Tell me about your favorite tree (a slow-web proposal)
nannnsss.omg.lol
nannnsss.omg.lol
For me the answer invariably comes out as Yes. Mom filled the fridge, homework wasn’t that hard, and I could spend hours upon hours just existing on the internet. Find a new friend? GReat! Chat for hours. Find a new idea? Awesome! Deep dive into a wikipedia rabbit hole for hours. Get an idea? Superb! Spend the next week coding every day after school to make it happen.
Now I have, like, obligations and stuff. The list of fun new ideas and friends and websites to explore is … very long. Not to mention all the existing fun ideas friends and websites I’ve already accumulated that I also enjoy spending time with. Realistically there is very little room for anything new.
So ask yourself: Do you miss the old internet or do you miss being a kid staring at a new-to-you frontier?
edit: Whenever I talk about this with people IRL. “the old internet” is always whatever was available when they were in middle/high school. Funny how that works :)
There are glimmers of hope here and there. I'd say LLMs brought the same sort of wonderment as the internet for a short period, but we quickly pushed them to their limits. They're a bit too much of a product, not the basic lego building block that the internet was for them to offer long-lasting effects. Granted, perhaps they are the BBS of our time, with an evolutionary, but game changing, step on the horizon?
But in the last 30 years, the smartphone might be the only game changing tech we've gained. And, sure enough, I'd say the early smartphone era was just as fascinating and fun as the early internet era. However, by now it too has grown long in the tooth. We really just pine for another automobile/airplane/space rocket/internet moment; something that changes everything.
This rings very true for video games. I cut my teeth on MUDs then MMOs and find myself craving pleasant social environments. It's easy to blame Discord or other social tools that gobbled up the gaming I enjoyed, but I'm old and all my peers are old, and the truth is I don't have 4 hours to roleplay about werewolf vampire monks.
That said, sometimes things really do change. I do get excited when I find a cool hobby website from a passionate nerd, or something like the MMOndrian game shared here a few days ago. There's more cool stuff than ever, but it does represent less of the general web experience.
The push to transform learning, or any form of productive activity, into drudgery, and humans into joyless (and often sedentary) robots, is regrettable. And the irony is that in the long run robots will be better robots than roboticized humans anyway.
(Older sites rot less, too; but even when you find archives of somewhat newer stuff, on average the content wasn’t so valuable.)
I miss the old web.
I am not dismissing it. I miss the old internet too.
But what I’ve found is that I miss the free time to explore a lot more. When I find that, there is suddenly plenty of good people on the internet sharing interesting things. But usually in my busy life I scurry past without even noticing.
For example: there are entire corners of instagram devoted to people with a few hundred followers sharing daily chicken drama from their farms. Like a soap opera with daily updates … about chickens. Doesn’t get more “describe your favorite tree” than that
Difference is that when FishCam went live, it was "Wait. What? You can do that?" Now: "Of course you can share video on the internet."
We still get the occasional "Wait. What? You can do that?" moments — when we witnessed LLMs, for example — but we aren't inundated with them on a near-daily basis like we were in the age of the old internet, when everything about it was new and people were continually testing its limits.
In other words, it is mature now. There is no bringing back the magic.
1. From the perspective of a kid, everything is like that.
At 17 I was amazed by all sorts of things that my older peers yawned at and said "Yeah we could do that 10 years ago on desktop/mainframe/whatever". I now work with a lot of youngins. Their minds are blown by all sorts of things I find boring because we (the industry) started working on them 10+ years ago.
2. There's a lot of "wow you can do that!?" out there but it's locked in niches.
Right now I'm working on bringing bioinformatics tools to the web. It is blowing people's minds. To me the tech feels boring and obvious, to the biotech researchers it's like their whole world is revolutionizing (and they tell us as much).
To some degree, but, for example, the car wasn't as mind blowing to my generation as my parents' and grandparents'. And the kids today don't seem to recognize it as anything special at all. I expect you can say that about any technology. The telephone (not to be confused with a pocket computer) meant nothing to me, but was one of the greatest inventions ever known to people from an earlier time. There seems to be a natural decline as something reaches greater and greater maturity. Who here is thrilled by, say, the threshing machine? Who here even knows what a threshing machine is...?
> 2. There's a lot of "wow you can do that!?" out there but it's locked in niches.
Like I said, we're not inundated with it anymore. There are still special moments here and there, to be sure, but they don't come around often, so it is not the same continual high we once lived when the internet was new. Again, I think you can say that about anything becoming more and more mature. Going back to the car, in the early days they quickly improved with new features and better technology. Cars too lived the same "Wait. What? You can do that?" period. Now? A slightly larger infotainment screen is the biggest selling feature. Boring.
