I think I hate the internet
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strategictree.bearblog.dev
The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre.
I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit because I linger on them because my brain can't help but stare. I open X and it's all engagement bait from major creators I don't give a damn about. I can switch to the Following tab and it's a lot of political opinions I'd just rather not hear about.
Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I was having old internet fun. And then it just died, I don't know. All the energy left the room.
Hacker News and my very curated Reddit are about all I even use the internet for these days, and Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable.
There was a very popular thread on here the other day basically talking about how these modern algorithms are the product, and how they're actually great and everyone loves them despite denying it... I'm just like is my brain so alien? I actively want and desire these services to be interesting or fun to use and they're just... not. They're boring.
There's nothing I want to see, so I don't use them anymore. It's not a leave Meta/X/etc in a huff like some of my more reactionary friends. It's just I don't even think to open them anymore because there's nothing worth my time.
Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.
What we need is a 2nd renaissance of small discussion forums. You don't need to use X, Facebook, instagram and the rest of the commercial web. Seek alternative, REAL COMMUNITIES.
I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.
It might be a fair trade if this exchange of info helped them eliminate bots, but it sounds like bots on X are more rampant than ever, so no thanks to that.
I used to get a lot of spambot followers, but that has ceased entirely in the past year. I would say the bot problem is no longer that relevant at the moment, but rather people posting AI replies are.
But if it's blanket rejecting certain signups based on identity, that suggests the company is interested in censorship and echo chambers, which means who knows what other dark patterns and less-detectable bot nets it has behind the scenes.
Doesn't seem worth it imo, except maybe for people who want their opinion echoed back to them (as well as other momentum that takes time to dissipate).
Back near the dawn of time, FB's feed was chronological, and that meant that Every.Single.Farmville.Notification showed up in your feed (and there were a lot of Farmville notifications).
This was actually causing real problems for Facebook, and they introduced an algorithmic feed to fix it. Back then, it was actually relatively simple, and mostly just ranked posts based on how connected you were to the person on Facebook.
Obviously things have changed since then, and algorithmic feeds have had a host of weird impacts, but a ranked feed is not necessarily bad in and of itself.
The mentioned "For You" feed for BlueSky appears to be a variation of LinkLonk's algorithm (by the same author), so how it works is partially known: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288
I kinda wish I could influence my For You with rules:
> No more than 2 degrees of separation from me
> Posts with fewer than 150 likes
Not even specific to a type of Hate. Obviously it's the "big Hates" which are dangerous (and can get people killed), but even the "small Hates" such as "pop star gets cancelled for wearing the wrong outfit" or whatever nonsense is going on in kpop fandom are annoying.
I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people.
Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd entered the conversation more intentionally?
No, it's probably more that a given thread was one conversation, like a GitHub issue, not a tree of comments with nested branches. Linear forum threads are great like that, posting is like joining a group of people by the vending machine, you're now in the group because you interrupted everyone else when you chimed in with your two cents, but that also means you belong there now.
Oh, and even more relevant: upvotes have zero effect on what post gets seen first! So it's not a popularity contest for the most pithy one-liner that gets upvoted to the top. You can write long-form posts and people will see them and engage on a human level.
I guess you can boil this down to "the absence of an algorithm": nothing has attempted to optimize what to put in front of their eyeballs, and so they engage with your long-form post. But when we talk about "opting out of algorithms", remember it's not just ML/AI algorithms: even Reddit/HN style upvotes are already an algorithm! It's obviously powerful enough that it has quite an effect.
Not sure why modern alternatives to phpBB, like Discourse, feel so impersonal and boring. I rarely feel the urge to check back on a Discourse thread, but that may just be me.
There's some hope that a small facet of forum culture can come back...
This gives me a ray of hope, if a bold enough group of people are willing to give it a shot:
Lemmy/Piefed are a pretty good approximation of the "old" reddit: community of people you remember, geek-centered for the most part, better discussion. It fills the void for me, and there's no algorithm to monetize or incentive for advertising. Well worth the few bucks a month I give my server admin.
It's (relatively) simple to run your own instance and/or connect to other instances as well. It's still pretty small and has no profit motive.
I get that Meta and X leave a really bad taste in your mouth, but that's because they want to use you to make money.
