The Boring Internet

ccrowdhailer about 4 hours ago 36 commentsRead Article on terrygodier.com

RU version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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Discussion (36 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pamcake•about 3 hours ago

Alternative readable rendering: https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii

Freak_NL•about 2 hours ago

Wait, why isn't that the article instead? Who actually wants this fade-scroll-thing? It detracts from the sensible content.

pratyahava•about 2 hours ago

even this "ascii" (i expected raw text but still got html+css) was hardly readable for me, had to reach to the reader view, finally readable, ohh... looks much like ai-generated, why did i spend so much time jumping over obstacles...

cryo32•19 minutes ago

The length and rambling nature of it was a clear AI indicator.

This is unfortunately the problem with the Boring Internet. It's subject to the common denominator which is shite. And LLMs generate a lot of that.

officialchicken•about 2 hours ago

CSS always counters the conceptual and philosophical use of hypertext.

pimlottc•about 1 hour ago

Color contrast in the text version isn’t great either

trelbutate•about 3 hours ago

Yeah, scroll fade might be useful sometimes but most of the time it's just annoying.

https://dbushell.com/2026/01/09/death-to-scroll-fade/

duskdozer•about 1 hour ago

Fortunately my "defenses" worked on this one, though CSS only doesn't seem to have been enough. I don't care if they want to make the user feel like they're living in a blingee gif by default, I just desperately want pages to respect prefers-reduced-motion

RadiozRadioz•about 2 hours ago

What are the times in which it is useful?

If those are referenced in the linked article, I'll be honest I didn't read it. That website succeeds whole handedly in its job of being too annoying to read.

cyanydeez•about 2 hours ago

im sure theres a class of people who gauge their willingness to read based on the length of scroll.

syhol•about 2 hours ago

Great topic and message. But the AI-generated writing really gets under my skin. It's not painful. Not unclear. Just really annoying.

interf4ce•about 1 hour ago

I can't help but wonder if we've already hit the point where real people now write like that because it's what they're exposed to day in and day out.

I have zero evidence to back this up but I'm convinced that autocorrect is what led to people pluralizing word's with apostrophe's. If we keep outsourcing how we express our ideas, how long until we no longer have any left?

ramon156•about 2 hours ago

Its not just a movement, it's a message.

alibarber•about 1 hour ago

Let that sink in.

varun_ch•35 minutes ago

even the plain text version’s subheading gets under my skin for some reason

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii

> You chose the quiet version. No animations. No scroll effects. Just words.

donutlover•about 2 hours ago

A great little expression I heard somewhere was 'AI;DR'. I find it grating to get through a text once I've lost the trust that the author wrote it themselves. When that trust is gone, how could I be sure that these are your ideas or just something an LLM said that you happen to agree with?

keybored•about 2 hours ago

This is real. You are not imagining it.

Oh sorry. I cribbed that from the article itself.

> > This is real. You are not imagining it.

hntiz•36 minutes ago

I thought it was a cool essay because I've been using Gemini (the one mentioned in the article, not Google) in my terminal browser lately. And it has been a lot of fun!

But yes the whole "re-explain by negation" writing style does come across as AI-generated.

cryo32•24 minutes ago

I think the best bit about this is the reminder that SomaFM still exists.

Martin_Silenus•about 1 hour ago

The Internet I grew up on was not the web. It was mail, newsgroups, IRC… maybe the article talks about that, but I don’t care as this is nothing the web can kill in any way.

ianhxu•about 2 hours ago

Not sure. Without commercialization and ads, there might not be the free high-quality web apps from Google. Things have two sides. But the complexity of the internet should have far surpassed the level that even large corps could influence, and therefore, the key might be culture instead of tech.

ianhxu•about 2 hours ago

The ux is really bad. But the commenting, versioning, syncing functions for collaboration or cross-platform use are of high-quality. And that's actually Google vs. Apple.

pjerem•about 2 hours ago

> there might not be the free high-quality web apps from Google.

I mean, which one of the "free high-quality web apps from Google" is free high quality ?

I'm forced to use Google Workspace for work and that's an incredible pain. GMail is messy. Google Meet have an horrible UI, Google Drive is messy++, Google Chat is unusable, Google Search is unusable. The only product that is still good at google is maybe Google Maps.

CM30•about 4 hours ago

I mean he's right, the old internet and the technology that underlies it still exists, and there's nothing stopping you from building and using sites that work independently of the big social media platforms/centralised services.

That said, I do wish this essay was a bit better contrast wise. Had to highlight some of the tables to read them at all, which isn't exactly ideal.

vanillameow•about 3 hours ago

The components heavily give Claude Code vibes. I use CC to build internal tools and, given free reign over the design, this exactly what it will produce.

Won't comment on the writing other than that the punchlines do feel a bit pretentious in an AI kinda way. I've seen the author's blog posts and I much prefer their natural writing to this essay-style output, but to each their own.

armchairhacker•about 2 hours ago

The writing is definitely AI.

I see this often in HN posts and I’m not sure whether to comment. Because it seems most people don’t care; and are only discussing the title, which the LLM post is a predictable extrapolation of, so human effort on the article would be wasted.

I wish people would discuss more interesting topics and less repeats. But probably most of the unique posts just aren’t interesting to me, and I spend too long here so I see repeats more than the average user.

fragmede•about 3 hours ago

Somewhat. If you open port 22 up on an ip, you're going to get hit by bots scanning the Internet, trying to find an open server to ssh into. If you open port 80 or 443, you're going to get bots looking for /wp-admin.php just as soon as the domain name for it hits certificate transparency logs. The Internet's not a friendly place to be. It once was, but the default now is that someone is going to try and abuse anything you put up. Makes it hard to want to set up a new platform outside of the big centralized ones.

alibarber•about 1 hour ago

In ham radio - we have a 'Q code' (abbreviation) for man-made noise: QRM (QRN is naturally occurring: thunderstorms and such). This is used mainly to refer to electrically noisy transformers, vehicles, misconfigured transmitters etc. Always been there, gets worse and/or better over time - but gotta figure out how to deal with it as part of the hobby.

When doing stuff on the internet, I've just decided to stop worrying and treat these scans like that above mentioned QRM. You can filter it a bit if you like [1], but really, a sensibly configured and maintained SSH server is as secure as it gets as far as I can see.

[1] https://alastairbarber.com/Building-Anycast-Network/#securit...

graemep•about 2 hours ago

> If you open port 22 up on an ip, you're going to get hit by bots scanning the Internet, trying to find an open server to ssh into

This has been the case for years. I can remember this from logs for port 22, more than 20 yeas ago, I saw this.

tardedmeme•about 2 hours ago

Those scanners are low effort. Don't run vulnerable software and you're fine (this mostly means not running any website you didn't write, but wasn't that the point anyway?) Run it in a container and you're double-fine.

If you don't have a wp-admin.php who cares if someone is trying to access it? If you have one but it correctly validates your admin credentials, again who cares?

You can turn it into a fun project of making a honeypot.

CM30•about 2 hours ago

Eh, as someone who runs a bunch of smaller sites and forums, I've not had any issues with scammers or hackers gaining access to them. Most of them are looking for obvious vulnerabilities via some sort of script, and usually assume the file names and database structure are the same for every site they target.

It's plenty possible to run an independent site with no issues if you keep things up to date and change a few things to thwart the most common attack attempts.

w4yai•about 3 hours ago

I find this website really hard to read, even in ASCII.

numericOverflow•about 1 hour ago

Fade scroll, hard pass.

philipwhiuk•about 2 hours ago

GPJV2kLVWR8R9AIzFcHTE

Interesting