Admittedly, the driverless car hype got us really excited for a while, but the ball was kind of dropped on that one. Quite possibly the greatest marketing blunder of all time, and as a result I'm not sure the emotions have been able to recover as we start to see the technology actually be realized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
Web and possibly mobile are deep into plateau of productivity
The commercialized centralized appified algorithm-fed web is inferior when it comes to community-forming. It creates the illusion of social cohesion but in reality interactions are too superficial for real communities (and friendships) to form.
I started consuming quality content again when i replaced youtube with a FOSS wrapper that allows me to avoid the algorithm and ads, started torrenting books and getting my news through RSS feeds.
I started having fun again when I stopped using Steam and replaced it with oldschool LAN parties with my friends.
And before you accuse me of nostalgia, I never went to a LAN party when I was young, nor did I use IRC that much (the internet was expensive!).
Yes, the old internet was and still is better.
Facebook's original feed was kind of OK when it was just a chronological list of posts from your friends (though that still has some issues). But of course that doesn't make as much money as an algorithmic feed that pushes advertisements and outrage-driven "engagement".
Yellow journalism has been around forever, but now we have outrage media that is optimized for each person with an addictive feedback loop.
Somehow I don't think AI is going to improve the situation.
Ironically, one of the biggest point raised against this Brave New Internet is its infantilizing and "managed" way of treating the user. You should probably read the original article -- it makes this point very clearly.
I loathed my childhood, and have far more freedom as an adult then I ever did then.
School, homework, chores, strict bedtime, dial-up Internet, shared desktop computers...
Yes, I spent a ton of time playing games, compiling the Linux kernel, and screwing around on the Internet back then. But outside of summer vacation (which I do miss dearly), I spend just as much or more online today as then.
I absolutely do miss the old Internet, not just that time period.
But, there's bright spots in the modern Internet too. The rise of online D&D via Discord during the pandemic was amazing. I play far more D&D thesedays then I ever did since the 90s. Discord also scratches the MUD/IRC itch. But, not sure Discord will survive the next decade either.
The Internet was mostly additive up to that point. New tech, sites, services existed alongside what came before.
I can appreciate Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and even Twitter (it was huge for distributed systems/database community ~2009-15) at different points in time.
It was really the photo-first, later video-first, shift that happened mid-2010s + big tech dominance that strangled old Internet. No longer being additive, but shrinking the Internet into fewer properties, with everything just being "content".
For online play though I have mostly used roll20 (occasionally fantasygrounds, and very rarely discord but just for audio.)
This is a really bad, lazy, thought-terminating meme. If you think the internet isn't net worse today, support your position. The existence of nostalgia isn't evidence that the quality of the world remains constant.
I think the real answer is that we never thought what we had would change, or go away.
I think I described it in another comment from a wee while ago, but the old Internet was split. It was like there was a giant wall up between the serious business side of the Internet and the fun meme side of the Internet. "Pssssh, nobody is gonna make money from this stuff, that's not the point."
And then the serious business side realised that everything on the other side of the wall was monetisable. And so they broke the wall down, to offer us t-shirts and mugs with our memes on them. And then the denizens of the fun loving side realised that money could indeed be made from memes. And now you have it, the modern Internet where it's all purely about clout, creating an image/brand for yourself, monetising going viral, engagement farming.
It's ironically biblical, in a way.
The iron law of encrapification dictates that almost any web platform (youtube, reddit, etc.) will keep pushing the "degrade the end user experience to make more money" button until it stops working.
A slightly more charitable take is that people miss the "loss leader" versions of platforms before the inevitable monetization push (demanding continual growth even in a saturated market) took hold and started making them worse every year.
Fewer people care to be a good listener. And not without good reason. It's hard. It's hard to be the listener, because it can drain you. Other people like it, and they like being able to talk to (or at?) you.
And "most" people on the internet want to firehose their lives to the world, and then take a break and whip through glimpses of the internet at a million short clips a minute. How much are we absorbing along the way? Who is feeling "seen" and "heard" on the internet?
Now when someone sits down and writes an earnest blog post, and someone else takes the time to read it, and then writes a comment which proves they engaged, overall the interaction feels meaningful, and someone maybe gets a little reassurance they have a voice, and others in the world have a moment to listen.
But both of those things take time and effort, and most people simply don't see enough value in that. Maybe they are too distracted. Too drained from how life is lived, and then too low energy to do anything but consume distractions.
A downward cycle instead of a virtuous cycle. But how many of us are good at putting consistency into doing the healthy things for our body and mind that keep us feeling energized and motivated to slow down and engage?