Not telling you what to do, just suggesting an alternative.
Edit: Fixed formatting.
But IMHO the bigger problem is that people became less social in general. I remember those fearmongering messages doing rounds which made people lock up their profiles and not post anything about their holidays as burglars could use that information to break into their houses.
Then there’s this thing where most people try to craft this perfect online presence with only carefully (and often heavily edited) photos and nothing too personal.
And in general, people seem to be much less open than “back in the early days”. Say “Hi!” to someone in the wrong mood and you’ll just get insta-blocked. Everybody is just caressing their profile but don’t want to have anything to do with the “social” part of the social network. Well, apart from collecting likes.
There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.
Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].
Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
The goal of a state is stability. The free, open, anonymous global internet otoh is a force of change.
The west really liked that, back when it was useful to its geopolitical goals, but now, not only does it have outlived its usefulness, but also, it's suddenly being pointed at the west itself.
At least I do not see how it could be any other way. You cannot simultaneously have high-trust and low-filtering in a space.
I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that this was actually always kinda the case. It was just not enforced by law, but by the fact that computers were weird, expensive and complex.
As the technology matured, these core assumptions started holding true less, until, eventually, we've ended up where we are now.
___
This doesn't necessarily mean that we will have no more anonymous networks though. But they will be less global and less accessible.
Thanks to open weights LLMs, we will have more capabilities within them than we did in the 90s and earlier, but, we will lack the leverage of tidal proportions that social media held.
This, to me, sounds like the compromise to be found with the powers that keep the states we live in running.
Social media is a public platform. We can't enforce moderation if we can't identify the abuser, they can always just make a new account. So deanonymize social media access, but for private communication? Let's leave that free from prying eyes.
To bring it back to cars, roads are public infrastructure, that's why you need a license. No one cares if you drive licenseless on your private track.
(also everyone in this thread saying deanonymisation does not on its own solve the problem is correct)
Discord and group chats will be considered private. Basically anything that requires an invitation / permission to view their content is considered private. To your example, I'm not sure if J6 members were organising publicly themselves. If the FBI wanted to, they could easily infiltrate these groups as an anonymous member themselves, so I don't see a contradiction there.
Legislatively, it means that platforms will be held responsible for their public content, which I think is fair. If there are too much content to moderate, it's up to them to find solutions. I hear rumours of a promising automating tool called LLMs.
Social media sure.
What about what you watch on PornHub? Should that be tied directly to your government ID?
I know that's an easy one to cherry pick but just consider all you use the internet for and how an adversarial governmenft could use some of that info.
Personally I'd love to see all social media corps required to verify ID but leave the rest of the internet alone.
Interesting question though, because IRL, before the internet, there was also ID verification to access that kind of content. And that was actually worse, because the person checking your ID lived in your city and could see you buying groceries.
I suppose what you would want there is a verification mechanism that proves that you're an adult, but gives absolutely no info on which adult you are.
This - to my understanding - is possible with the technology we have. But whether that will actually be what happens remains to be seen.
Not everyone has a life that is all sunshine. Not every use of anonymity is criminal or unethical.
To bring it back to analog, newspapers are platforms, where journalists are identified members of the public and can be held accountable for their words.
If you would like more personal stories, by all means, search for the personal blog online and share them with your friends privately. But if you share it on a public platform like HN, you are making an editorial decision that this is worth sharing to the masses and thus should be scrutinized.
Identification schemes would be fine if there were never abused, but every single instance of them has been abused in the past. There is zero reason to believe it will it be different on the internet.
Are you familiar with how the DMCA gets abused? Do you really believe that bad actors will not find similar ways to abuse an identification system?
Think of it like advertising on billboards. When you partake in an activity with explicit intent to persuade others, you should declare who you are first. That's why my target has been solely focused on social media. Personal blogs don't advertise, social media does. Just like how a private business conducts themselves privately, but advertisements of a company should make clear if it is self advertisement or someone else advertising on behalf of them.
This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.
