?
IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
Or a rigorous back and forth on the horse-riding tribes who spawned the Indo-European languages.
Or people can put in context some outlandish quantum computing headline in a way that you'd never get from the actual article.
That stuff is valuable.
lots of bots, and lots of spam, esp. in specific threads.
I don't think it's just an advertising/cancel culture problem. It's partially a problem with the internet being so decentralized that spammers and scammers can operate with impunity, pushing a ton of work onto people running online communities because countries like India and Russia don't properly go after cybercriminals - even if someone SaaSified forums, this is still a significant burden.
It's also kind of a UI problem: if Google search starts to suck and gets filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core pull-model of the web. If Reddit starts to suck and get filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core push-model of the web. Together the two kind of Embraced-Extended-Extinguished the web, but maybe something like an RSS reader, different web client (eg a browser that didn't nudge you into making google queries as the main way to operate it), and more capable search engine would be able to fix these.
I think that was the aspiration, but nobody realized there were so many people who thought 5G caused corona (and similar lack of thought process) until it was too late.
But hey, those people won greatly, who can and want.
literally nobody thought this, perhaps except a handful of oddballs. If you want to make your case for describing the state of the internet, please avoid nonsense exaggerations like this.
oddballs, i agree. but a dangerous group of oddballs.
> Across Britain, more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism have taken place against wireless towers and other telecom gear this month, according to police reports and a telecom trade group. In roughly 80 other incidents in the country, telecom technicians have been harassed on the job.
that is not a small number, we discuss smaller things on HN. And these are only the cases that have manifested in to arson or harassment, so includes zero couch conspiracy theorists.
So not literally nobody?
It was a small minority, but there were (and are) absolutely people who believed this. They also usually explain it poorly, I think their idea really is that 5G radio signals caused disease but it gets morphed into a claim that 5G somehow created the virus that caused the disease.
Well it seems relevant because the comment I replied to was minimizing the number of people who thought 5G may have caused covid to a miniscule number of people. I raised my experience because I only know a small number of people and did in fact know someone in real life who believed this and sent me plenty of links and whitepapers making the same claims.
Is my anecdotal experience statistically significant? Absolutely not. But I also hesitate to believe that the number of people who bought into the idea was so small as to effectively not exist.
Regardless of the often overused WWII analogies, how would banning voter rights work in your example of QAnon and the Republican Party? Would you want to see anyone believing QAnon conspiracies banned from voting, even if you are correct that the ideology has taken over much of the Republican Party? I'm not sure that banning most voters in one of two parties we have would go over well, nor would it leave us with a democracy or much of an election process.
Some of the core beliefs underpinning Nazism were based on bizarre occultism and antisemitic conspiracy theories. I suppose people simply ignored or brushed off what they didn't like, much as they do with QAnon politicians today.
> Regardless of the often overused WWII analogies, how would banning voter rights work in your example of QAnon and the Republican Party?
I never said anything about banning voters. I was just lamenting how easily the crazies can coalesce and gather power these days. Don't know what the solution is. Maybe we're just doomed.
My understanding of the history of how the Nazi Party took power is a bit different than what you're describing, curious what you may have seen that I haven't. My understanding is that the party was always based on racist ideology but that it only went antisemitic in the 30s around the time Hitler gained power.
Sorry again about the voting question, that's very confusing when I got the context wrong here!
Ultimately all we can do is trust that the system is designed to withstand. If we don't think the system can work without breaking our own rules to "do the right thing" then what are we really doing? As long as people can speak their minds and hash out disagreements in public we're all better off. When ideas that may end up being dangerous are forced to stay behind closed doors we really have a problem.
At least in the US though, speech is protected specifically from government censorship. Facebook can censor whatever they want, but the government can't take part in it at all. Historically, American culture has stood strongly behind free speech and we're very uncomfortable with the idea of punishing a person for what they say. Once you act on an idea that's a different story, but we have laws that already cover that.
It sounds to me like you should lower your caffeine intake. Nobody sober-minded watching that on TV should have felt scared; it was obviously a mob of clowns goofing around, not an insurrectionist army.
> and also confused as to how anyone pushing through barriers and doors were going through without being shot.
Because it was obvious to everyone that it was just a mob of clowns goofing around, not an insurrectionist army. The tiny minority that got violent and probed too far got violently dealt with though.
> Historically, American culture has stood strongly behind free speech and we're very uncomfortable with the idea of punishing a person for what they say.
One funny thing to tie this with is that Congress is literally "the People's House". It would be a very American interpretation of things to say that anyone should have the right to protest at/in the Capitol. Those Congress critters shouldn't have run away and hid as if they're dictators holing up in the bunker when the peasant have surrounded the royal palace; they should have met the non-violent rioters and talked with them. Their job is to represent those people that are angry out there!
And, optically, that would have been a win-win for all of us: either they bravely diffuse the situation and get respect OR they get assaulted, in which case the "OMG INSURRECTIONIST" rhetoric would prove to be actually warranted.
