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Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
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).
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.
Because the effort put in searching is so high that I am tired before involment.
As you say, amount of noise is too large.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“if A is a subset of X and p is in X, that does not imply that p is in A”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.