The gp's analogy maps better this way:
roads = ip packet network routing, DNS, telecommunications cabling
racist conventions/meetups = social media platforms like Facebook
(Yes, people do "hate traffic" but that not's the same as "hating roads". Anyone who has travelled on unpaved dirt roads or gravel trails that make their teeth rattle will appreciate having paved roads. And that appreciation doesn't change even if a lot of KKK racist members also use roads.)
The industrial age brought tech with enough downside to spark a reaction. Then there was a run of less-contentious tech. Recently, we've had a run of tech that looks to me like all downside for society. The conditions (neoliberalism) are still in place. People are not empowered by hf trading, web 2.0, social media. They could be, but the tech was co-opted. IMO, neither are they empowered, in the round, by crypto or AI.
Their algorithms promote the wrong posts for the wrong reasons.
1: https://justinharter.com/my-god-it-was-awfulmy-husband-and-i...
This road is owned by a casino, and its signs are scientifically placed so that you take the wrong turn and reach their business. They place guardrails in the specific spot to hide places they don't want you to see. They actively encourage your children to grab a car and drive on it, even at risk of their health, to groom a new generation of casino clients.
" It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
" Ammonia production is a highly energy intensive process consuming around 1.8% of global energy output each year (steam methane reforming accounts for over 80% of the energy required) and producing as a result about 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (about 1.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions) "
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-...
> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.
But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.
But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.
I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.
This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.
A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.
Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.
Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist.
It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?
People consistenty act like they have no agency.
It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better.
So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".
lol This is a wild sentiment to not only have, but to share with others.
Just in shock someone actually believe this. That you're so entitled to other people's stuff that unless they give it to you for free they shouldn't be doing it.
> It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture.
lol What? You're just making things up.
It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.
It is entitlement. Nobody forced you to visit a web site with ads. The thing I said about people pretending they have no agency is exactly what you're implying.
Thinking you deserve free stuff because you don't like how it's presented is nothing but entitlement. If someone has to pay for your traffic, it's theft. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to come to terms with this. Maybe it's because everyone wants to believe their altruistic and this challenges it.
What's worse is seeing the same people who claim LLMs are stealing but have no issue with ad blockers. That level of incoherence is nuts to me.
LLM companies never asked to train on scraped content when they damn well intended to rent the result back commercially.
There is no incoherence here unless you accept axiomatically the Internet should make money. That was never the original purpose. Nor should that become it's ultimate purpose. In fact, I argue that this goes beyond the purpose of the Internet. Society is not yours to monetize. Period. Commercial relationships are not default.
For the last 30+ years, I've watched as society has completely forgotten how to be humans talking to humans and building relationships in lieu of trying to discover the fastest way to plug into someone else's wallet by selling something that isn't theirs to sell.
People who serve ads don't force you to visit their site. You do this on your own free will.
You're not a victim. You don't deserve other people's stuff for free because one site has deceptive practices. It's such an immature worldview.
A website wants visitors as much as a visitor wants to see the content of the website. If a website exists but doesn't get read, what is the point of it?
Personally, I would take readers using adblockers over no readers at all, the same way I'd want people reading a newsletter even if I had to print and pay for it myself.
The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.
An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible.
I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.
Even the argument against the Javascript/CSS/APIs explosion and browser complexity... all that can be "avoided" if you make a JS-less document-centric webpage, for example.
The biggest problem with the web is that there is only one.
People are working on this: https://geminiprotocol.net/
And the fediverse and other decentralized protocols have yet to entirely succumb to the rot.
Inadvertently, Cunningham’s law helps me out.
Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.
It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
It's perhaps why I loathe it so much.
For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
This sounds great. What magazines do you recommend?
Unless you have a lot of antiquated components on hand, probably a good idea to work in reverse, chronologically.
Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
People sought cheaper alternatives, and for a while several messaging apps were used, but WhatsApp was so convenient compared to everyone else (using the phone number as username, no password required, was a genius move), that it was already becoming the standard before Facebook came and acquired it.
Carriers noticed their error eventually, and stopped charging for SMS, but by then it was too late. They even tried using the tribunals to block WhatsApp, without success, and technical measures to degrade WhatsApp's protocol and block audio and video calls on it, which also failed legally. So they eventually relented, and now offer packages like "n GB/month plus free WhatsApp!!!" (and in small letters: "audio and video calls not included").
