If AI forces people to re-weight their priorities (i.e. be less on the internet), perhaps that's a good thing?
For the past five years I made an effort to seek out and finish long posts or videos that seem interesting at first in the name of exercising my attention span.
I'm now quick to bail on anything when I don't know the author, and bail on authors if their quality starts slipping. When the daily fire hose started running out, I realized I was mainly looking for distraction and spent more time being healthily bored.
While social media may have ruined the internet, think of that as more of hitting the ground after falling off a cliff. It was the constant connection that really started changing everything. Instead of getting on the internet and disconnecting from the internet, we were always on. The algorithm that filled this new environment was inevitable.
Simply put there is no route back to those early days.
Sure there is. Make another internet and keep the normies and capitalists away from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541705
This is no different than saying make a huge pitre dish and ensure no mold ever lands on it and grows. Aka: a completely unrealistic view on how systems work.
And if contamination is inevitable, just burn down the lab and start the experiment again elsewhere.
If I had any reason to I could pump out thousands of Gemini slop sites and turn the ratio of real sites to slop up to 1 to a million. Then publish article after article on how all Gemini is is junk and for the most part it will be true.
Yeah but you don't. It literally isn't worth the effort. We're talking about a few thousand people at most, less than the userbase of HN. And if you did, those sites would just go ignored. And no one would read those articles because no one outside of geminispace actually cares about geminispace. It would be like trying to kill a housefly with a cannon.
Even if we were talking about the fediverse, which provides a much bigger target, people just wouldn't federate with the slop. The decentralized architecture guarantees that the community splits and fractures as it grows, so you can have greater inclusivity across the board, but exclusivity within instances. Go ahead and pump out thousands of instances. No one has to care. So far self-limiting and opt-in architectures do work to hold back the tide.
The modern internet has just become privacy scraping and adverts if you visit websites that do such things and serve such content, but that doesn't stop anyone setting up and running their own domain, which is what the old internet was? If anything, it's easier than ever to "be on the Internet" with your own VPS or Pi at home. Far easier than it ever was. Just stop putting all your content into someone else's locker.
The lack of discoverability has always been a problem on the internet, which is why Yahoo had their category pages and why search engines exist.
People keep talking as if "the internet" is a thing that came and suddenly disappeared. But it hasn't. The only thing that has appeared are apps that use specific domains, where the services behind those domains are colossal vacuums of data. A lot of people use those apps, but it doesn't mean I need to. And it doesn't mean I can't go and search for some specific website holding specific data about a given topic. People keep talking as if that was lost? Am I missing something?
As for it "tearing society apart", society has always been fractured. It just means more people can speak now, and more people can listen; if they're not choosing who they listen to or weighing concepts in their own mind, that isn't the "internet's" fault - that's their own, any more than someone writing a newspaper article in the 1980s would be held responsible for "tearing society apart"?
Pretty much the same thing the printing press did. Breakthrough communication technologies force underlying societal problems to the surface. It will end up being a good thing long term as long as we survive it.
But unfortunately I just don't think that will happen. For some people it might, but I think the mass of people will accept the slop as it's given to them. Nothing in the history of communication technologies makes me think otherwise.
Perhaps I'm too cynical.
you might as well expect people to drink less water.