This is an overly wordy article, that I think misses the mark.
The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either.
A few things affect this:
- Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The internet experience is getting gradually worse.
- Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s.
- Artificial intelligence. The situation will only be exacerbated by letting AI loose on the internet. Whatever humans can do online, AI can do much, much better—or worse, depending on your perspective.
The outcome of these things will be that countries will have a more restricted and censored version of the current internet. We'll follow China's example, and have a European internet, US internet, etc.
The internet will survive. It will just be very different.
We got the Internet that advertising built.
This was not how we (well some of us early 90s and before) users assumed it would pan out.
It has been my experience that private Internet communities (groups, forums, messaging chats) are where the quality discussion happens these days. Away from the advertising and the controversy seeking (and anti-tech) mainstream media reporters.
Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web): that it would be open and really big. It was supposed to be a place where some kid in rural Africa with only 8 years of schooling could learn how to be a software developer, or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence (eg people really into collecting vacuum cleaners).
I don't think it's just an advertising/cancel culture problem. It's partially a problem with the internet being so decentralized that spammers and scammers can operate with impunity, pushing a ton of work onto people running online communities because countries like India and Russia don't properly go after cybercriminals - even if someone SaaSified forums, this is still a significant burden.
It's also kind of a UI problem: if Google search starts to suck and gets filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core pull-model of the web. If Reddit starts to suck and get filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core push-model of the web. Together the two kind of Embraced-Extended-Extinguished the web, but maybe something like an RSS reader, different web client (eg a browser that didn't nudge you into making google queries as the main way to operate it), and more capable search engine would be able to fix these.
I'm not sure that GP meant entirely private communities - rather something like, for example, Discord communities, or online forums, where people can still join, but it's not entirely "public" in the sense of Twitter or the like.
I think that was the aspiration, but nobody realized there were so many people who thought 5G caused corona (and similar lack of thought process) until it was too late.
To rephrase it differently: it was not anticipated that the great majority of people cannot handle the amount of information, which is required for thoughtful decisions, that they happy to accept obvious contradictions to avoid self-reflection, and that they lack even basic suspicion of information's validity. We were naive to think that they can choose, or even want to choose between options, that they want to be free from central agencies to tell them what to think. We really thought that The Long Tail would happen in everything.
But hey, those people won greatly, who can and want.
I honestly don’t agree with most of the doomsayers of the Internet.
Sure, there is way more advertising and bots these days but there is WAY more content available today than 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Definitely way more diversity of content too.
> kid in rural Africa with only 8 years of schooling could learn how to be a software developer
Small and private does not necessarily imply exclusive. There are such communities where you can easily join or lurk.
> or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence
And that still works for me like that. They might not be visible on the first results page but once you start to research a topic in depth you can find them.
> Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.
There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests?
IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
Do you consider pleasant and cynical as mutually exclusive?
I had a chat with a former politician and he was definitely pleasant, but extremely cynical, he pointed out instances of corruption everywhere. Although to be fair he was probably just being realistic not cynical. Cynicism is a good filter against dumb trends, hustler types and "emperor's clothes" situations.
Don't delude yourself. There is quite a lot of stuff being put here for ungenuine reasons.
If you want to find a platform with true signal to noise golden ratio, you either have to find one on the rise, NOT made by a well known name, and place a timer on it, or you have to find one people think is long dead.
> "You will not survive" is not only a frightening idea.
This article has a tone of a giant, unacknowledged fear of passing that is using some notion of "the Internet" as a demonstratory puppet. "The Internet" too shall pass[0], and it should be the most obvious and neutral thing in the world; the overdramatizing part of this article does makes no sense.
My take on declining online social engagement is; a lot of people like to consume online content passively e.g. just reading Facebook posts or watching a YouTube video without actually liking or commenting. Another thing is; increasing number of people came to realize that privacy does matter and they refuse to participate in online dramas that can damage their reputation or harm their mental health.
