I don't enjoy the Internet any more
btao.org
btao.org
I still spend a lot of time programming (and thus a lot of time on the computer) but other than that, absolutely nothing appeals. Its a wasteland in my mind.
While sites like Neocities are trying to keep the old web ideals alive, even there it can be difficult to find much of value.
As tired as I am seeing the constant stream of LLM stories (and even worse, vibe-coded projects) on HN i'm getting just as tired of the regular posts complaining about how much the internet sucks as well. HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") but lately it seems like nothing left but vitriol and bitterness. I feel like I need to limit my exposure to this place the way I do other social media platforms because it's just too toxic.
Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.
Reddit is full of the same hundred jokes being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with a good pun to make their life complete.
It's basically the same picture, and if we're talking about the spirit of the "old internet" that everyone seems to miss, Reddit hits it far better than HN.
I've started to go to tiny forums like forums.bladerunner.net and hobby-specific forums like rpgpub and vogons to hang out at the water cooler around others.
Awhile back, I dropped into Libera.chat's lobste.rs room and asked about this topic, which got no traction, but we ended up chatting for a bit, I was given the classic noob treatment. One user complained I was a bot at first, then asked me absurdist non-sequitors to haze the newbie, another user complained that they should close membership off from randos like me (and another user argued with him that they need new members eventually), and a third user told me not to post more than a few sentences without using a pastebin because their terminal IRC client looks ugly.
So I had a very nostalgic web 1.0 world: 1)the angry troll trying to kick me out 2) the tired mod trying not to tap the sign 3)the grumpy greybeard who never left emacs and 4) nobody really addressed the topic I was hoping to talk about.
If that's not congealed 199x internet exchanges, I don't know what is! It was very nostaglic and comforting in a way, the only thing it was missing was some erectile dysfunction pop-up windows and a gaudy internet radio widget.
The web as we know it is out there, I saw it on the lobste.rs libera chat just a few weeks ago! So maybe you have to go as far as islands like fediverse and simplex which are so isolated, most of the users there only want to talk about the tech itself, but , fellow web rando, have some hope, because I didn't go out there and I found some true internet recently, it can happen to you too!
Ask your search engine or LLM to help you find small-medium sized forums ased on hobbies you like, and start lurking, just like we used to 20(!?) years ago.
I had also a box with audio tapes.
Audio tapes are still functional. Links in bookmarks are 95 pct dead.
Internet is vanity. It was meant to be a communication tool. Now it’s some species of messy yellow pages.
On my grave, I think it won’t be written that I was a really good member of xyz bbforum :)
I would rather be remembered as a valuable member of local discussion club…
It maybe a reason why frequent internet users who remember the past, feel tired.
Appreciation on the internet is mostly fictional (not really real) and we feel it unconsciously…
Anyway, the real internet is and always has been/will be smaller forums brought together by a common interest. Think back to the MMORPG private server communities of the 00's/10's. Kind of hacker news fits into that bucket today but even still a lot of the brainrotted brigading and average takes from reddit I'm seeing more often here (not calling out this post in particular; referring to the comment sections mostly).
People report spending obscene amounts of time on social media while also saying that social media makes them feel worse. So captain obvious says why not just quit? Well that's because they're addicted to it. This is probably also why you see overwhelming support for age restrictions of social media, even amongst demographics that would otherwise be quite reluctant to give the government yet more power - people don't want their children to end up being another one of these stats.
That's not actually a contradiction.
With addictions, it's extremely common for someone to do $THING not because of any (remotely durable) sense of happiness, but simply "to feel normal", as not-doing it feels empty or wrong or painful or intrusive.
If people are feeling hopelessly stuck repeating behaviors they don't actually enjoy, that's more like evidence for addiction rather than against it.
When William Burroughs was on heroin he would spend 6 hours or so a day just staring at his shoe.
Yes; and either yes or the author is separating walled social network gardens from "the internet". The "real internet", as you say, is not the addictive algorithmic feeds.
I believe that the "real internet" you're talking about is larger than it's ever been, but the signal-to-noise ratio of the whole internet has been killed by even larger amounts of noise. So it's difficult to find these smaller forums and get involved with them.
It is like trying to take on Coke/Pepsi with a new cola drink, good luck! They will do anything that can get away with so long as it keeps them on top.
BBS' are probably a good example of this for those who around during that era. They were basic dial-up services with some basic social features, and they were extremely addictive even though it was limited to nothing but a handful of people in your geographic region, and long before 'the algorithm' was even a thought.