Oh, also, another deeply American valence is revolution. Take for that what you will. ;D
What would have happened if they got into Congressional chambers? Or got their hands on congressmen? PR the VP? We simply don't know.
It wasn't caffeine that scared me. It was the potential for a civil war. That seems outlandish now that we know was Jan 7th looked like. But honestly, can you say it wouldn't have happened should they have reached Pence or Pelosi?
I don't like either of those politicians, or government in general. But its a for agile house of cards, and a mob of people forcing their way into the capital building while all of Congress is in session is a terrible sign. I don't know how you write that off as a clown show, and I don't know what tipped you off to that being a clown show rather than something potentially more serious. Maybe I just missed it.
Storming pizza parlors.
Protesting election results in violent and extreme ways.
Coalesced crazy is dangerous, full stop. Stupid ideas being dragged out into the sunlight used to work but these folk are being fed nothing but crazy by the algorithms of social media, so it stopped working.
The solution is regulation of social media.
Regulating social media isn't a solution, and definitely not the solution. For one thing, if the state officially took a role in regulating speech on social media they would be bound by constitutional powers.
You could actually see censorship on social media sites decrease when they are required to respect individuals' rights to free speech and protection from government censorship. Why do you think they currently do it quietly and behind closed doors? As long as the government isn't openly censoring us on social media the censorship isn't unconstitutional. As soon as its government regulated we will see supreme court rulings likely deciding that the government censoring speech online is unconstitutional and a violation of the first amendment.
With that said, what's the problem with people having ideas that seem crazy and baseless? Does it really harm you at all if someone else believes 5G causes covid? And does it harm you enough to say that their speech should be limited rather than free?
Interesting point of view/source of internal tension there.
There are historical examples of why trusting the mob goes poorly, but keeping that on the table fundamentally ruins the point of a democratic society. Its all well and good to say we need an educated populace, but the system should offer the public a chance to live up to the ideal rather than guard against their failure.
I would far rather restrict their right to vote than their right to speak. If they're sufficiently influential, that also means that everyone's vote who doesn't fall for their charm is worth just that much more.
I'm very opposed to limiting either, the US is already more restrictive with regards to both voting rights and speech than I'm comfortable with. I'd be very worried about gating voter rights to some kind of checklist of thought, removing Coting access from those deemed to be unworthy of casting a vote based on what they think or say.
Small and private does not necessarily imply exclusive. There are such communities where you can easily join or lurk.
> or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence
And that still works for me like that. They might not be visible on the first results page but once you start to research a topic in depth you can find them.
Sure, there is way more advertising and bots these days but there is WAY more content available today than 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Definitely way more diversity of content too.
The many forums that existed fulfilled both of those. Open to read for anyone, really big in aggregate and mostly small and private communities of participants.
I fully agree with you there. This is why I remarked on the private (or perhaps better said, semi-private) nature of forums/chats I use with high SnR today. I’m disappointed it has gone this way, but then the 90s was a long time ago now and I was certainly more naive then.
To draw an analogy, I think distance/privacy brings its own benefits. There’s a reason the corporate giants of the 50s, 60s, and 70s put their research campus away from the main HQ centre of gravity.
In the late 80s/early-90s, it was quite a “hike” to get to the Internet. Either you were at University or as in my case, you had to get modem, cable, KA9Q, terminal emulator, Kermit, rz/sz, etc working together to reach it. Even when browsers became a thing, you may have needed to compile one, or get Winsock working if on a Pee Cee.
Liking a video makes your feed piled up with a semi-relevant crap for a week.
Sometimes (increasingly often) I have to dislike an otherwise good video because I don’t want to screw up my recommendations.
Also “don’t recommend channel” for truly obnoxious ones. I follow through 3-4 of their videos so that they start to appear in the side column and then kill it from there, removing all traces afterwards.
In my experience,
- Don’t recommend channel - strong flag, but doesn’t modify “interests”.
- Not interested - removes this exact video with a very low key tuning of recommendations, if at all.
- Dislike - a slightly pronounced signal for recommendations. But still clueless cause no info on why.
- Like - you’ll drown in content similar to this, but not the same quality. Get ready to shovel it and miss your previous interests completely.
- Comment - similar to like.
The default careless youtube experience without all that stopped working around 5 years ago (at least). Can’t imagine using it as is and not degenerating into something inhuman.
It's interesting to me that somebody would try and curate their experience in this shitshoveling assault on the nerves that is Youtube recommendations.
Can you maybe recommend some extensions please? I’m only using unhook (some of) and sponsorblock, but it would be nice to e.g. dislike videos right from the feed or ban channels from their video or a channel page. Oh, and the one that loads X button in history immediately.
I disagree. Consuming less mindless content such as watching videos is always helpful.
> So what to use instead?
Try recommendations from real humans such as friends or posters in online communities you are part of.