99% of my social media engagement is on anonymous social media because whatever I do on real-identity social media is either broadcast to everyone I know by the platform (FB, LinkedIn, Twitter), or becomes indexed by search engines, and unfortunately my firstname+lastname is globally unique.
In fact I would say this is the singular reason why Facebook declined. I just don't want my 8th grade classmate to see that I liked my cousin's wedding photos 20 years later, y'know?
Yep, or a prospective employer when I'm in my 40s to see what my political opinions were in my 20s. The more polarized and politicized everything gets the more careful a watch I keep on what turns up when you Google my name. What's well inside the Overton window today won't be in five years and I'm not willing to risk my career on the assumption that even I will still agree with myself in a few years.
Also “don’t recommend channel” for truly obnoxious ones. I follow through 3-4 of their videos so that they start to appear in the side column and then kill it from there, removing all traces afterwards.
- Not interested - removes this exact video with a very low key tuning of recommendations, if at all.
- Dislike - a slightly pronounced signal for recommendations. But still clueless cause no info on why.
- Like - you’ll drown in content similar to this, but not the same quality. Get ready to shovel it and miss your previous interests completely.
- Comment - similar to like.
The default careless youtube experience without all that stopped working around 5 years ago (at least). Can’t imagine using it as is and not degenerating into something inhuman.
I'm just glad there are browser extensions that remove all that Youtube dross no questions asked.
It's interesting to me that somebody would try and curate their experience in this shitshoveling assault on the nerves that is Youtube recommendations.
It’s completely automatic at this point, I barely notice my actions :)
Can you maybe recommend some extensions please? I’m only using unhook (some of) and sponsorblock, but it would be nice to e.g. dislike videos right from the feed or ban channels from their video or a channel page. Oh, and the one that loads X button in history immediately.
IMO, it’s due to burnout due to pathological manipulation. Which is also playing out in politics and the media/advertising, and the macroeconomic fed rate situation. They’re all related.
Business cycle wise:
- it starts out mellow, with lots of positive ROI and few downsides. Few know about it at first.
- as awareness grows, so does competition. While there is a ton of room to grow, this isn’t a problem. Growth doesn’t have to be at the cost of a competitors market share, there are tons of available untapped opportunities.
- eventually, it starts to become crowded. Now competition starts to become more heated and cut throat. Old tricks to stay competitive stop working, and there is an arms race to develop new ones.
- at some point, some/many players don’t feel they can compete based on fundamentals (positively), and it starts to become a race to the bottom. With some/many players starting to scam or commit fraud, be scary/manipulative, squeeze suppliers to a destructive degree, etc. Zero sum game instead of green field.
- this causes demand side restrictions and additional costs as customers start to get scared/overwhelmed, and cut back or get more demanding on quality.
- this causes a downward spiral that worsens the situation industry wide, eventually bankrupting marginal suppliers and maybe even big ones, until things stabilize or change.
On the social side, a lot of people population wide are flat out not doing it anymore. Including women. Similar to dating apps.
Which is why some advertisers, politicians, businesses keep getting even more insane and craven trying to extract even more value from the remaining people - to keep the numbers going up and right. So they don’t have to ‘look down’ and be potentially bankrupt. The loudest players in this type of environment are almost always the ones in the worst position.
This is also playing out in American Politics and Media right now.
It isn’t just engineer or blue collar types, who IMO were already predisposed to not engaging with it.
Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
Minuses:
- there are going to be a lot more deeply traumatized people with a profoundly negative outlook on human nature, now and even more in the future.
- society is going to get a whole lot poorer while this plays out.
> Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
I disagree. Tech literacy is going down, partially due to an overreliance on dashboard-style mobile apps and phishing scams are still widely effective. I have seen people lose mails and accounts to strategies that have been unchanged for an easily googleable 11 years now. Perhaps the inevitability of exposure is a numbers game, but I'm overall pessimistic, I think a lot of scams will become a lot more "personal sounding" due to AI agents, and a preparedness reset is coming.