Because the effort put in searching is so high that I am tired before involment.
As you say, amount of noise is too large.
The Internet has been addictive since forever. Algorithmic feeds take the blame recently because simple explanation makes brain feel good, but they are at most a catalyst. We used to hog the phone lines until someone yelled that they needed to talk to someone "IRL", we installed additional phone lines, we endured 64k (32 was before my time) just so we could get one more hit of "you got mail" or post on that forum, or moderate that community, or chat with that person. It's world-wide, "free" and instantaneous communication with anyone and from anywhere. Of course it's addictive!
I don't want to make this into the very thing I'm trying to avoid, so my direct question is, if my interest is in building quality software with AI (in the current form, that is LLMs), where should I go to interact with like minded, friendly people? I've literally avoided reddit like the plague for the last couple of years, but perhaps I should return to certain subs there?
I'd just like to avoid a certain style of comment, remove the noise so to speak, and just trade helpful advice and opinions from people with similar goals. I can't do that here on hn, because it isn't that sort of forum. 99.9% of ask hn posts are going to get no traction.
Discord "chat" format also doesnt work, it's too immediate for good, deep interaction to happen. Same as Slack. It's been the nature since IRC. (I've seen it even in really high Signal to Noise ratio communities like Rands tech leadership slack community).
Email lists kind of cut it wrt length and temporarily. But historically the browsing/discovery format hasn't been great.
NNTP also has a good format, OK discovery and plenty of good clients. And with AI, I think Spam shouldn't be an issue.
I just wish young people were more attracted to open formats/protocols instead of proprietary services for interaction.
I think Discourse is the platform of choice right now, and I'm going to get one going for my immediate family / f2 network rather than a public one. If I did a public one, it would be one where each user could only subscribe to it at $5+ per month, then graduate the cost of new sign-ups and monthly costs to be 5+<monthly average users> for each new user, specifically so I could pay server hosting costs, market the site for the target audience somehow (users willing to prioritize long-term reputation and effort posting and pre-eternal-september netiquette) and pay one or more mods to keep the site behaving and on-topic for each given forum.
We can have the flamewars section on politics and religion, we can have the skills section on getting advice from industry experts in their own vocations, we can have the web1 section for hamster dance, retroweb and retrocomputing hubs, web2 section for flash revival and homestarruner and fark and reaction images, and we can have web3 for doing 'people of walmart' but for algorithm meat puppets from social media and short form brains and chat-only sites.
This magical site would have RSS feeds for every thread, easily enable web/mobile posting, support email mailing lists, make it easy to split a thread as conversation diverges, and enable enough social features to have signatures and home pages, but discourage passive likes / empty internet calories. So a mash-up of discourse, LKML, XenForo, and phBB.
The Tech is not the main problem, its the finding of each new user, the site as designed above would stay pretty small as is, it needs to be able to grow to let new users in without growing so far that the core user base dilutes away to let in the 'sociopaths' and the 'groupies' that the old 4chan 'how a space gets ruined over time' edgelord meme images show.
“if A is a subset of X and p is in X, that does not imply that p is in A”
They are not mutually exclusive. Actually, the opposite is true: most addicts don't enjoy what they are addicted to anymore. They just have to consume it.
I can't agree more with this.
And furthermore, even if you can compress your information into a short period, the audience might not beable to successfully absorb the information at that rate.
There have been studies done on this finding short form content to be less effective for education.
What I mean is, there are times where folks tend to over expand their premise to the point of tedium. Something that could have been an essay become a book. That can drive people away from good stuff through sheer scale that wasn't necessary.
the issue is with attention-seeking. Platforms willingly turn their forums to competition for likes, instead of encouraging compromise, which is what drives interesting discussions.
I remember drinking the cool water and being greatly refreshed by it, but what I think is easy to overlook is what, in the modern real world, has been improved by its absorption of the internet into the combined normality. The things that have been improved we take for granted. Music, Movie, and TV streaming, instant messaging, working from home, online shopping, podcasts, webcams, smartphones. Not all of it is positive (but that's a tool usage choice conversation, which is a bit different).
The nostalgia, I think, is the "what could have been", with this new thing, and now we're living in it, it's a bit disappointing, but only in a way that anything that's 'normalised' is a bit disappointing. We're stupid, demanding, impossible to please humans; our imagined utopia will never be manifest.
