Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.
Today everything has disappeared or has been conglomerated into siloes, sanitised, focusing on engagement. You have YouTube videos about it (which is more cheap entertainment than actual education), you get some posts here once in a while, there’s Reddit where all intelligent discussion goes to die. IRC is a wasteland of idle bouncers. Then the LLMs arrived to kill what is left.
Who says the Internet is a vibrant place today mistakes flashiness with depth. It’s all empty calories, just makes you hungry for more, never satisfies.
I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.
And the red box references and pots patching and such were true enough, even if everything else got hilarious hollywood treatment.
That movie still gives me wardialing and 2600 meetups and “voice bridging from a Dennys payphone bank at silly hours” memories.
The pitch: it is network-agnostic. The same mesh network runs on the Internet or through LoRa radios or any other physical layer than allows the exchange of data packets. It scales from private networks to global meshes. It's the wild west. People are excited, and eager to grow further.
How is this different to, from example, Yggdrasil Network[0]?
There is I2P. They have been disabling scripts for ideological reasons, so there were many websites without scripts. I have used quite exotic Charon web browser from Inferno OS in I2P. That was 15 years ago. Don't know how it's now.
There is RetroNAS and plenty of other software to enrich home network.
Sometimes I use Marginalia's "Vintage Web" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs and old .edu personal websites that someone forgot to delete, still a vanishing minority of anything one could find in 2001.
and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them,
why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?
Why should I have to suffer through Fandom raping me with screen-obscuring banners and "PLEASE ALLOW ADS" just to make some sense of fucking Warhammer 40K lore (written by unpaid volunteers anyway)? instead of just asking ChatGPT what the fuck Globriznaroks is/are.
Why should we support shady companies by sitting through their ads on YouTube videos for minute topics instead of just asking AI for the shit I want to know about?
Why should we submit to the whims of 3 mods on a subreddit deciding what thousands should get to see (fuck /r/AskScience) and then getting low-effort answers or outright trolling anyway? instead of just asking AI?
Bury me, I am ready.
but..that's not a problem inherent to the technology or medium itself.
That's a separate problem that's the responsibility of laws and society to solve
What we actually need is a browser that filters out bullshit.
What exactly WAS the "old" internet anyway?
100 half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff, covered with gif-vomit that looked like epilepsy simulators?
Serious question: What do the rose-tinted glass wearers actually think was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now?
You can find random pointless stuff now too, just that except Geocities/Yahoo it's Intsagram/TikTok/Twitter etc.
If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here.
If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube now, if you but search for them (I suggest Weebl, David Firth, Sechi, to start with, and let the algorithm soak up the weirdness)
1. Pre-web. Internet is mostly about messages sent to individuals or groups. USENET organizes group discussion into browseable topic-oriented hierarchies, IRC does the same but with lists in fragmented networks. If the discussion exists at all, finding it is easy.
2. Early web. Dominated by topic focused websites, early online shops and personal home pages. Search engines suck and face strong competition from manually maintained topic-oriented directories (did anyone else here contribute to DMoz?), content discovery is mutual and webmasters help each other out by joining "web rings". DoubleClick and AdSense start to funnel small amounts of money to creators, but it's enough to offset hosting costs and in many cases can make web hosting effectively free or even yield a small profit. This encourages an explosion of website creation. Discussion moves off USENET onto phpBB forums. Every organization decides it's a cultural imperative to have a presence on the information superhighway. Finding information is easy as long as you can figure out what topic it belongs to.
3. Blogging and centralization era. The internet starts to rebuild itself around people as the primary object, not the topic or category. Directories die because websites can no longer be categorized by content. Web rings die for the same reason. IRC is replaced by instant messengers that are about connecting people with pre-existing friends, not mutual interest groups. Outside of institutional websites that exist to promote the organization, things become hard to find without highly centralized search engines because nobody is putting any effort into organizing or indexing what they write anymore: maybe you get a few tags if you're lucky. Spam, hacking and lack of SSO causes forums to centralize onto Reddit. This is the peak of the search engine era because you are forced to use Google to find anything. The power eventually corrupts the tech firms and they begin political censorship to benefit the left in 2015 [1]. Enormous amounts of information is deliberately made unfindable as part of a large-scale programme of social control.