Again, returning to the "it's not the internet itself, but the content on it" thing.
Facebook and microblogs use the same infra and can be accessed via the same means (web browser, etc).
At least from anecdotal experience, the really good stuff has been getting easier to find through IRL-ish means, like asking a colleague for the invite link.
I haven't really seen behind the invite veil much, since I'm about as far as it gets from someone cool you'd want in your group chat, but from what I've seen, "good" things are happening and thoughts are thought. It's just happening in private.
There were comments or an article somewhere about someone being sad about "very deep technical discussions being held on discord servers and that knowledge being ultimately lost". I don't think it's that bad of a thing though since that knowledge was never intended for the public and being ultimately lost and forgotten is what the people writing said messages are expecting of it. Certainly, as a person, I care more about myself having less of a digital papertrail than someone in the indefinite future not being able to solve their nieche non-essential problem.
I could elaborate more on the "onlyfans has replaced sex" and the such, which are, IMO, while somewhat true, are conclusions to which the author arrived to from a wrong place, thus continuing to think in that direcion would get them further from the truth, not closer to it.
In the end, just as human brain is a sort of general purpose multimodal input-output machine, the internet can be used for all sorts of purposes. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will fall out of fashion, without getting a solid cultutal foothold. The test of time works as well as ever.
It might be better to instead say, what does a discord server offer to you that a mailing list does not for your technical user group? I think most people are on discord because its fashionable and they are unfamiliar with older technology like mailing lists, which were more common place when they were only children perhaps.
> what does a discord server offer to you that a mailing list does not for your technical user group
Having to click on multiple links to just make sense of a conversation?
It's the reason I can't even get myself to follow places like NANOG and LKML; because the experience is just so painful. It makes you almost immediately want to disengage from the subject matter.
I'm almost never looking for a mailing list. I've been on the internet for 20 years and they never fill the same niche as IRC. Same for discord. mailing lists can't do what it does.
I would love mailing lists to be a thing again, but the experience of using email is just so bad for me. The sheer amount of unsubscribing I have to do to make it usable - not even taking spam into account - makes email a place I don't want to spend any time.
By far, the majority of my time "online" these days is spent in a Discord server for enthusiasts that are also interested in my hobby. Due to the server's small size and narrow niche, moderation is straightforward and we rarely have any issues with trolling. We don't allow political discussion, which mostly allows members of diverse backgrounds to interact safely, since triggering discussions don't come up very often.
It's not even a particularly novel idea, right? Chatrooms have been a thing just about since packet switching was a thing, this one is just a polished implementation of that idea. Trouble is, the one metric that matters to Google (inter-linking, engagement, etc) can't happen when the content can't be crawled in the first place. So our pleasant, intellectually simulating content stays hidden where the rest of the internet never notices it.
Chatrooms used to be for idle chit chat, banter, and quick questions, but are now being used for deeper technical discussions. Ironically, you find a lot of this on places like Reddit, including an excess of uninformed and repeat questions.
I am of the opinion that Discord does any niche community a great disservice by first locking content behind an invite link and, once invited, content is locked behind pages and pages of search results if the content is even still available.
I’m sure there is bias on my part because I cut my teeth on forums of the ‘00s to the mid ‘10s, but the siloing and fragmentation of information has ultimately divided up centers of knowledge into smaller and smaller pieces. Those in the know will know and those not will be shut out.
There are many within our community which share this viewpoint, and any time we do serious technical research the general sentiment is to move that onto our forums or wiki, specifically to make it discoverable.
I personally don't socialize on the forums though. My unfiltered thought process doesn't need to be searchable for the next century. It's okay for some communication to be ephemeral.
This had my attention at first but I’m not sure it led me anywhere. For discussion of the fundamental contradictions with the current structure of the Internet (that lead to the problems described herein & more), I highly recommend The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Platform
It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.
I am old enough to remember when people said TV was a passing fad.
And the radio.
And the printing press.
And the telegraph.