When I'm disciplined about not buying junk at the store and my kitchen only has relatively unprocessed ingredients, I find myself obligated to make that kind of food.
But if the chips are there, it's really hard to not wander into the kitchen and snack on them. I only have finite willpower after all.
The modern world is like being completely surrounded by junk food for our attention, 24/7. It's no wonder ADHD diagnoses are spiking, people are anxious, no one seems to have enough willpower anymore, and we're all struggling to do what we know is best for ourselves.
My first favorite tree was an American Chestnut that I used to walk past on the way home from elementary school. For a time there was a slate sidewalk underneath the tree and the chestnuts themselves were a constant annoyance, but the tree was big, beautiful and shady, it made my neighbor's yard look really nice. I was shocked to learn later how fortunate I was to experience a real American Chestnut that had survived the blight (reddit even has a sub dedicated to finding survivors: https://www.reddit.com/r/americanchestnut/). I went back to try to find pictures of the tree and its since been razed. Presumably it died of blight, and the owners replaced it.
My second favorite tree is a somewhat famous Giant Sequoia I found after moving out west. I'm not doing disclose the location or the tree's name because its too easy to figure out where I am. The tree is the largest in town but not by much... it does stand out though. Without knowing its species the tree got me curious. I found out that it was actually a Sequoia! this surprised me because I thought they were relegated to small areas inside of national parks - NOT TRUE! Finding this tree led me to be intensely curious about all the other trees in town- what else was I missing? so I spent 6 months going on morning walks with a tree identification book. I met all sorts of people, and learned a ton about the trees. Tree identification is super hard by the way... I'm still getting my feet underneath me even after all that time. I was able to identify ~30 native species though, which was really cool!
I'd love to hear about other people's favorite trees.
Come the fall, her crown turns gold, A fire against the coming cold. She sheds her robe as others cling— The only pine to welcome spring.
() Never saw one in person and maybe will never see.
But my favourites have always been the oaks, and I still plant acorns whenever the opportunity arises. I have a few saplings in pots right now waiting for new homes. Maybe 500 years from now, someone will be sat under one of my oaks, reading a history book on the collapse of democracy during the 21st century, and the almost total destruction of global biodiversity. Planting trees feels like pretty much the only positive contribution I can make to this crazy world.
In an ever-larger Internet with ever-growing bullshit and regurgitated, useless data, social-media-driven madness, commercial interests, the odds of finding islands of naive and purely human interaction shrink by the day. Given the advances of AI, the hope of having a network of "unadulterated" users, however small, are practically nil. Add the fact that most of human affairs are now online - work, leisure, communication, paying taxes, shopping, etc. - there is not even a realistic hope of living without the net.
What are we to do? Do we only have the choice to assimilate the AI-driven, algorithmic future or to become complete Luddites living on subsistence farming? Are (open) islands of humans communicating over the internet possible? Can we connect three computers with the full guarantee they are all being operated by homo sapiens? Will "real-life, face-to-face interaction" become the new frontier for outcasts, weirdos and idealists, just like the internet was 30 years ago?
This is a serious question and request for comments. I do not particularly care to start a discussion on whether AI is good, the internet is fine and I'm being dramatic; there are plenty of other places to discuss AI optimism.
[My favourite tree is the birch. Majestic with its white bark, reminds me of cooler climates. Also pines, with the peculiar smell and the reddish, thick carpet of needles they leave on the forest floor.]
A few days ago someone posted an article linking luddites to the NASA moon landing program to AI-generated furry porn.
The interesting gist is that Luddites were misrepresented then and continue to be misrepresented today. The Luddite movement isn't conservative nor regressive, it is human!
No? To be conservative is to be hesitant of change. I know you say the Luddites have been misrepresented, but if they don't represented at least that much... What do they represent?
> it is human!
These aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I expect every human is conservative sometimes.
Conservatives aren't opposed to change, they are only hesitant of it. They worry about what negative effects the change might bring. Like, say, "the owning/ruling class's ability to buy and consolidate more labor as technology improved."
I guess the Luddite movement is conservative after all. Not sure what was up with the earlier comment trying to paint some other kind of picture.
Sure, +10 points for semantics, but it's missing the point. Maybe my fault for invoking a false liberal/conservative binary.
Intriguing to try and reify labor rights as conservative. Definitely a novel argument.
There was a point to that? Hopefully the Luddites being a labor movement wasn't the point, because I've never heard of it as anything else. It would be pointless to reiterate the obvious.
> Intriguing to try and reify labor rights as conservative.
The people were conservative[1]. Labor rights aren't human and cannot exhibit human attributes.