4. Social media era. All the same problems as blogging except now the bulk of the content goes behind login walls that stop search engines from surfacing them. Video and podcasts start to matter more, both of which are unsearchable by default. Eventually video completely dominates, as few younger people want to read when they could watch instead. Firefox starts to replace IE6, and then Chrome. They bring ad blockers in their wake which starts to choke off ad revenues, so many websites from the web's first era go unmaintained and eventually offline. This is somewhat but not entirely compensated by the falling cost of web hosting. Social media remains because it puts people's faces next to everything, allowing clout farming and viral notoriety that can sometimes be monetized by becoming an influencer. The only part of the web's first era that really survives into this era is Wikipedia and Reddit, which by this time substitute monetary rewards for power tripping by a small group of ideologically driven moderators.
5. AI era. Information is so heavily scattered over so many tiny sourcelets and search engines have become sufficiently useless that full neural integration of knowledge is required, with LLMs issuing massively parallel and complex search engine queries as a backstop.
What can we predict for the AI era? Institutional websites will remain because institutions still have an interest in getting their agenda into LLMs, but visual redesign efforts will largely cease as traffic stats seen by executives show visits completely dominated by AI. There will be lots of conversations of the form, "why redesign our website to look more modern when 99% of traffic is AI which won't care?" Blogs will go the same way as the thematic websites they killed, disappearing as the authors age out. A lot of effort will be put into finding ways to block AI crawlers to create 'human only' spaces, especially by social media firms, but these will fail because AI will just be integrated directly into browsers and become unblockable - and anyway, the incentives to create will be ignored. ChatGPT style text oriented interfaces will last until inferencing capacity catches up, being eventually replaced by voice interaction and on the fly video generation for nearly all users.
Where we go from here is hard to say. Content creation was most pure in the web's first era, where people with knowledge were incentivized to share it with the world by the promise of a bit of fame combined with ad clicks to offset hosting costs. Ad blockers, social media and AI killed that world. You could however bring it back by producing a new platform that isn't like the web, one where AI and search engines are blocked via technological means (e.g. confidential computing). How much anyone would actually enjoy such a web is unclear.
[1] https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-inter...
This shift to hard to cheaply index content is maybe why search engines died. People don't use hyperlinks anymore
There's also a psychological aspect to relating faces to information. It's much more engaging and attractive. Content creation is still alive and more popular than ever but text based content creation brings no clicks and creates no interest. There's something about video that makes it very appealing like feeling you are outside and thus needing to be alert
I'm never going to stumble across an interesting tidbit of information on Discord while browsing the web.
And even when you do have access to a particular server, you'll often struggle to find something posted a while back, even if you know exactly what you're looking for.
I hate Discord with a passion.
People moved to phones, and customizable websites are very hard to make on mobile. However they sometimes make videos or take screenshots or something instead of making fan sites. Amino kind of tried to solve this but was never able to control child grooming.
The people talking about their os now publish it on social media or YouTube. The posts become "the community". And people migrated to reddit.
It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM", but the algorithm (or model) they use is heavily skewed towards intents (actions) and brands (because they 'trust' big names).
And it's not working.
A simple, short informative blog about a tool you used that could be of interest to max. 100 people on this planet is no longer getting ranked, if it gets indexed at all.
Those posts tick all boxes: no incoming links, no authority, thin content.
It changes somewhat between "Google Updates", but it's pretty clear that it's no longer working.
Multiply the 100 people not finding that post by millions of queries and it's now a big problem for Google.
My dad asked me the other day if Google got worse because smaller companies are not paying Google enough money.
He didn't see any difference between ads and content, because all results are now big brands only.
"Helpful content" is such a misnomer. It removes all helpful content in favour of AI overviews and only shows intent-driven, commercial content.
We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.
Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.
Tiktok is cheap to run. AI however, it needs absurd amounts of power, RAM and GPU compute capacity to run... and there's serious constraints everywhere.
The earlier web era felt like this unimaginable realm of freedom and exploration to me. I stumbled on countless novel sites that were interesting, helpful, and/or entertaining. That content has decreased by orders of magnitude since then. These days most searches return a full page of SEO slop that all summarize (badly) the same source from years before. There's usually zero new information, personal touches, or community attached.
so no they are not archiving their own core books let alone periodicals
Or have they started own indexing?
I'll give this some thought. Maybe there is a way.