In fact I would say this is the singular reason why Facebook declined. I just don't want my 8th grade classmate to see that I liked my cousin's wedding photos 20 years later, y'know?
This is why I have never used, and will never use, my real world identity on the internet in the decades I've been interacting on it. Instead, I use consistent internet-only identities. It allows me to communicate honestly and openly.
Business cycle wise:
- it starts out mellow, with lots of positive ROI and few downsides. Few know about it at first.
- as awareness grows, so does competition. While there is a ton of room to grow, this isn’t a problem. Growth doesn’t have to be at the cost of a competitors market share, there are tons of available untapped opportunities.
- eventually, it starts to become crowded. Now competition starts to become more heated and cut throat. Old tricks to stay competitive stop working, and there is an arms race to develop new ones.
- at some point, some/many players don’t feel they can compete based on fundamentals (positively), and it starts to become a race to the bottom. With some/many players starting to scam or commit fraud, be scary/manipulative, squeeze suppliers to a destructive degree, etc. Zero sum game instead of green field.
- this causes demand side restrictions and additional costs as customers start to get scared/overwhelmed, and cut back or get more demanding on quality.
- this causes a downward spiral that worsens the situation industry wide, eventually bankrupting marginal suppliers and maybe even big ones, until things stabilize or change.
On the social side, a lot of people population wide are flat out not doing it anymore. Including women. Similar to dating apps.
Which is why some advertisers, politicians, businesses keep getting even more insane and craven trying to extract even more value from the remaining people - to keep the numbers going up and right. So they don’t have to ‘look down’ and be potentially bankrupt. The loudest players in this type of environment are almost always the ones in the worst position.
This is also playing out in American Politics and Media right now.
It isn’t just engineer or blue collar types, who IMO were already predisposed to not engaging with it.
Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
Minuses:
- there are going to be a lot more deeply traumatized people with a profoundly negative outlook on human nature, now and even more in the future.
- society is going to get a whole lot poorer while this plays out.
I disagree. Tech literacy is going down, partially due to an overreliance on dashboard-style mobile apps and phishing scams are still widely effective. I have seen people lose mails and accounts to strategies that have been unchanged for an easily googleable 11 years now. Perhaps the inevitability of exposure is a numbers game, but I'm overall pessimistic, I think a lot of scams will become a lot more "personal sounding" due to AI agents, and a preparedness reset is coming.
I doubt this. The entire history of humans indicates otherwise.
Get rid of identities and the fire hose of click bait social media and I'd expect the internet goes back to something much more similar to what we often see people wax poetic about, a smaller web that's people goofing off and writing random stuff on their own site.
This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably on the endangered list. TikTok is probably the last big social and has an increasingly negative reputation, meaning it'll probably be "out" pretty soon.
The public Internet is probably dying, a victim of spam and over-commoditization.
Public wide open free for all space are a major use case but they aren't a necessity and they may not survive the spam tsunami of LLMs and troll farms.
It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.
But then once it ended, it feels like being stuck online with nothing else to do all day burnt a lot of people out on the internet and online activities. Perhaps they decided it was best to make up for lost time once real life 'reopened'. Or perhaps they took one look at the online panopticon, and realised it wasn't adding as much to their lives as they thought.
Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.
Important to note that this happens every summer. Especially a pre-us-election summer. People are out there living their lives, having fun, and avoiding the constant barrage of politics online. Things will be back in the fall.
Sauce: My email open rates observed over the past 10 years. Summers always see a lull in online activity
Also you may be experiencing your age cohort growing up. I’m mid 30’s and have noticed a significant decline in online activity as people my age juggle kids and career and increasingly have zero time to spend online. The younger folk without these encumbrances don’t hang out where I’m used to looking.
Whenever I hang out (irl) with younger coworkers it’s obvious that people 10 years younger still spend just as much if not more time online than we did at that age.
Interesting read. Check out the section "Decline in time spent online". It kicked up for Covid, but is now back to pre-Covid levels: 2016: 6h29 2017: 6h46 2018: 6h48 2019: 6h38 2020: 6h55 2021: 6h57 2022: 6h37
But users are now spending more of that time on social media (about 40%).
Variety is the spice of life though, I’m glad it was enjoyed by others.
I can't really explain why I like them so much. They scratch a cosmic itch I don't fully understand, and the answer isn't simply validating negative sentiment toward the world or other trivial possibilities that immediately spring to mind.
This article has a tone of a giant, unacknowledged fear of passing that is using some notion of "the Internet" as a demonstratory puppet. "The Internet" too shall pass[0], and it should be the most obvious and neutral thing in the world; the overdramatizing part of this article does makes no sense.
Facebook and microblogs use the same infra and can be accessed via the same means (web browser, etc).
At least from anecdotal experience, the really good stuff has been getting easier to find through IRL-ish means, like asking a colleague for the invite link.
I haven't really seen behind the invite veil much, since I'm about as far as it gets from someone cool you'd want in your group chat, but from what I've seen, "good" things are happening and thoughts are thought. It's just happening in private.