[1] And also liberal. The difference is only a matter of perspective. As you point out, it is false to think of them as being somehow different. No doubt everyone is both liberal and conservative at the same time, all the time. We use the words merely to indicate at which angle we happen to be looking at someone.
Then it's clear your didn't read my comments. Scroll up and you can see that I am replying to a mischaracterization of Luddites.
Here is the original comment that I addressed:
> or to become complete Luddites living on subsistence farming?
Whether or not I did is irrelevant. I replied to a specific bit of your comment that wasn't related to the rest of the conversation. If you didn't want to discuss that tangent, why did you bring it up?
> Here is the original comment that I addressed
Again, that has nothing to do with our conversation. Perhaps it is you who didn't read (meaning here to understand; I know you took in the individual words) my comment?
Have a link?
I found it to be a very fun read. Some neat connections being made.
I agree that there's no way to guarantee that you're interacting with a human online.
Optimistically, this could spark a return to the internet/real-world relationship that the author mentioned: "Back then, the internet felt like an addition to our in-person connecting..."
Rather than meeting people online, you meet them in real life and have the option to talk to them over the internet. Just like you trusted that they didn't hand off their account to another person before AI, you'll have to trust that it's them that you're talking to.
The biggest threat to that scenario is suburbanization and the lack of third spaces. How will you meet new people if there's nowhere to just exist? This was already happening to kids, and the pandemic really accelerated it.
Long story short, I think there's a possibility between assimilation and rebellion, but it's not in the suburbs. We need to work for it now, and fast, because the next generation won't have the frame of reference to do it themselves.
Is that frightening? Maybe. But it is considerably more cerebral than the infinite scroll/influencer status quo. And there will always be personal interaction and voice/video with realness attestation.
Also, imho we don't want islands of real people since we've seen the islands turn into facebook and tiktok. We need networks of real people interleaved with whatever the rest of the net decides it wants to be.
The devil is in the details, of course. Is it even possible to thread the needle of usability and controlling your own data/algorithm? Maybe! But if there's going to be a human island, I think this is the way. Individual trusted connections branching out from you.
And the "block" in "blockchain" is a different sense of the word from how you block users on social media, so I don't think it bears any resemblance to blockchain. It sounds more like email (or another similarly federated network) with a whitelist.
So blockchain has some similarities in that it allows a decentralized way of managing communication through cryptographic signing, but the core of blockchain is that it provides a full "chain" of transactions going back to the beginning of time, whereas this idea is less "chainy" and more of a graph, or maybe a bunch of little chains, each originating from your profile
Sure, tons of articles about similar efforts if you search for the term 'small web'. In particular, I like gemini and tildes (tilde.town, tilde.team, tilde.club, etc) which are actually pretty neat if you take the time to ssh in and checkout the ecosystems they've built. The tildes in particular might surprise you, gemini can be a bit of a ghost town if you don't know where to look though.
Tildes technically aren't public since you have to login to them, but they're not that different from social media in that respect (and since membership usually involves messaging the server owner personally, it's hard to imagine bot activity getting too bad). Gemini is public but you have to use a (usually terminal-based) browser program in order to interact with it and usually self-host a gemlog if you want a 'website' on it.
These communities make me happy because you tend to find people who use xmpp or IRC or alternative platforms there and kinda get away from the enshittification loop. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, and I'm sure since this is HN I'm going to get some very snarky responses for mentioning these things as alternatives, but my experiences with exploring the communities around these technologies have consistently made me smile, which is downright weird in the current year. It's got me considering checking out usenet, which I'm too young to have used before outside of direct downloads.
In retrospect, it's funny because all of the things I mentioned are technically 'not the internet', which might honestly be your answer.
If there is a desirable quality about open islands of humans, sure. Of course. Whatever that desirable quality is will allow recognizing what and what isn't human.
But I suspect there isn't a desirable quality to be found there. In fact, before the "Facebook age" came along, the idea of humans on the internet was more or less considered to be a scourge. HN itself is a product of that era, removing all semblance of whatever humanity there might be hidden in the implementation details. The Internet was seemingly born to be a completely different world, void of humans, only software.
There's more to the story (of course) than this half-remembered paragraph, but I've thought through if there was a way to reproduce that.
Nowadays, there were two schisms. One was between Facebook and YouTube... FB being content walled and protected by default, where YouTube (and old blogs and StackOverflow, Reddit, etc) were public by default.
I hate feeding Facebook, but now, "speaking in public", you're "just feeding the bots". Your content is vaporized into the aether the instant you make it public.