I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the current state, I'm afraid the majority of people will forget what search was like and default to AI summaries.
I've tried alternatives, including Kagi (not actually relevant because there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products) and Uruky, but they're not good enough.
(Edit: Added "directly or indirectly" about Kagi to point out that I'm not claiming that Kagi itself is Russian.)
Even if brave were problematic it would be the lesser evil to me.
The fact is that SEO people got too good at their jobs and filled the search results with junk.
They should be able to fight this as well.
Problem is they are the ones funding the poor quality spam and they're in turn profiting by taking money from advertisers.
Something like this has existed as long as I can remember. The three dots used to be a down arrow in the same place.
PS: I hope not many people are the type to see a slavic name and conclude Russia.
Why not?
Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences, so I dislike idea of even very indirectly funding them.
And I support actions that are harmful to Russian economy, also when they are harmful to me - as long as it is not too badly balanced. As this is much cheaper than directly participating in war.
(I am from Poland)
PS
Yes, I understand that at some point there are some indirect effects that you cannot avoid.
I also understand if for some people paying Kagi that pays tiny fraction of that to Yandex that is paying taxes in Russia which funds their wars is too tenuous connection to care.
What makes you think so?
>Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences
What do you mean?
Your resident propagandists like Solovyov, Dugin and Medvedev are very explicit about invading former warsaw pact countries when they're not threatening Europe with nukes.
> Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences
They didn't teach you about the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in your russian school? Of course not, it doesn't fit the great patriotic war narrative. It's about that time when your country's leadership was friendly with the nazis and decided to split eastern europe between themselves.
Look, a picture of stalin shaking hands with a nazi: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Bundesar...
that joint invasion of Poland by Russia (Soviet Union) and Germany (Third Reich) was really bad for my country and its inhabitants.
1920s Russian invasion failed but also was bad.
Previously there was occupation of part of Poland that lasted over century which was also bad for us.
and so on
> What makes you think so?
Geopolitical analysis of situation. Who else in your opinion is more likely to invade Poland? Japan?
That's a very interesting turn of conversation. I think you are missing a bit from that story when presenting Poland as a victim[0]:
According to Aviel Roshwald, (Piłsudski) "hoped to incorporate most of the territories of the defunct Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth into the future Polish state by structuring it as the Polish-led, multinational federation." Piłsudski had wanted to break up the Russian Empire and set up the Intermarium federation of various different states: Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and other Central and East European countries that emerged from the crumbling empires after World War I. In Piłsudski's vision, Poland would replace a truncated and vastly reduced Russia as the great power of Eastern Europe. His plan excluded negotiations prior to military victory. <...>
He used military force to expand the Polish borders in Galicia and Volhynia and crush a Ukrainian attempt at self-determination in the disputed territories east of the Curzon Line, which contained a significant Polish minority. On 7 February 1919, Piłsudski spoke on the subject of Poland's future frontiers:
"At the moment Poland is essentially without borders and all that we can gain in this regard in the west depends on the Entente – on the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany. In the east, it's a different matter; there are doors here that open and close and it depends on who forces them open and how far".
"Closed within the boundaries of the 16th century, cut off from the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, deprived of land and mineral wealth of the South and South-east, Russia could easily move into the status of second-grade power. Poland, as the largest and strongest of the new states, could easily establish a sphere of influence stretching from Finland to the Caucasus".
The USSR returned the territory that Poland grabbed in the 1920. And I must remind you that just a year earlier Germany, Hungary and Poland jointly dismembered Czechoslovakia[1]:
Germany had started a low-intensity undeclared war on Czechoslovakia on 17 September 1938. <...> This was followed by Polish and Hungarian territorial demands brought on 21 and 22 September, respectively. <...> Poland grouped its army units near its common border with Czechoslovakia and conducted an unsuccessful probing offensive on 23 September. Hungary moved its troops towards the border with Czechoslovakia, without attacking. The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia's assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.
<...>
The Munich Agreement was soon followed by the First Vienna Award on 2 November 1938, separating largely Hungarian inhabited territories in southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathian Rus' from Czechoslovakia. On 30 November, Czechoslovakia ceded to Poland small patches of land in the Spiš and Orava regions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War#Back...
Source: Am Polish.
And you in turn seem to miss similar quotes from Lenin et all, salivating at subjugation of Poland.