There were comments or an article somewhere about someone being sad about "very deep technical discussions being held on discord servers and that knowledge being ultimately lost". I don't think it's that bad of a thing though since that knowledge was never intended for the public and being ultimately lost and forgotten is what the people writing said messages are expecting of it. Certainly, as a person, I care more about myself having less of a digital papertrail than someone in the indefinite future not being able to solve their nieche non-essential problem.
I could elaborate more on the "onlyfans has replaced sex" and the such, which are, IMO, while somewhat true, are conclusions to which the author arrived to from a wrong place, thus continuing to think in that direcion would get them further from the truth, not closer to it.
In the end, just as human brain is a sort of general purpose multimodal input-output machine, the internet can be used for all sorts of purposes. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will fall out of fashion, without getting a solid cultutal foothold. The test of time works as well as ever.
It's not even a particularly novel idea, right? Chatrooms have been a thing just about since packet switching was a thing, this one is just a polished implementation of that idea. Trouble is, the one metric that matters to Google (inter-linking, engagement, etc) can't happen when the content can't be crawled in the first place. So our pleasant, intellectually simulating content stays hidden where the rest of the internet never notices it.
I am of the opinion that Discord does any niche community a great disservice by first locking content behind an invite link and, once invited, content is locked behind pages and pages of search results if the content is even still available.
I’m sure there is bias on my part because I cut my teeth on forums of the ‘00s to the mid ‘10s, but the siloing and fragmentation of information has ultimately divided up centers of knowledge into smaller and smaller pieces. Those in the know will know and those not will be shut out.
I personally don't socialize on the forums though. My unfiltered thought process doesn't need to be searchable for the next century. It's okay for some communication to be ephemeral.
Thankfully there are lots of other servers that have more lax inclusion of adult topics, if that's your fancy. I think it's okay for different communities to have different standards.
Having to click on multiple links to just make sense of a conversation?
It's the reason I can't even get myself to follow places like NANOG and LKML; because the experience is just so painful. It makes you almost immediately want to disengage from the subject matter.
As the centuries went on, many people decided that the time it took to read a pamphlet was almost always worth more than what they were getting out of it. So, we got book publishers and newspaper proprietors whose key value added was their guarantee that what they were publishing met a minimum standard of value, and people were willing to pay for that because it was better value than reading self-published books or pamphlets, even when free.
If the mainstream Internet follows the same path, it might come to have more in common with MSN of 1996 than with Facebook of twenty years later.
All the doomerism is gone if you avoid it.
You can take back your life if you just go for it
But the article isn't really about that, to the extent it's really about anything except the author's need to feel very, very smart. It's a vague gesture at how "over" it they are, for any value of "it". Best to pat them on the head condescendingly and then move on.
Think of it like this...
Radio didn't die, it evolved, into streaming music.
TV didn't die, it evolved to streaming TV>
The printed medium did not die, it evolved into HTML and web pages, a fancier form of type setting.
The telegraph didn't die, it evolved into digital communications.
See, it's not that things die and go away, it is a process of improving how humans interact.
Some may find it difficult, or maybe the isolation is a problem, then there is an evolution.
It will not stop, it will evolve to the next step.
What that is, will be fun to watch.
I hope I am still here to see it.
I wait in anticipation, not negativity.
New media exploration is new, fresh, and chaotic. The kids on Discord channels and those watching streamers and VTubers have this same energy. The old guys looking for mailing lists are sneaking a peek in between looking at their kids, doing their household chores, and finishing work. The vibes are off cause of the audience.
I think better lessons in media literacy would help a lot of situations like this, however there is very strong incentive in our world to prevent a high degree of media literacy from taking root, as it would obviate a lot of methods used for controlling subsets of the population.
Maybe this time it will be different, eh?
It survived, hypnotic ads are an amazing thing.
Think of all the billions over the decades it took to finally get video ads on the internet that were deemed as engaging as old analog color TV.
You've got to pay for it somehow.
>The internet is already over
Nah, just a multi-year commercial break . . . Well, maybe I don't know how easy it would be to tell the difference any more.
The companies that built what we think of as the modern internet, they tried to build perpetual motion machines. They've built unsustainable businesses chasing investor money, based on the idea that they can sell people things better, give them more of what they want, entire environments built around interaction and engagement. And then, like the foresight lacking Rube Goldberg engineers they are, they created a thing that can do all the engagement for them and unleashed it. I have no doubt in my mind that when the last user deletes their Facebook app from their phone, engagement will be at an all time high.
I remember reading something about how most internet bandwidth usage is not people sending things to each other, but machines mindlessly sending nonsense, and what we see is a fraction of the total. It appears that that is the fate of the visible internet as well, and coming very soon.
I still advocate that style - and being drunk with style - can lead the writer to singularly original and contemporaneous ideas. Language is a dynamic object, filled with the spirit of the age, and very high sensitivity to it within a philosophical context can act as a catalyst.