And the written word. I mean come on you lazy shlubs, memorize Beowulf like we had to back in my day.
OK, I am not actually that old.
My point is, that with every technology that has been invented to improve, or expand the ability of humans to communicate, there have been the detractors and naysayers predicting the inevitable doom of said technology.
I am still waiting for that whole writing things down instead of memorizing them thing to finally go out of style.
I'm not sure if the examples you bring make the point you're trying to make. For most practical intents and purposes, printed press is but a small shadow of its former self. Pretty much all outlets focus on the digital and many have stopped printing altogether. Radio is the same, as a fraction of the population, the numbers are hitting record lows. Most people listen to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, podcasts, etc, not radio. I doubt I need to even mention classical TV. Point being, all of these technologies exist and people do consume them, yes, but compared to their former glory they're all practically dead.
And yet they persist.
And continue to evolve.
And TV, now streaming over the internet.
The way humans communicate evolves.
And so will the internet, and social media and all the rest to come.
Think of it like this...
Radio didn't die, it evolved, into streaming music.
TV didn't die, it evolved to streaming TV>
The printed medium did not die, it evolved into HTML and web pages, a fancier form of type setting.
The telegraph didn't die, it evolved into digital communications.
See, it's not that things die and go away, it is a process of improving how humans interact.
Some may find it difficult, or maybe the isolation is a problem, then there is an evolution.
It will not stop, it will evolve to the next step.
These aren't the laments of a dying internet. They're the laments of a person mourning a time and place that will never come back but without the social awareness to realize that. That's the trouble with most of these kinds of laments.
New media exploration is new, fresh, and chaotic. The kids on Discord channels and those watching streamers and VTubers have this same energy. The old guys looking for mailing lists are sneaking a peek in between looking at their kids, doing their household chores, and finishing work. The vibes are off cause of the audience.
And bad for kids. Go back and you can read about how dreadful it is that some people are letting their children read novels. What sort of person would do that?
But the article isn't really about that, to the extent it's really about anything except the author's need to feel very, very smart. It's a vague gesture at how "over" it they are, for any value of "it". Best to pat them on the head condescendingly and then move on.
The person who wrote the article used the internet for all the sub-references. Had it not been for the internet, this person most likely would not have known all the things they mentioned. I don't know if they are listening, but it would be an interesting question.
All these technologies have something in common however. They get coopted for misinformation. I think a lot of fear about "new media" whatever form it might be is simply reactionary from a media literacy perspective. The adult of the radio age might understand that one can have some media literacy with the radio, not believe everything they say, waste their time on it, etc. But their kids who are watching TV all day didn't get that lesson in school, clearly the case from watching TV all day and not playing like a normal kid over the last millenia, and since they are kids they don't understand nuance so its simpler to put the foot down, and say "shut that damn TV off."
I think better lessons in media literacy would help a lot of situations like this, however there is very strong incentive in our world to prevent a high degree of media literacy from taking root, as it would obviate a lot of methods used for controlling subsets of the population.
I sometimes suspect the pandemic and lockdowns probably killed a lot of social engagement and internet activity too. Yes, it seems counterproductive, since those times were boom periods for many social media platforms...
But then once it ended, it feels like being stuck online with nothing else to do all day burnt a lot of people out on the internet and online activities. Perhaps they decided it was best to make up for lost time once real life 'reopened'. Or perhaps they took one look at the online panopticon, and realised it wasn't adding as much to their lives as they thought.
Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.
Statistically we actually know this is false, the pre-Covid 6pm internet surge window has actually stuck around as the new baseline normal internet traffic post-covid.
> Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.
Important to note that this happens every summer. Especially a pre-us-election summer. People are out there living their lives, having fun, and avoiding the constant barrage of politics online. Things will be back in the fall.
Sauce: My email open rates observed over the past 10 years. Summers always see a lull in online activity
Also you may be experiencing your age cohort growing up. I’m mid 30’s and have noticed a significant decline in online activity as people my age juggle kids and career and increasingly have zero time to spend online. The younger folk without these encumbrances don’t hang out where I’m used to looking.
