The Boring Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Boring Internet

terrygodier.com

54 pointscrowdhailer44 comments

Alternative readable rendering: https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii

Yeah, scroll fade might be useful sometimes but most of the time it's just annoying.

https://dbushell.com/2026/01/09/death-to-scroll-fade/

What are the times in which it is useful?

If those are referenced in the linked article, I'll be honest I didn't read it. That website succeeds whole handedly in its job of being too annoying to read.

im sure theres a class of people who gauge their willingness to read based on the length of scroll.

I am reaching for “reader mode” in my browsers all the time as they cut through these design choices that don’t agree within my eyes

It really helps to focus in the content rather than the fluff.

I should probably be doing this instead of fruitlessly expanding my blocklist. I'm frustrated that extensions don't work in reader view though.

To be honest I don't know of any, I just didn't want to be outright dismissive of it. If you just use it for a header to have some kind of small animation that grabs the reader's attention I guess it's fine. Just don't use it for the main text body.

Some news articles work well with a long scroll. Usually to progress through the "time" of the article. But yeah most of the time it's just annoying.

Fortunately my "defenses" worked on this one, though CSS only doesn't seem to have been enough. I don't care if they want to make the user feel like they're living in a blingee gif by default, I just desperately want pages to respect prefers-reduced-motion

Wait, why isn't that the article instead? Who actually wants this fade-scroll-thing? It detracts from the sensible content.

CSS always counters the conceptual and philosophical use of hypertext.

even this "ascii" (i expected raw text but still got html+css) was hardly readable for me, had to reach to the reader view, finally readable, ohh... looks much like ai-generated, why did i spend so much time jumping over obstacles...

The length and rambling nature of it was a clear AI indicator.

This is unfortunately the problem with the Boring Internet. It's subject to the common denominator which is shite. And LLMs generate a lot of that.

Color contrast in the text version isn’t great either

Great topic and message. But the AI-generated writing really gets under my skin. It's not painful. Not unclear. Just really annoying.

A great little expression I heard somewhere was 'AI;DR'. I find it grating to get through a text once I've lost the trust that the author wrote it themselves. When that trust is gone, how could I be sure that these are your ideas or just something an LLM said that you happen to agree with?

This is real. You are not imagining it.

Oh sorry. I cribbed that from the article itself.

> > This is real. You are not imagining it.

Its not just a movement, it's a message.

Let that sink in.

I can't help but wonder if we've already hit the point where real people now write like that because it's what they're exposed to day in and day out.

I have zero evidence to back this up but I'm convinced that autocorrect is what led to people pluralizing word's with apostrophe's. If we keep outsourcing how we express our ideas, how long until we no longer have any left?

Shifting baseline. In a year or two, people will tell you you're being silly, dismissive, or just an old timer for not liking AI writing.

Think of all the stuff that's happened with. How we get something new, it's kinda dumb, then within a year or two it's normalized to 60% of folks.

even the plain text version’s subheading gets under my skin for some reason

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii

> You chose the quiet version. No animations. No scroll effects. Just words.

I thought it was a cool essay because I've been using Gemini (the one mentioned in the article, not Google) in my terminal browser lately. And it has been a lot of fun!

But yes the whole "re-explain by negation" writing style does come across as AI-generated.

> You chose the quiet version. No animations. No scroll effects. Just words.

> The internet you grew up on isn't dying.

> A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.

Not x. Not y. Just z.

The x is not y-ing. The z i is.

Its so tiresome. Give us the prompt instead.

I think the best bit about this is the reminder that SomaFM still exists.

I mean he's right, the old internet and the technology that underlies it still exists, and there's nothing stopping you from building and using sites that work independently of the big social media platforms/centralised services.

That said, I do wish this essay was a bit better contrast wise. Had to highlight some of the tables to read them at all, which isn't exactly ideal.

The components heavily give Claude Code vibes. I use CC to build internal tools and, given free reign over the design, this exactly what it will produce.

Won't comment on the writing other than that the punchlines do feel a bit pretentious in an AI kinda way. I've seen the author's blog posts and I much prefer their natural writing to this essay-style output, but to each their own.