I guess our main disagreement is if he has original ideas. I've only read a couple of things he wrote so I'm certainly not in position to have the definitive opinion, but neither of his articles impressed me.
Setting aside what does "end of the world" actually mean, who's making this statement?
Almost nobody is, since practically every instance is someone referencing somebody else with little commitment. Essentially this is arguing against a person instead of some wide-spread view.
Even if it was wide spread, does it even matter?
It obviously can't be true since end of the world in any reasonable understanding contains end of the internet. So what exactly is this point and argument against it trying to show? I have no idea since believing or not in something dying generally matters little to it being (or not) in such process.
Let's say it is important. What are the arguments that it is incorrect beyond being obviously so?
Well, some unrelated people before you were incorrect about unrelated shape of future so you, but not the author, probably are too. Then he follows this by putting words in mouth of the people he disagrees with, before he swerves into his own experiencing of internet consumption and resulting numbness. I guess based on his expectations of near future there's an expectation of universality of his experience, but even if it was universal (and huge amounts of emotions exhibited online create at least some doubt that it is), why would it contribute to internet's death? It obviously doesn't stop him from scrolling, or writing and otherwise engaging on internet. Again, I have no idea.
So all of it does not really add up to much, but I admit it is entertainingly written which is more than most of us manage.
No, it obviously can be true. I can imagine many ways "the end of the world" could occur. Also, maybe it's not crystal clear what "the end of the world" means to you, but for me, and likely other people, it means the collapse of human civilization, which could happen from nuclear war, climate change, etc.
Just because "the end of the world" would include "the death of the internet" doesn't imply that by imagining the end of the world you're also imagining the ways in which every aspect of the world get destroyed. When I imagine the end of the world I don't focus on what happens to say, Paris, specifically, but I do know, implicitly, that the end of the world would include the end of Paris.
We obviously disagree on what it means. For me it doesn't mean something of high value to me would end/disappear. It does mean in almost axiomatic way that if internet is still working, then the world hasn't ended as some part of civilization is clearly still running to a very high degree necessary for that to be the case.
<http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-pub/bge/bge4.htm>
(It's ... nothing but a compilation of epigrams. Fediverse Toots, if you will.)
What seems to be happening is churn. Geocities was supplanted by Myspace, which was crushed by Facebook, which was marginalized by Tiktok... Does this ever settle, or what?
The real breakthrough would be if someone came up with something like Craigslist that won on price. Operate at a low enough cost that just charging for ads in areas where people purposefully look at ads, such as apartment rentals, is enough to keep the the thing going. Make social so cheap that the big players go bust.
- People will use it drastically less. I got rid of my smart phone ~2 years ago and it's been a huge life improvement. Still on the computer a lot, but when I leave the room I'm in the real world again.
- When they do use it it will be drastically higher quality. I'm working on building the World Wide Scroll as a successor to the web (https://wws.scroll.pub/), an idea I first had 12 years ago (https://breckyunits.com/spacenet.html), but took a while to figure out all the infra.
Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
We were the first to come, and we're the first to leave. We're trendsetters, while most of the society just do what everyone else does. It's just that those things don't happen overnight, it's a process.
> Meanwhile most of the population
have been peasants and slaves in most societies through most of history. The fact that there exist a handful of countries where average Joe doesn't need to worry about biological survival doesn't suddenly remove the truth that most people do and will belong to lower classes and "everyone is equal" is a meme that came to existence very recently so can't be taken seriously.
> Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it.
Most people want cheap entertainment and nothing more. That's how things have always been, whether it's gladiators fighting or cute puppy pictures on Facebook. Modern tech industry is just a reflection of this, and things will stay this way.
Obviously nothing stops you from seeking better ways to pass time, or at least building some healthy habits if you're not ready to give up on slop completely. Just like Newton chose to think about falling apples instead of drinking wine.
My comment might come across as snobbish, but I also recognize the fact that there are lots and lots of people above me, and I will never achieve their level no matter how much work I put into myself.
I wish I could tell you more than what's on the website there now.
Right now it's a ticket on a voyage into the unknown!
There are a myriad of "simple web" projects out there that do technically a "basic web like in the good ol' days", no money required, and actually have specs and implementations to show, in contrast to "a folder".
Check out https://geminiprotocol.net/. They have clients available, and even some content!
> Asking for even a dollar makes it inaccessible to a vast part of the world's population
Downloading/reading the WWS is always free. It only costs money if you want to own/build a part of it.
> Two, it just makes the project sound like a scam.
I've worked on this project for over 12 years (https://breckyunits.com/treeNotation.html). If this is a scam, I'm really bad at scams!
First the first time ever, people are now giving me money for it, which will give us the funds to expand the project to realize its potential.
> They have clients available, and even some content!
Have you tried `wws fetch pldb`?