Whenever I hang out (irl) with younger coworkers it’s obvious that people 10 years younger still spend just as much if not more time online than we did at that age.
I dunno, maybe I didn't look deep enough, but skimming through, it feels like more a symptom of infinite growth. I think we're def. starting to plateau in many things that have had basically no growth for a long time. Anything that's gotten the attention like crypto and AI feel like "let's dump unbridled enthusiasm into this" while waiting for some real epiphany to arrive. The internet was imho the last real step forward in mankind (and a bunch of life saving drugs/vaccinations), though mass cellphone usage certainly helped to democratize it.
I was about to make a snarky comment about 2002, but looking back that really was the early days. A lot of the early stuff (with a few exceptions) basically extinct now.
No, he wouldn't. The whole thing is all blitz and little substance of someone who seems to be over-read and under-thought. It's best described in his own words: a handful of sugar instead of a meal.
The dramatic claim in the title is not well supported by the content.
What seems to be happening is churn. Geocities was supplanted by Myspace, which was crushed by Facebook, which was marginalized by Tiktok... Does this ever settle, or what?
The real breakthrough would be if someone came up with something like Craigslist that won on price. Operate at a low enough cost that just charging for ads in areas where people purposefully look at ads, such as apartment rentals, is enough to keep the the thing going.
Make social so cheap that the big players go bust.
I'm not going to deconstruct the whole thing to appease a stranger, but let's just take the first point of the argument: That it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet.
Setting aside what does "end of the world" actually mean, who's making this statement?
Almost nobody is, since practically every instance is someone referencing somebody else with little commitment. Essentially this is arguing against a person instead of some wide-spread view.
Even if it was wide spread, does it even matter?
It obviously can't be true since end of the world in any reasonable understanding contains end of the internet. So what exactly is this point and argument against it trying to show? I have no idea since believing or not in something dying generally matters little to it being (or not) in such process.
Let's say it is important. What are the arguments that it is incorrect beyond being obviously so?
Well, some unrelated people before you were incorrect about unrelated shape of future so you, but not the author, probably are too. Then he follows this by putting words in mouth of the people he disagrees with, before he swerves into his own experiencing of internet consumption and resulting numbness. I guess based on his expectations of near future there's an expectation of universality of his experience, but even if it was universal (and huge amounts of emotions exhibited online create at least some doubt that it is), why would it contribute to internet's death? It obviously doesn't stop him from scrolling, or writing and otherwise engaging on internet. Again, I have no idea.
So all of it does not really add up to much, but I admit it is entertainingly written which is more than most of us manage.
It also was how N. saw his thoughts at times. An evidence, disgraced for being explained. And stylistic flamboyance around a theme is hardly foreign to philosophers, this one in particular (any chapter of Zarathustra can be read as a blog post in the same way).
I still advocate that style - and being drunk with style - can lead the writer to singularly original and contemporaneous ideas. Language is a dynamic object, filled with the spirit of the age, and very high sensitivity to it within a philosophical context can act as a catalyst.
As someone with sweet-tooth I don't mind the style, but I do think it masks how empty his arguments are and how unsubstantiated. Explanations that aren't really.
I guess our main disagreement is if he has original ideas. I've only read a couple of things he wrote so I'm certainly not in position to have the definitive opinion, but neither of his articles impressed me.
I think you're right on the crux, with a qualification: every argument has already been made in one form or another - the underlying universal concepts are not that complex. the talent of a writer is to present it in a manner congruent with the geography/times. Isn't vacuity when speaking in pure style, but in a style that itself acts as a mirror to the zeitgeist, a valuable tool for thinkers? A frame, a kind of meta-thought?
Sounds about like how I felt during my early thirties as well. But whether it's AOL and MSN, Orkut and Myspace, or Facebook and Tiktok, platforms come and go yet the internet persists.
