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I must admit I've indulged in constrained writing when I was a teenager with the same purpose: circumventing spontaneous layout errors in Word when writing a paper for school, feeling a non-negligible amount of anxiety due to the deadline being around the corner. Terrifying.

This is why I wrote "well" in quotation marks and used expressions like "potentially of value". You missed the whole point.

Look, we should make a concerted effort—a huge one, I know—to strip away all that is potentially of value in X, and through pulling and separating it from the whole, establishing dignified alternatives to every single one of them.

Here's what X does "well":

- Witness media/citizen journalism.

- Text publishing (narrowed down to short-form and very opinion-based, but still).

- Link sharing (there are TONS of links to great pieces of media; the vast majority of posts containing links to pirated content are never removed).

- Self-promotion (art, video games, software, etc.).

Now, imagine all of these facets turned into dignified, decentralized, and uncensorable platforms or protocols. It might sound like wishful thinking or some kind of utopian aspiration, but I really think we're fighting a battle for Internet freedom RIGHT NOW. What we do in the next two to five years will establish how much of it we'll get to keep in the long term, because there might be no turning back.

No, I don't think it is. I didn't want to reach the mods necessarily. I wanted to check what the picture was regarding the general opinion on this kind of practices, hopefully with personal experiences from regular users rather than, potentially, getting some kind of formal statement that is further from what the actual moderation activity is like, either coming from moderators themselves or from users flagging or downvoting content.

Wait. Is it not against the HN guidelines to regularly submit links to your own sites? Isn't that considered self-promotion and, thus, against the rules? I've got nothing against the author, personally, as I'd do the same, but seeing his submission page, I'd like to know how normal getting in trouble is for this practice or if the guidelines are enforced at all in this sense.

>Powerful LLMs will be deployed at global scale in the next few years, and will dominate the Internet, and increasingly, ordinary life.

This kind of judgements or predictions trying to pass as imminent and unavoidable truths about the future are disgusting. They always feel like a means of propping up a certain status quo or ideology that favors the business of the people behind these foreboding statements.

>We could’ve just paid for the content, directly subsidising the creators we like.

That wasn't an option. And if it had been, they would've rolled out monetization through ads anyway. If you believe otherwise, there's too much we disagree on to sum it up here.

Ads have destroyed our culture. Just look at the fundamental change YouTube underwent in 2012 when they made all users eligible for monetization. It turned it into junk/infomercial TV.

>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline

Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.

Noise, in a wide, aesthetic sense, is rich. "Clean" is shapeless, soulless.

Hmm... To my mind, the best way to commercialize software is the old way: pay for the binaries of every major version. This, of course, bars the option of using the software online, and makes pirating it easier, but I think it's the most fair.

You might think to look for it through a smartphone app; I certainly wouldn't. That's some projection right there. And no, it's not there, still. If you knew anything about the deep web, you'd know it's quite different from the Internet of old, as well as much less populated.

>I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.

That was a critical turning point, to be sure. But what came about with the conjunction of social media and the smartphone around 2010 was a much more impactful one, as it made the Internet undergo extremely essential changes, not just a qualitative (and quantitative) modification of its userbase. The Internet became the media outlet for hypercommercialism and late-stage capitalism, basically, and all the societal changes we've seen since are byproducts of that paradigm shift.

It's mostly devoid of content and participation, unfortunately. We need more people to join in.

We desperately need to develop more for I2P. Make it a real place to thrive instead of just a curious piece of technology or a mere repository of pirated media. Let's say right now it's mostly an abandoned and almost empty museum.

I'll say it yet again. The Internet has become the very thing we used it to escape from.

One step closer to the great exile from the clearnet. I'd say "accelerate".

Absolutely. If they end up making access to the deep and dark web impossible through commercial Internet infrastructure, the next logical step is cracking down on alternative Internet infrastructure. Overlay networks like I2P, Tor or Hyphanet can be a temporary safe haven, but ultimately a government can make it extremely hard for uncontrolled platforms to stay up. I guess we'll have to fight for it if push comes to shove, and it's looking very bleak.

We'll move permanently to the dark web, then. Ideally, we should maintain resilient wireless community networks that can withstand government abuse, as well.

>If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost

It's been a lost battle for decades, then.

Advertising and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"

Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iterations. Impossible. They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it".

From another article:

>"Social media app TikTok has been accused of purposefully designing its app to be “addictive” by the European Commission, citing its infinite scroll, autoplay, push notification, and recommendation features."

All of these have immediate and easy replacements or workarounds. Nothing will substantially change (for the better; maybe it does for the worse, even).

Moreover, "purposefully designing something to be addictive" (and cheap to make) is the fundamental basis of late stage capitalism.

...and the global oligopoly grows ever smaller.

>You missed my second statement, I think.

I didn't. Nothing in my post could possibly make any reasonable person think I missed it. It bears no connection whatsoever to it, nor does it contradict anything I wrote.

>social networking has the same effect on a laptop

You carry your laptop literally everywhere you go and use it in every imaginable situation you can find yourself in for more than six straight hours every day? You really pull out your laptop while waiting in line at the grocery store? You text on it while driving? You use your laptop strolling down the street at any given moment, or at restaurants with friends, really?

Get real.

>At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices

I wager most people are putting those on while having a meal and using their phones or tablets at the same time. Moreover, 99% of the most watched content on YouTube is utter garbage that would make the average reality show on TV twenty years ago look like The Godfather in comparison. Gossippy, clickbait videos made to induce an immediate dopamine dump and be used as background noise aren't "in-depth" anything. I don't think people are sitting in front of a TV watching an hour-long, non-sponsored, ad-free interview with Margerite Duras and doing nothing else concurrently, for instance.

On top of all that, this trend of making longer videos comes mostly from an attempt to increase ad revenue. Let's not be fooled here.

The "shit" to "good" ratio in literally every field was much less skewed to the "shit" side before smartphones and social media came along. It's always this same fallacy: "hey, that was always a thing!". Sure, drugs have "always" been a thing, but did you have fentanyl producing real-life zombie parades in the streets just ten years ago? If we make these reductionist claims, we can say just about every phenomenon was already a thing a hundred thousand years ago. We have to think about the degree to which something is occurring as well, and how it is taking place, not just try to dismiss it through knee-jerk intended retorts.

Everyone's.

Every monopoly is predicated upon abusive, anti-competitive and unlawful practices, as well as exemptions and unearned subsidies from governments. Always. Many people aligning with megacorporations wouldn't support "capitalism" if the playing field was even.