The Internet Doesn't Suck: Blame Big Tech, Not the Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Doesn't Suck: Blame Big Tech, Not the Internet

riverseeber.net

43 pointscratermoon27 comments

No, early internet decorum has broken down in general. Now it’s a Wild West of the worst hate and propaganda imaginable on even small forums without active moderation. It’s just what being on the internet means now. Big tech may have broken it but it’s universal now.

Think of what slashdot used to be or even the vast majority of usenet (though it had its own segregated problematic areas). Then look at what 4chan initially and then the rest of social media did to discourse.

I was recently looking at screenshots of old Facebook, Orkut, and even old messaging apps like HipChat. It really feels like the inflection point began around 2016 and finally fully transformed once the pandemic hit.

It is just that more people become totally engrossed in online activity during the pandemic and never left? Or is it bots? Who are all these new corrosive users?

Are you familiar with the “dead internet theory?”

Yes, but it felt so sudden. Thanks for reminding me about it as you are probably correct.

Its a shame what we lost. On one hand we could maybe have a real life identity system that would stop the bot problem but at the same time that anonymity blossomed so much unique internet culture that we would lose (maybe its already lost).

This. I've been saying it for years. You can trace the decline back a couple of decades.

All of these threads and comments people throw out about how "social media" is bad misses the forest for the trees. The Internet has put us, broadly speaking, in the position we are now. It's fucking garbage and it's ruining our ability to communicate and function together. The biggest impact most of us can make is right outside our front door, with those who we directly interact with throughout our fays. Instead, we'd rather argue about the world's problems online. Being aware of what's happening is great, don't get me wrong, but yelling into the void past one another is not how things get solved, and that's all this shit seems to be now.

I might get downvoted to hell for this, but I stand by it - the Internet was a mistake.

Edit: I'm all about people's faces these days. https://youtu.be/mvCKSuPq8o8?si=WAQ4ltArdjDPpt2u

Edit 2: I guess I'll put my money where my mouth is and make these my last posts.

Pay up. You made a post after this. :)

>We can imagine a social media that doesn't play games with the "attention economy", trying to "increase retention"

A social network where no one is there is not that valuable. Incentivizing people to "socialize" more has exponential value to a social network.

>As a result, these major companies no longer need to create better products so that you will use them instead of a competitor,

I feel like this person is regurgitating old arguments. With the recent AI boom, it should be obvious that companies are still trying to build better products. And it is fully possible for new players like OpenAI to get a billion users.

Counter point: HN, Facebook before the timeline, the entire pre-Facebook internet, Reddit before the IPO path.

The giants grew market share and started deploying profitable advertising models. Once a giant gets the profit bug, they stop being stewards.

Open source social media and messaging largely sucks. Either the UI/UX sucks, like Matrix, or the demographics suck, like Bluesky's hyper-polarized audience.

None of this means it's impossible. We've just seen the successful attempts become evil and lots of bad attempts that fail.

>HN, Facebook before the timeline, the entire pre-Facebook internet, Reddit before the IPO path.

What is the counter point? None of those had more MAU than any of the big social media platforms of today. All of the big social platforms have experimented to find what kind of experience the average user actually prefers and has used that to improve their platform and continue growing. The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline. Trying to win over people to a social media platform that takes measures to be worse and to avoid growing metrics is not a successful strategy.

>The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

"The cigarette of today is a much better cigarette for the user now that we have filters in them."

>The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

Absolutely bullshit. FB today is terrible. It's a dopamine casino filled with engagement bait and ads that leave users wildly unsatisfied.

> All of the big social platforms have experimented to find what kind of experience the average user actually prefers and has used that to improve their platform and continue growing. The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

I mean if we’re using that as metric I think then you’d have to admit that fentanyl producers have made a better product than Facebook. I would be surprised if the median user didn’t prefer fentanyl over Facebook, assuming they tried both.

>have to admit that fentanyl producers have made a better product than Facebook

Why? Even if you add all of the users of fentanyl producers together you won't even get to 1% the MAU of Facebook.

Don’t forget X, it’s a sewer. Grok generating non consensual nudes and csam, nazis, trolls, and scammers.

> Either the UI/UX sucks, like Matrix

It's ridiculous to say that the UI/UX of a protocol sucks.

Matrix has clients with good UX and ones with less good UX (especially in the past). I would challenge anyone to install Element X and say that it has a bad UI/UX - it's objectively at least as good as WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage. It's probably not as good as Telegram yet (but TG has it easy given it's not E2EE).

> like Bluesky's hyper-polarized audience

Every social network started from a hyper-polarized audience and grew it from there. In the case of Google, geeks, in the case of Facebook, the sort of men who browse "HotOrNot" websites, rating pictures published without consent for sexual attractiveness.

> In the case of Google, geeks,

Google was open for everyone almost immediately

> in the case of Facebook, the sort of men who browse "HotOrNot" websites,

Facebook was for every college student almost immediately after it started growing. And shortly after the on-campus growth phase, it was opened up for everyone.

Reddit skews mildly liberal, but not overtly so. It was able to grow usage amongst all demographics. X, on the other hand, is increasingly becoming conservative, but it still has a large audience on all sides of the spectrum. Neither has to jumpstart growth.

Bluesky started out almost entirely polarized to the point it will be nearly impossible to be inclusive of anyone else. This will kill its ultimate growth potential. Threads basically skipped right over it.

The "Internet" doesn't suck, people do and thanks to the Internet we can see that. It's not the technology, it's how people use it.

I feel like the amount of time spent on the internet is really mostly just mostly a function of the number of people you can interact with on the internet. Like Hacker News, which doesn’t really have any of the Big Tech problems and isn’t run for profit - yet people spend a lot of time on the site anyways.

I’ve made this point before, because plenty of people are too narrow minded in how they view the internet.

We don’t dislike roads(real internet/pipes & routers) because asshole drivers(social media) are out there.

What if most drivers were assholes.

Try a different road :)

On every road

Mad max is a documentary, don't believe their lies

Related recently:

Dead Internet Theory

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671731

Blame yourself for what websites you choose to visit.

Social media degenerated as the companies behind it figured out how to better optimize for engagement (time spent on site, links clicked, comments posted), which is to show people all the things most likely to titillate, surprise, or piss them off.

So we get "social" feeds stuffed with thirst traps, culture war, and political slop, instead of a simple, fairly sedate chronological feed of what your friends have been doing, thinking, or photographing.

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