Individual incentives have also shifted substantially. Having a post go viral or be of some help to someone else used to be enough of an incentive to post on the internet. Now people want to make a job out of it, which shifts the nature of the posts due to different incentives requiring different optimizations. Also people aren't hosting their own websites that they support out of their own pocket that often anymore. People would rather post their content on other people's websites that are ad supported and therefore have incentives that bias what is posted there or gets traction on that platform.
I'm honestly in the 'old guy from the 1990s' camp. ... once there was a fleeting glimpse of beauty, called 'Internet'.
This whole article reads as "i expected things to stay the same and they are"
There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways - netflix, apple tv, etc. So they're not in theaters? Miniseries are the new movies. Your streaming box is the new theater.
Bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style? Stop reading best-sellers, and focus on more curated and genre lists, such as Goodreads. Again, you expected the new york times bestseller list to be the arbiter of "good" and that is no longer true.
And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap
Broaden your horizons or slide beneath the static.
Are there? People parrot this over and over but rarely provide any reliable evidence.
Even if there is interesting stuff being done, if it has no impact past three people then it is by definition not "great".
By most measures I can think of, there are NOT lots of "great" things being made.
And how does your definition of greatness apparently presuppose widespread impact, but somehow presumably exclude any modern films that have demonstrably widespread impact?
Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down.
Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so.
I'm reminded of the punk documentary where the original punks were horrified that the people who came after and idolized them missed the whole point.
If this is the case across the board, it can't be an indicator of decreasing quality. It's more likely that with the internet and streaming, box office revenues simply matter less than they once did. Everyone is competing with streaming and the internet, no one wants to go to a theater anymore.
Same with music. No one cares about Billboard anymore now that everything is on Soundcloud and Spotify, and no matter how niche someone's tastes are, there's probably an entire ecosystem of content for it. I recently found out dungeon synth was a thing.
>Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down.
Where is it documented? Show me the documentation. I doubt that if you combined all movies releasing this year in theaters, and everything on every streaming service, that even half would be sequels.
>Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so.
What's your thesis here? That no modern music is ever played at weddings? That music played at weddings is an objective measure of artistic quality and cultural impact? Why even bother asking this question if you're going to answer on my behalf?
But as far as impact goes, again, it's simply impossible for any music to have the same impact in the internet age as it did pre-internet. That isn't an indicator of quality going down, it's an indicator of the scope of available media becoming so broad and diffuse that no one thing, regardless of quality, can capture the market like it did when pop culture was more centralized.
Again, the world is changing. You have not.
This is the IMDB top 250 list, which I take as a reference for "best of all times" movies. 30 of them are from this decade. Some of them may drop off (there is a slight bias towards recent movies), so let's keep 25 of them, so 1/10, the list is over 100 years, so we are about average.
Not many in the top spots though, the best being Parasite (2019), #33, which I expect to stay high, and Dune: part 2 (2024) at #35, but I expect it to drop a bit as it is a current year movie.
Anyways, it is neither a particularly good nor a particularly bad time for movies.
A lot of the pop music kvetching is usually code for “new music that I like and find familiar is hard to find.”
I've never heard of her, but the first search result I got is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM
It seems very derivative to me.
And FWIW I think there's plenty of high quality and original/creative music out there nowadays. But the 'top 40' category does seem quite stale and boring (judging by the music I hear in shopping malls/bars...).
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bw5K138hoU
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Wxl9Q9lUQ
What would you say this is derivative of, and how is this more derivative than other music? What is an example of not-derivative music by this criteria?
Nearly all music depends on some kind of prior art. You can be reductive about any genre of music; for a couple hundred years choral and classical European music was nearly all about devotion to God.
Now take this story and extend it to anything you like. The dying publishing industry forcing authors to bring an audience with them minimizes risk for flops but with that goes away any point for the industry to exist, and any incentive for originality, etc.
Nothing was ever perfect but it also seems disingenuous to say that nothing is worse. Some may feel it doesn’t matter which is a different topic, but the decline of art and culture is certainly real
Sorry, this just isn't true. If you aren't listening to the "top 40 crap", then you aren't listening to pop, you're listening to something that isn't pop at all.
There aren't any tiny pop acts at all. Those aren't pop. The definition of "pop music" is that it's popular, hence the name. If it's some band that barely anyone knows about, they might be great (in your opinion), but they're not popular by any reasonable definition, and thus aren't "pop music".
When people complain that modern pop music is all terrible, it's a perfectly valid position. The music industry is not at all like it was 40 years ago. It doesn't mean that all recent music is bad.
To be fair, he was talking about big iron mainframes. He envisioned everyone having a dumb terminal in their home rather than a microcomputer (which we effectively call "the pc").
All had one thing in common: interesting creators.
Previously Google connected you with interesting pages, now Google is answering machine. Now you are not connected with people, but with Google algorithm. You are connected with amazon deals, news outlets. You will not find XYZ blog on it that easily.
Previously Facebook was designed to connect you with people, now you are connected with memes, ads, bots, and companies, news outlets.