> It’s already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all our pop music sounds like a tribute act.
This whole article reads as "i expected things to stay the same and they are"
There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways - netflix, apple tv, etc. So they're not in theaters? Miniseries are the new movies. Your streaming box is the new theater.
Bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style? Stop reading best-sellers, and focus on more curated and genre lists, such as Goodreads. Again, you expected the new york times bestseller list to be the arbiter of "good" and that is no longer true.
And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap
Broaden your horizons or slide beneath the static.
>And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap
Sorry, this just isn't true. If you aren't listening to the "top 40 crap", then you aren't listening to pop, you're listening to something that isn't pop at all.
There aren't any tiny pop acts at all. Those aren't pop. The definition of "pop music" is that it's popular, hence the name. If it's some band that barely anyone knows about, they might be great (in your opinion), but they're not popular by any reasonable definition, and thus aren't "pop music".
When people complain that modern pop music is all terrible, it's a perfectly valid position. The music industry is not at all like it was 40 years ago. It doesn't mean that all recent music is bad.
There’s even new top 40 pop music that’s doing well. It’s hard to say that Chappell Roan is particularly derivative of anything, as an example, and before that you had Billie Eilish breaking in, the popularization of niche genres like Jersey club music, etc.
A lot of the pop music kvetching is usually code for “new music that I like and find familiar is hard to find.”
This is the IMDB top 250 list, which I take as a reference for "best of all times" movies. 30 of them are from this decade. Some of them may drop off (there is a slight bias towards recent movies), so let's keep 25 of them, so 1/10, the list is over 100 years, so we are about average.
Not many in the top spots though, the best being Parasite (2019), #33, which I expect to stay high, and Dune: part 2 (2024) at #35, but I expect it to drop a bit as it is a current year movie.
Anyways, it is neither a particularly good nor a particularly bad time for movies.
Provide reliable evidence of your own, then. What objective measures are you using, other than your own personal taste? What quantifiable data can you provide to back up your claim that great films are no longer being made?
And how does your definition of greatness apparently presuppose widespread impact, but somehow presumably exclude any modern films that have demonstrably widespread impact?
>Money--overall monetary takes are down across the board.
If this is the case across the board, it can't be an indicator of decreasing quality. It's more likely that with the internet and streaming, box office revenues simply matter less than they once did. Everyone is competing with streaming and the internet, no one wants to go to a theater anymore.
Same with music. No one cares about Billboard anymore now that everything is on Soundcloud and Spotify, and no matter how niche someone's tastes are, there's probably an entire ecosystem of content for it. I recently found out dungeon synth was a thing.
>Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down.
Where is it documented? Show me the documentation. I doubt that if you combined all movies releasing this year in theaters, and everything on every streaming service, that even half would be sequels.
>Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so.
What's your thesis here? That no modern music is ever played at weddings? That music played at weddings is an objective measure of artistic quality and cultural impact? Why even bother asking this question if you're going to answer on my behalf?
But as far as impact goes, again, it's simply impossible for any music to have the same impact in the internet age as it did pre-internet. That isn't an indicator of quality going down, it's an indicator of the scope of available media becoming so broad and diffuse that no one thing, regardless of quality, can capture the market like it did when pop culture was more centralized.
People who doubt the decline of the arts should reflect on the idea that the best composers of our generation are writing film scores and video game music if not straight up ad jingles. sure you could argue that art has always been commercial, that everyone needed a patron, and that working for the pope or whatever is not that different from working for Hollywood. but I suspect even people that make that argument today don’t really believe it.
Now take this story and extend it to anything you like. The dying publishing industry forcing authors to bring an audience with them minimizes risk for flops but with that goes away any point for the industry to exist, and any incentive for originality, etc.
