Can we take a moment to appreciate what kind of web experience we are building? | Hacker News Reader

Can we take a moment to appreciate what kind of web experience we are building?

12 pointstomdesantis8 comments

A web where most posts, images and videos are AI-generated with only SEO optimization, advertisement and manipulation in mind

A web controlled by scraping and crawling agents with advanced browser control designed to deceive paywalls, steal content and send spam

A web were creators that make genuinely interesting content are not rewarded for their work because of the things mentioned above

A web where digital identities are easily faked and weaponized with a simple prompt

I'm afraid that we are trading short term economic gains for a horrible web experience in the long term.

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Yes, modern internet stack is a cesspool, and it cannot be saved.

- Specs (be it for hardware or software) are too complicated. The complexity can be controlled only by large companies (e.g. HTML5 == Chrome == new IE). And software/hardware companies fail to implement specs securely.

- "Self-hosting" is becoming harder. Microsoft & Google controls (blocks) the email traffic for own gains. Public static IP address from ISP costs more than the whole thing (IP, virtual machine/hardware, electricity, etc.) from cloud. Additionally, Cloudflare etc. can take control of internet traffic.

- "Cloud-hosting" has uncontrollable pricing. DDOS attack can make $100k bill in a few hours.

- There only couple of "OKish" non-scamming/no-dark-patterns domain name registrars.

- Google Search is dead (results are only AI-generated stuff + ads + scams). LLMs are the greatest manipulation machine ever invented.

I suspect a parallel internet will emerge that is more social and closed. The current trajectory of the internet seems unsustainable.

It will likely take the form of a plain-text or markdown-based 'article sharing' app/protocol.

So it's essentially a web browser, but the initial wave of content found on it is pirated articles from commercial websites, unpaywalled, with ads and cruft stripped out.

And that's bolted atop a social graph for communal comments, maybe from Mastadon.

For years, I've been expecting this to show up. People hate ads, paywalls, and trolls so it scratches an itch, and there's a 'viral' spread from having existing users invite their friends by sharing article links.

It seems like a matter of time.

Based on current trends, I think something geographically constrained and heavily chat and picture focused is likely. Probably a way to transfer money around too.

Take a look at every company currently. They're trading the short term illusion of economic gain for a stable and skilled talent pool of employees that are engaged and productive and a public that doesn't hate them and their products.

The best bet will be parents. The generation that grew up with the spam and social media will be hyper vigilant of how their kids take in the internet, that's really the only hope. That first millennial/gen-z generation were just inundated with the speed at which all this came.

Maybe people will go outside

The best thing to come out of the US and Canada trade war for me as a Canadian is that I dropped most of my dependence on said system. It’s not 100% (I’m here commenting) but I will do my best not to fuel FAANG as they can keep their plan in motion for a paywalled AI web.

I suspect niche forums to be the 1st line of defence for a reintroduction of a human centric web and relink from those small enclaves. We’ll have to lose anonymity in the process as it’ll be the only way to guarantee authenticity and in all likelihood biometrics will be a necessity as content will need to be tagged with a pulse.

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