Previously YouTube connected users with creators, now it is full of corporations, big media. You cannot down vote, you cannot easily browse subscriptions. YouTube does not care about users, comment section has limited amount of moderation tools.
Dead internet theory. Bots create your feeds through algorithms. Bots comment threads through malicious accounts. Now Bots will also create content.
Manual labor is often more precise, more artsy. Moving to automation, to factories killed some of that. I think this is what happens with the Internet. We are living in a factory now.
There is a limit to enshittification, before users are tired and go elsewhere.
HN: “well, this was bound to happen anyway without AI, it’s just fearmongering, dont pay any attention to the man behind the curtain” hehe
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/a-users-guide-to-the-zairja-...
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-cacophony
The second one is a bit closer to touching on the same themes, but both are a little more allegorical than TFA.
>They were wrong,
The fact that both Google and Facebook are based on precisely this suggests to me that it is not the theory that is wrong but the execution of the other examples. Uber - where you drive - just isn’t all that interesting to advertisers
I’d say the more important perspective is one of walled garden. The companies with tight walled gardens seem to succeed the best at hijacking these personal behavioural exhausts of data aka surveillance capitalism etc
On paper this looks good for the marketer. Why yes, we can take our captured population and send them ads to local partners who now get these customers patronizing their business. Seems like it would be a great lucrative deal for both parties, right?
Of course logic says it doesn't work like that. Like I said, no one sits there looking at uber ads the entire ride. No one tells the uber driver "hey wait, I know I was trying to get where I was going but all the sudden I am surprisingly hungry, lets divert a half mile and potentially 20 minutes so I could get a $4 bacon egg and cheese." It just doesn't happen.
But the dance must continue of course. Maybe the uber people responsible for this feature don't even care at all that it works, only that their shareholders think it works and their advertising partners also think it works. That is incentive enough to keep up the farce even with no supporting data because the money, in the end, is very real. After all, everyone on earth knows about coke thats sold in every store on earth, but the ads still need to be purchased because the purchase itself is a more important metric than the end result.
The new generation doesn't know how boring a world without a phone in your pocket actually was. They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back.
Who's "we"? There's billions of people today who really do believe in religion the way that medieval Europeans did. The middle east is full of them, and there are multiple countries where the religion and government are inextricably joined together (such as Iran and Afghanistan). Sure, a large portion of the people in liberalized Western nations no longer believe that stuff the way medieval Europeans did, but there are many others who still do. The US has many of them too, trying to control government policy according to their beliefs.
Perhaps, just like with civilization IRL, it will start with pockets of societies that have specific ideals for collaboration. And then the successful pockets grow to include more and more.
First of all, the internet isn't on the verge of imploding, it's just in flux, as per usual. It also isn't stagnating, at least not on such a grand scale. Though it does feel as though it's lost a bit of steam in the last few years. That could be due to the homegeneitiy of the current investment landscape.
The author tries to sell us a doom spiral by comparing the state of services. They attempt to connect different services as if they're representative of a pulse for the internet as a whole. But the differences between Facebook and Tik Tok are vast, between Twitter and MySpace, between forums and Discord. Declining numbers in any of these does not indicate decline in any other service, nor the internet as a whole. Not to mention most of these are controlled by monolithic entities who also don't contribute to the web outside their bloated bubbles, the performance of these services are largely based on the performance of these companies and their investments. If one dies, it's a largely isolated event.
All the most recent, negative changes were made by spurious investments into anything that even seemed remotely profitable by eager investors. These bubbles will burst, and when they do, some people won't even notice the change. Some, of course, will be forced to adapt, or to leave the internet entirely. That'll likely mean the www will lose a lot of its traffic, but that doesn't sound bad for the internet as a whole... in fact it sounds good.
Companies are only making the internet worse because they believe there's money to be made. That, as the author points out, is not really going to be true for much longer, at least not for the current wave of companies. And when that happens, new companies will have to step in and pick up the pieces if they want to profit off the internet. Unfortunately for them, there's just not enough lubrication to keep an aging population of users relearning all their old habits in new environments.
I believe the internet, as it is now, will not survive for the individual. However, every individual must make that journey on their own terms. The author clearly made their journey ages ago, or perhaps was always skeptical. Others, however still have to make that trek. I have a few younger friends still in the beginning of their internet obsession where they (somehow) can still find regular content that interests them on the www. This group is likely to be the last large wave for advertisers. So, when they're done, that's it; The internet won't be worth investing in, and everyone who only ever used it kill time will go along side the companies. Those that made the journey will stay if they have use for a post-corporate internet.
The article, of course, assumes that the internet is just for fapping and killing time, when in reality it's used for a lot more than just that. Fapping and killing time is just what's being subsidized by the numerous companies invested in the internet. The article doesn't consider this, it doesn't consider that there were points before the current one, or that there are even corners of the internet where people share software and ideas. No, it just assumes that once this fad dies, the internet dies. I personally believe the internet has uses outside what companies invest in, and it's not hard to use it for just those purposes. That's enough of a reason to keep coming back.