I've thought through if there were a way to make more private, semi-distributed communities, but you run smack into the difficulty of one "traitor" that rebroadcasts content (or any rebroadcasting at all) ends up ruining the closed system.
Time to change the lock on the hot tub again, and delete all the recordings from the cameras. :-/
All in all an A-tier tree and I would definitely get a new one if I lost this version.
If you sent a DM or group chat, I’d know for certain that I’m meant to engage and wouldn’t just superficially skim as a bystander. Just replying with a +1 would feel dismissive. You’re expected to engage and reciprocate.
This ability to have broadcasted vs targeted communications is relatively new for folks, and I’ve noticed that not everyone has learned to distinguish these communication styles.
Younger generations seem to grok it because they grew up with it, but everyone else needs to learn as they go. If you were blogging back on the old internet and had lots of meaningful targeted communication with your audience, it’s going to be a shock when people start treating your content as broadcasts and stop interacting the way you are used to.
The thing I think we’re missing is long-form targeted messaging like an old-school blog. You could send emails, but that is 100% private so there’s no way for a new reader to join in.
For example, let's look at "for you page" style algorithms. When I open Reels, I see incredible musicians, mind-blowing visual art and really thoughtful insights from people all over the world. That's exactly what I wanted out of the early internet, and here it is, an ever-evolving system that connects me with all the weird and amazing things that exist out in the world.
And those people in the world who make this content now have an agent actively connecting them with their audience. Yes, I realize this is an extremely charitable interpretation of what's happening behind the scenes. But often, the content I see feels very close to what the author is describing: Someone taking the time to describe their favorite tree.
If there was ever a "good ol' internet", it's still in there. It's just had tons of freeways and high-rise buildings built up around it. The older I get, the more it seems like you just need to let your eyes adjust a bit to see it.
Edited to add: My favorite tree, right now anyway, is a pair of birch trees in a park near my home. When they leaf out and the wind blows, I sit in the grass between them and it sounds almost like I'm at a beach, which is really nice because I'm about as far from an ocean as you can be on this planet.
One of the best things about the old internet was Flash Player. It was an extremely low barrier-to-entry way for creators (especially young creators) to make games and animation which could be played in-browser on extremely low-power hardware. To this day, there's nothing which comes close to filling the vacuum.
I expect the only thing we actually miss about it is that it opened up a new frontier to explore, with nobody really understanding what it could be, allowing us to geek out on trying all kinds of crazy ideas to see what might stick.
Nowadays we more or less have a good understanding of what the internet is. There is no doubt still room for a crazy idea here and there, but it isn't the every idea is crazy feeding frenzy that we found in the early days.
We don't really want the old internet back – it never went away. Instead, we are ready for the "next internet", whatever that may be.
Perhaps a related question is: How do we bring back that old feeling cars used to give people? The old timers reminisce about them just like those here remember the internet, but these days they're just boring tools at best. So boring that the kids reaching driving age today are happy to not even go near them.
Or maybe there is no going back? Been there, done that, as they say.
it used to be that only certain types of people had the means and interest to be there. going there was like venturing into a world that was created and maintained by people that were all a little... weird. if you were also somebody that was also a little weird, it was a nice escape and gave a sense of belonging because the default way of being was "a little weird".
but now the internet is mainstream. the internet populus mirrors the real world populus. it's not built by and for nerds and academics and startrek obsessives anymore, it's built to serve the needs of the normal and popular people because normal people are now the modal people on the internet.
there are still pockets where you can find your weirdo kin, but you need to look for them. and the fact that you need to look for them kind of ruins the old allure where you could imagine what a parallel universe run by people like you would be like.
Going blind to the big data is like not voting in my opinion. I also cherish those Islands but I see it as a place in which you put data which shouldn't be in the bug data pool or at least in a different category and not traceable back to you...
I love the slow web and once in a while I try to write something non-technical about things that catch my eye. Each of us has got a unique perspective and it’s refreshing to read about them.
My attempt and shameless plug: https://samkhawase.com/blog/an-ode-to-the-tiger/
the way I use tech now is mainly trying to get LLM agents to work to shorten the daydreaming process by giving me the answers I need. the thing is, tech is just for building more tech. it only builds upwards on the stack, and doesn't yield discovery or growth outside it. it doesn't make me a better musician, horseman, hiker, motorcyclist, lifter of heavy things, or friend, etc. these things are only the effect of practice.
maybe the response is not so much a kind asceticism where choices of taste in tech or opinion become a proxy for purity, but to ask, what have you physically practiced vs. merely consumed?
Provides no phone number. Smh.
Blog posts are hit or miss but a good one is so much more rewarding than anything else on the internet.