I'm sitting here watching a webcam of a flock of pigeons drinking from a waterhole in the Namibian desert. That's cool! But I've still got to work, and work is still hard thinking and forcing myself out of bed in the morning and ignoring distractions of things I'd rather be doing - but I can have this extra screen showing me pigeons on the other side of the world.
We can still have this conversation.
It is no big secret, but it is said quietly, that the most popular creators online are generally fairly anxious people as they are always afraid that they could bomb their entire house of cards in a single day.
I don't think it's overcorrection so much as a proportional backlash against society losing its mind over this thing.
[0] https://www.fox5vegas.com/2026/08/14/middle-school-student-a...
[1] https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2024/02/15/the-rat-with-t...
[2] https://marinaamaral.substack.com/p/ai-is-creating-fake-hist...
The younger audience is the majority. They want to see effortless cool. They want their hero to be out there "aura farming".
Despite what they may say in words, they don't really want authenticity because it's "cringe". Everything that you consider uplifting, inspirational, community-focused, introspective, etc. comes off as pretentious and corny. They have a more cynical take on life and prefer fake drama and subtle quirkiness. They grew up watching "authentic" people get canceled left and right. You might as well just be a shameless actor then.
They want main characters. They want the whole song and dance. They are far from the first generation to be this way and it goes in cycles. Look at old Hollywood.
The juice ain't worth the squeeze.
Although now that I think of it, stopping absorbing everything, or, _absorbing nothing_, might be a good mindfulness practice.
I've been slurping parts of the internet that I think are interesting—the parts I would miss if the internet died.
So many electronics magazines and books (as PDFs) from worldradiohistory.com. Ditto for magazines and such from archive.org. TV series, music videos, concerts, films from YouTube…
I suppose if the internet did go away (or I left it) I'd discover more things that I would miss (drawing a blank right now though). I expect though I would also rediscover a lot of the things that I enjoyed before the internet.
(You see, I'm old enough that the internet was not a part of my life until my mid-to-late 20's. We had fun before the internet, BTW: I made and flew kites, model rockets, did a lot more artwork…)
It's been an "eternal September" since Prodigy & Compuserve and then AOL joined the net, Usenet started degrading, people had more then 4-line sigs without a "-- " at the start of the sig, people top-quoted messages etc.
So the internet has been dying all that time. Lived through the dotcom boom/crash, growth/death of Yahoo Groups/Geocities/stumbleupon/slashdot/fark/etc.
I'm not sure whether AI/LLMs are really killing it more than the advent of social media and the endless slop that is time descending blogs.
I'm not sure whether the internet is just becoming yet another broadcast media, where small voices are drowned out by media conglomerates and the endless suck of advertising, or whether it really is "dying".
Either way, it will evolve, but whether it will evolve "well" is a very open question.
Our media environment is "intelligently designed" and can be modified by concerted action. We don't need to "evolve" to meet the monopolist social media ecosphere, we can modify it to remove the monopolies/oligarchies.
There is absolutely no reason why X, Google, Facebook, Oracle etc can't be "trust busted" and broken up. The SpaceX IPO, conflating a space company with an AI and social media company to defraud people of the losses of Musk from his xAI and Twitter.
It's actually a "conservative" move to break these companies up and democratize ownership via IPOs of spun-off companies. It worked when Standard Oil was broken up into Esso, Mobil etc.
In comparison, I've found small net places such as Mastodon or smolnets much more enjoyable even though the population is much smaller (which is nice since they also don't generate more information than I have time for). As a rule of thumb: The less interesting a place is for companies, the more pleasant it probably is.
We're older now, being young was great, we had infinite time to roam and discover and have nice things (and our first real six-string, and trying different things and not thinking about tomorrow). The youth nowadays also has infinite time, and they fill it in their own way. They like how things are, even though we don't like it and yearn for the days of yore.
It is the way of things.
1/4th of the humans in the world (many of them youth) are mindlessly scrolling short form content for almost 2 hours a day (and this is just Tik Tok). That’s a problem!
A better comparison in my opinion is to television of the 80s-90s. Though I do think longer form content is better for you.
We'll have to walk away from the attention economy, that'll be a journey that each has to take singly, but we don't have to walk back to the 1980's. We can build something that works for communication, but that doesn't work for advertising: something structurally enshittificationproof. It will not attract investors, because there will be nothing to leverage. We'll have to build it because we want it, which has never been easier.