All that being said, I do agree with the author regarding causes on the internet. One essentially does nothing when they try to devote their time to a cause online. Unless one explicitly uses the internet to organize action with others in meatspace, the internet is essentially worthless as a medium for revolution. Actually, it's worse than worthless, it's detrimental as it encourages non-action. In most cases even supporting forces who would ostracize those that would push for more forceful and aggressive action against the status quo. The corporate internet has largely made revolutionaries into pacifists, a trait which makes them non-threatening to those in power.
Even calmly explaining all this is a bit mastubatory and counter-productive. What I should be doing is running in local elections, organizing meetups, or sabotaging power structures in a variety of ways. I should be speaking in plain language about all of this, and freely expressing myself. Instead I'm here, explaining the obvious flaws of an article, while simultaneously not-so-subtly advertising my views regarding the web like it matters.
Oh wait :\
Just train a LLM, your new search engine. Like-minded folks making the enshittified portions transparent.
E-mail spam used to be a thing, until one day it wasn't. AI just generalizes the process.
I think this is the answer. Once upon a time we were way fewer people, and many interests were shared among those people (because we pretty much were all "geeks"). We've always had trolls, spammers, etc. but it still felt like we were part of a big community.
Now everybody is here, and that feeling is no more. It's like moving from a small village or town (where everybody knows each other) to a huge city. It doesn't feel like "belonging" anymore.
But today, HHGTTG is very nearly 45 years old.
For how many decades should references to novel fiction persist, do you suppose?
In 2009, we already had pocket supercomputers.
But to your question, Tolkien, Asimov, Lovecraft, et al. are still a heavy influence on modern Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror. Why do you think a mere 45 years should mean that something is no longer referenced?
Things are moving on, we are just getting old.
Why.
> People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day
That's the societal cost of having personalized experience. Nobody watches the content I watch because I pick content that's specifically relevant to just me. Even my closest friends watch different things.
But the sports fans never felt this way, and were always happy to cut out the geeks and nerds that didn't give two shits about the sportsball game they watched that weekend. Why should the geeks and nerds need to worry about including the sports fans, but not the other way around?
>I think social media, politics, streaming services, etc. have totally blown away these shared frameworks in society, and it's kind of a bummer, even though it's great to have lots of choices. People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day.
When Game of Thrones was the new hot TV show, it seemed like everyone and his dog was watching it, and that included the sports fans and the nerds too.
>I guess sports is basically the last thing that's shared.
Back to my first point. I don't know any sports fans in my circle of friends and work colleagues (who are all techies of course). If any are, they keep it to themselves, thankfully.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
https://ooh.directory is constantly growing if you want to look for things to read.
https://kagi.com/smallweb Is a fun alternative way to discover new content.
I started a series almost a year ago to help people discover interesting humans and their blogs: https://peopleandblogs.com/
Bearblog has a discovery section: https://bearblog.dev/discover/
The spirit of the old web is still alive and thriving in places that are now no longer mainstream. It takes some effort to find them but great sites are still out there.
* https://search.marginalia.nu/
* https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3hn0a7/what_smal...
EDIT: and because this one just brings me joy, that it exists, with such excruciating detail (:
(Scroll all the way down; HN is mentioned first).
> 8. Ads can be good
No they absolutely cannot. Ads skew the incentives whether they are intrusive or not. Also the entire point of ads is to get the user to do something aside from his own goals so they are in direct opposition of point 1.
Forums were the cornerstone of the old internet and more or less completely extinct today.
Thanks for this. It's the best thing since webring. I recently switched to Kagi. I didn't know they were patrons of the spirit of the old web too. That makes me even happier to be giving them my money.
The internet age is over is correct. The age of being connected has started.
More and more people connected to the internet but not actually using it the way we saw it in the 90s and 2000s. Mid-2010s we started to see the paradigm take place.
Like the verbal equivalent of that one time I drank far too much Gin and my stomach finally said "no" all over the bathroom floor (missed the toilet — oops).
I'm glad to never have gone down that particular path. Stuck with my flip phone for ages, etc.
But for people who did, just know that there's room for moderation. There is plenty of space between "all day online" and "the internet is over."
I like this quote from "Mutant Message Down Under":
My suggestion is that you taste the message, savor what is right for you,
and spit out the rest; after all, that is the law of the universe.
Because these apps are designed to be targeted and specific with some of the brightest minds in the world working on them, it's easy to overdose and become addicted.
t. recovering addict
I'm not sure where the healing process begins, on the larger scale. Parents with their children, I suppose? I grew up without TV; probably that twisted my mind a bit, so I recoil from that stuff somewhat automatically. It's something I wish upon others.
"predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate."
To me it fucking wildly accurate. It did revolutonize a lot for me. Yes I know some people would get a heart attack if they could not show to the rest of the world what did they have for breakfast. Not my problem. I only had good from the Internet so far.