The writing is definitely AI.

I see this often in HN posts and I’m not sure whether to comment. Because it seems most people don’t care; and are only discussing the title, which the LLM post is a predictable extrapolation of, so human effort on the article would be wasted.

I wish people would discuss more interesting topics and less repeats. But probably most of the unique posts just aren’t interesting to me, and I spend too long here so I see repeats more than the average user.

LLMs seem hellbent on generating Tailwind interfaces. So much of the internet was already like this, so I’m not sure it’s a Claude thing (Google Stitch doesn’t seem to know how to make anything else).

Somewhat. If you open port 22 up on an ip, you're going to get hit by bots scanning the Internet, trying to find an open server to ssh into. If you open port 80 or 443, you're going to get bots looking for /wp-admin.php just as soon as the domain name for it hits certificate transparency logs. The Internet's not a friendly place to be. It once was, but the default now is that someone is going to try and abuse anything you put up. Makes it hard to want to set up a new platform outside of the big centralized ones.

Eh, as someone who runs a bunch of smaller sites and forums, I've not had any issues with scammers or hackers gaining access to them. Most of them are looking for obvious vulnerabilities via some sort of script, and usually assume the file names and database structure are the same for every site they target.

It's plenty possible to run an independent site with no issues if you keep things up to date and change a few things to thwart the most common attack attempts.

Those scanners are low effort. Don't run vulnerable software and you're fine (this mostly means not running any website you didn't write, but wasn't that the point anyway?) Run it in a container and you're double-fine.

If you don't have a wp-admin.php who cares if someone is trying to access it? If you have one but it correctly validates your admin credentials, again who cares?

You can turn it into a fun project of making a honeypot.

> If you open port 22 up on an ip, you're going to get hit by bots scanning the Internet, trying to find an open server to ssh into

This has been the case for years. I can remember this from logs for port 22, more than 20 yeas ago, I saw this.

In ham radio - we have a 'Q code' (abbreviation) for man-made noise: QRM (QRN is naturally occurring: thunderstorms and such). This is used mainly to refer to electrically noisy transformers, vehicles, misconfigured transmitters etc. Always been there, gets worse and/or better over time - but gotta figure out how to deal with it as part of the hobby.

When doing stuff on the internet, I've just decided to stop worrying and treat these scans like that above mentioned QRM. You can filter it a bit if you like [1], but really, a sensibly configured and maintained SSH server is as secure as it gets as far as I can see.

[1] https://alastairbarber.com/Building-Anycast-Network/#securit...

Not sure. Without commercialization and ads, there might not be the free high-quality web apps from Google. Things have two sides. But the complexity of the internet should have far surpassed the level that even large corps could influence, and therefore, the key might be culture instead of tech.

> there might not be the free high-quality web apps from Google.

I mean, which one of the "free high-quality web apps from Google" is free high quality ?

I'm forced to use Google Workspace for work and that's an incredible pain. GMail is messy. Google Meet have an horrible UI, Google Drive is messy++, Google Chat is unusable, Google Search is unusable. The only product that is still good at google is maybe Google Maps.

The ux is really bad. But the commenting, versioning, syncing functions for collaboration or cross-platform use are of high-quality. And that's actually Google vs. Apple.

Useful in 1993 before the Unix machines in the computer labs were running Mosaic.

The Internet I grew up on was not the web. It was mail, newsgroups, IRC… maybe the article talks about that, but I don’t care as this is nothing the web can kill in any way.

I find this website really hard to read, even in ASCII.

That was a lot of short, punchy sentences. A lot. Tough to read. Reads like a political speech. Or advertisement. Not great.

This essay returns 50% on Pangram, which matches my impression of it. The human-written bits do have real insight, but it's being buried in vacuous slop that makes it.

I understand from personal experience how addictive writing with AI can be. Universally when I looked back at the result a week after composing it, I saw it was what it was - slop - and did the responsible thing - throw that out and use my own brain to express those thoughts, or decide that thought needed more time in the oven before touching the page.

If the original author is reading this, I beg you to consider this instead of becoming another contributor to the internet's cacophony of slop.

Fade scroll, hard pass.

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Interesting

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