We can steganographically hide it in AI slop which no human has to actually ever see, and we can trick our enemies into hosting it for us for free. It might even be fun.
Seems to be a universal thing, in a society that values capital as one of the highest achievements, it will co-opt anything that ends up trying to work against it and sell it back to you.
Medium and Substack aren't mediums, not like spoken word or watercolor or dance. They're platforms with admins who can be compelled to make changes with no regard to the consent of the users.
Things with that property do always fall to corruption. But we can build software that doesn't do that. It won't be worth investing in, because what investors are buying is the ability to compel that admin, but we can make it for ourselves of we want to.
Overtop that, an API which ensures that applications conform to the CALM theorem. This is a major restriction, but it buys us a lot. CALM violations are nucleation sites for enshittification. They're the points where platform owners exert their influence.
Going without them means going without DNS, for instance, because which bits which name resolves to is the kind of coordination problem that, in our previous attempts, we allowed centralized control to solve for us. And centralized control means presenting a target to corrupting forces.
So I figure we go content addressed. And we gossip tuples of hashes around which we will use to decide which content is which, which is trustworthy, which is malicious, etc. We'll get these from humans that we've met in real life, shook hands with, etc.
We won't have to use a globally unique human friendly name to communicate about content because we won't be blindly trusting content on the basis of it having come from a server with a trustworthy name in the first place. Instead, the act of sharing will be part of the protocol: an attestation about a hash. Instead of "go to Netflix and search for foo" we'll say "here, I've recommended a movie to you" and then you can find it under the list of movies I've recommended to you. It'll have a name for humans, but its the hash that the protocol will operate on.
The lack of a need for a name resolver means we can be partition tolerant. Apps will get smaller if they're just on a LAN with two peers and no internet, but they won't break.
We can gossip this peer to peer over Bluetooth or WiFi, or we can treat Twitter or whatever as our transport protocol: just a dumb wire full of ads nobody sees.
It might never support video calls, because you're gossiping messages opportunistically and there are no service providers involved: nobody to demand that their hardware stays online and conforms to some SLA.
Latency to the other side of the planet might measure in weeks, might require the right person who happens to be taking the right flight to have gossipped the right tuple.
But these are constraints I can live with. Mostly I want to know about local goings on anyway. If it takes my peers a few days to get distant news to me, so be it.
I think it could happen.
When everyone first started tagging each other's face and location, I immediately hated it. It felt like an incredible violation of privacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would do it. Now, finally, the zeitgeist is starting to catch up, and it's common to hear even "normies" worry about who is snooping on their data.
This process took about 20 years. I suspect LLM etiquette will take roughly the same.
Social media will be viewed as a failed experiment in the future.
Also, the scale of the media they must process means 'the algorithm' is a feature not a bug. It was always going to devolve into echo chambers.
It is funny seeing writers from the 1950's through to the 2000's all figure out the horrors this would unleash even if they didn't have a clue on the specifics of the technology.
I agree it will be seen as a failure but I suspect it is only once it has a point of absolute devastation that it cannot be ignored any more. I don't know what that will look like or when but it will be horrible.
The internet had so much potential. Shame.
Never hopped on the streaming bandwagon for anything but the most throw away stuff. Yes, I kept all my DVD's from decades back.
I have said it many times. Look at the original iPhone presentation. It was a device that was very deliberate. It wasn't made to addict, it was made to be productive. Get in, do the thing you want and then move on. If only it stayed that way.
Although it did have facebook, it was facebook delivered by Microsoft engineers and was missing a lot of features.
Still bitter about that over a decade later.
Other than that it's just an occasional google maps usage. I never browse anymore. My home PC has reddit/youtube DNS'd to 127.0.0.1. This isn't impermeable but it creates small gaps of boredom where I'm more likely to go for a walk or pick up a kettlebell. Adding up small wins is where the ship starts to turn around
But to TFA's point, yeah, it's screwed.
I guess it is probably required these days. Your opinions don’t matter, you will adapt to the new AI reality or might as well find another job.
What I dislike is all the posturing and all the low effort crap.
Even AI/LLMs I'm kind of fascinated by although I dislike their writing as much as anyone. But the singularity type stuff is a unique moment in history and interesting to watch.
The real reason for the enshittification is "the smartphone".
We had all of the modern internet advantages with very few issues when internet was limited to desktops.
But wearable electronics is the cancer that is destroying humans.