> The USSR returned the territory that Poland grabbed in the 1920
Yes, in 1920 Russia wanted to conquer Poland but failed then. They managed to succeed in cooperation with Nazi Germany.
How that disproves my point that Russian invasions were bad for Poland?
> Czechoslovakia ceded to Poland small patches of land in the Spiš and Orava regions
Yeah, that was footgun though earlier story is also of interest
> provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.
geee, I wonder why (see say Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that proved such suspicion 100% correct)
If Russia invade in XXI century and they will manage to find some pretext (returning the territory that Poland grabbed in the 1920 or something), how that will make things less bad for Poles?
again, I am not making point that Poland is 1000% innocent and Christ of nations or something. Though if you want to compete on who was less murderous, did less genocides and was less oppressive Russia will not win at all.
Enlighten me? Meanwhile I'll remind you that Felix Dzerzhinsky[0], who created the predecessor of KGB for Lenin, was a Pole born in Russian Poland. Vyacheslav Menzhinsky[1], his successor, was a Pole too.
>How that disproves my point that Russian invasions were bad for Poland?
You just don't call what happened around 1920 a Russian invasion, it was yet another Polish attempt at building its own empire that backfired. Especially, if you cite it as a reason for thinking Russia is likely to invade Poland
>geee, I wonder why (see say Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that proved such suspicion 100% correct)
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you don't cooperate with USSR against Hitler, having signed non-aggression pact with Hitler just 4 years earlier[2], don't be upset that USSR finally signed its own non-aggression pact with Hitler after years of trying to form an anti-Hitler pact with France and the GB (who cited Poland objections as one of the ways to drag its feet).[3]
I can't recommend enough the article "Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940" [3] with "trilingual, multi-archival evidence" to anyone who wants to understand the reasons for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
>If Russia invade in XXI century and they will manage to find some pretext (returning the territory that Poland grabbed in the 1920 or something), how that will make things less bad for Poles?
Sure, it'll be bad for Poles, just like if Poland burns Moscow once again it will be bad for Russians. But we are not discussing fantasy scenarios?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Menzhinsky
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declarat...
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.14...
And? You seem to be commenting like I claimed that Poles are nation of saints.
And from "Bolshevik revolutionary and politician of Polish origin and leader of Soviet secret police" description it is clear he was awful and evil human being.
Letting such person to end in position of authority and create not one secret police but three of them is utter failure of society in which he was living (Russian one).
Though it is noteworthy that likely most evil people of Polish origin (and maybe Poles if they were really Poles) did this in position of authority of Russian state. Not Polish one.
> If you don't cooperate with USSR against Hitler, having signed non-aggression pact with Hitler just 4 years earlier[2], don't be upset that USSR finally signed its own non-aggression pact with Hitler
non-aggression part was not a problem, the problem was in secret part about cooperation
Poland and no point signed treaty with Hitler to jointly dismember Russia, while Russia signed treaty with Hitler to jointly dismember Poland (and other countries)
(yes, I know about Zaolzie)
And "Lenin et all" included these Polish gentlemen which casts some doubt regarding you claim about "salivating at subjugation of Poland".
>in secret part about cooperation
There is nothing about cooperation in the secret part[0]. Just that Hitler stops at approximately the Curzon Line and doesn't take the territory that Poland grabbed from the corpse of Russian Empire. In fact, Soviet troops didn't move into Poland until German troops stopped advancing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Russia must be resisted until those responsible for that war are held accountable and Ukraine is whole, free and compensated, and all imprisoned and kidnapped Ukrainians (especially the kidnapped children) are returned.
Once those things are done, I'd be open to a slow process of normalization for the sake of the Russian people.
Yandex is Russian.
I would not describe it as Kagi being indirectly Russian.
What do you mean? That Kagi is directly Russian?
Paying a russian provider isn't against the law and at some point we need to bring Russia back into the warmth of the West.
I do maintain some boycotts that significantly inconvenience me (Amazon being one; I won’t enumerate them all), so I’m not just making excuses for inaction.
So I am fine with singling out Russia.
no, that Kagi is buying from Russian supplies
> Paying a russian provider isn't against the law and
I never claimed that it is
> at some point we need to bring Russia back into the warmth of the West.
no we don't, and hopefully Russia will be forced to behave before we do this