Could you say more about this? I'm not very familiar with the WhatsApp acquisition, or necessarily happy about it, but at first glance I don't see what part would come anywhere close to theft.
It almost all collapsed because of an airmiles ticket which couldn't be changed.
Which is why it hasn't been adopted. Everyone with any power, from governments to telcos to big enterprises, prefers centralized services. Hence SMS, its upgrade, RCS, and the many private protocols.
There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier.
In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.
How do you figure? Information is gatekept differently, but editorialized harder than ever before.
I also question whether "better optimized supply chains" is in fact a benefit. Optimizing a supply chain has meant just-in-time inventory etc; I'd argue an optimized supply chain is a fragile supply chain.
On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.
Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.
I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
Whatsapp - https://signal.org / http://element.io
Instagram - https://fotoapp.co/ / https://glass.photo
Twitter - https://joinmastodon.org/
Substack - https://tuhat.net
Facebook - maybe replace it with a mix of the others
It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people.
Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t.
https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_By...
There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself.
One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope.
We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them.
What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything?
But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.
> What is the internet now to me? In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.
It's so much more annoying to do any of these things without/before internet. I don't do half of the other things in the rest of that paragraph. Like for phones I just get a used CAD$400 Android phone with good audio output.
I think this applies to all personal blog posts
I think it's healthy for a society to question everything, as long as it doesn't get us stuck, but rather helps us conciously choose our path. We have more options than ever.
I used to be on social media all the time and always want the next shiny thing in tech. And I enjoyed that. But now I can choose to not be on social media and be on a basic iPhone mini. And I'm enjoying that now. All is to reiterate: we can choose our path, and that applies to many verticals.
What is a hatred of the Internet seems to be a hatred of humanity or at least its ability to freely express itself.
The solution is to reduce the noise, in much a way someone 100 years ago would only visit clubs or establishments they enjoyed.
The problem are the algorithms that put us into buckets and benefit from divisions.
The algorithms helped give us the single most dysfunctional and corrupt US administration since the 1800s.
A basic bit of modernity is very useful, but as we become more modern, it becomes more nuisance, less comfort.
Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.
...Which was a perfectly valid choice in 2005. It was that or Ruby, more or less. Java, ASP, and ColdFusion were a thing for enterprise, otherwise it was Perl CGI, Python, or some crazy custom C++ stuff.
The early commercialisation of the Internet killed BBSes but there were web forums. But more people could access it, so more problems. More stupidity, noise.
The dumbing down has fully transpired. Violence, anger and salaciousness are not only the noise in the noise to signal ratio, they're the investor's friend - the engagement hook that we pattern everything after.
Instead of nerds we have plastic faces with big fake lips posing for pictures or recording selfie videos in public.
I have painful nostalgia when I see an old VGA screen with an old operating system or Sierra game on it, and I wish I could find through the slop where the nerds went.
Stay away from "algorithmic" social media and all 24-hour news—if something important happens, it'll show up on the HN RSS feed.
If you want to stay politically active and informed, subscribe to political activist newsletters and write your congresspeople.
I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.
I admire her for the stance she's taking today and the personal sacrifice it's costing her to this day, but I won't deny that her own account sounds like someone who thought "this will be big" and decided to help without thinking "should this be big?" first.
You don't have to "hate" the Internet. You can just choose not to participate in it.
Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy.
High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet.
Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable.
Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.
Also, automatic updates that are forced on the user.
And of course that the internet is breaking down our democracies.
I feel like the author is a mind-reader and somehow read my mind.
Having to go through 3rd party services (and rely on them to stay on top of things) to participate is not fun.
If you setup your Website you will inexorably attract spammers at least. Yes they are using new tools and new techniques... but so can you. There are plenty of tools to keep track of abusive usage, individually or collectively, and ways to both backup your data or containerize your services. As long as you keep up then I don't feel it's getting more challenging.
The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor).
Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me.
But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that.
> Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone?
It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time.
I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is.
Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept.
But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction.
I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones.
And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls.
P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame.
Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.
We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.
That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel).
I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.
Sounds like yet another call for government overreach to amplify mass censorship even more (which is also used against things like abortion information), and ban anonymity to "protect the children".