Nothing was ever perfect but it also seems disingenuous to say that nothing is worse. Some may feel it doesn’t matter which is a different topic, but the decline of art and culture is certainly real
What we've had so far was not "the internet" it was "the internet, gatekept by socioeconomic and educational criteria". The number of internet users appears to be flattening off at around 75% of the world population. So far people have been happy to jump right into that mass of 6 billion people. But I think that this plateauing will allow sub-ecosystems to flourish. HN is one of them.
This person is just, like many others, mistaking the death of public social media and the open web for the death of being online. All the interesting activity has retreated to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Mastodon, Signal, private and niche boards, game chats, etc.
This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably on the endangered list. TikTok is probably the last big social and has an increasingly negative reputation, meaning it'll probably be "out" pretty soon.
The public Internet is probably dying, a victim of spam and over-commoditization.
A big issue with the internet is the commercialization aspect of it. Any time you get an organic community of actual users, that's just chumming the water. That's a good quality population of users for the marketer unlike a lot of others out there. They are going to try all they can to get into that community and use it for advertising, to make some use out of it versus to leave it be on the table. Entropy favors enshittification. The race to the bottom never ends, the bottom just keeps moving as low as it possibly can be.
Individual incentives have also shifted substantially. Having a post go viral or be of some help to someone else used to be enough of an incentive to post on the internet. Now people want to make a job out of it, which shifts the nature of the posts due to different incentives requiring different optimizations. Also people aren't hosting their own websites that they support out of their own pocket that often anymore. People would rather post their content on other people's websites that are ad supported and therefore have incentives that bias what is posted there or gets traction on that platform.
A big part in that was ISPs who often enough deliberately killed self-hosting with dynamic IP allocation and asynchronous upload/download rates, necessitating hosting somewhere else, which came with an extra cost, either in ads or in money.
> Where you go, what you buy; a perfect snapshot of millions of ordinary lives. They were betting that this would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff that rules the world.8
>They were wrong,
The fact that both Google and Facebook are based on precisely this suggests to me that it is not the theory that is wrong but the execution of the other examples. Uber - where you drive - just isn’t all that interesting to advertisers
I’d say the more important perspective is one of walled garden. The companies with tight walled gardens seem to succeed the best at hijacking these personal behavioural exhausts of data aka surveillance capitalism etc
I think a big part of it is also the data are poor and people don't know how to take advantage of their walled garden. For example, uber recently added advertisements into their app. You may not know this, because they are only seen when you are riding in your ride already, but you get an ad for Tim Hortons because the car is within a half mile of one.
On paper this looks good for the marketer. Why yes, we can take our captured population and send them ads to local partners who now get these customers patronizing their business. Seems like it would be a great lucrative deal for both parties, right?
Of course logic says it doesn't work like that. Like I said, no one sits there looking at uber ads the entire ride. No one tells the uber driver "hey wait, I know I was trying to get where I was going but all the sudden I am surprisingly hungry, lets divert a half mile and potentially 20 minutes so I could get a $4 bacon egg and cheese." It just doesn't happen.
But the dance must continue of course. Maybe the uber people responsible for this feature don't even care at all that it works, only that their shareholders think it works and their advertising partners also think it works. That is incentive enough to keep up the farce even with no supporting data because the money, in the end, is very real. After all, everyone on earth knows about coke thats sold in every store on earth, but the ads still need to be purchased because the purchase itself is a more important metric than the end result.
I agree with a lot of this, but think the future of the Internet will be u-shaped:
- People will use it drastically less. I got rid of my smart phone ~2 years ago and it's been a huge life improvement. Still on the computer a lot, but when I leave the room I'm in the real world again.
- When they do use it it will be drastically higher quality. I'm working on building the World Wide Scroll as a successor to the web (https://wws.scroll.pub/), an idea I first had 12 years ago (https://breckyunits.com/spacenet.html), but took a while to figure out all the infra.
There are always stories of people who "quit" normal tech things, buying obscure eink phones and other pretentious minimalist crap, claiming it does this or that to their sleep or attention span. Always devs or at least tech-adjecent people. A lone outlier is what you are. Meanwhile most of the population remains completely (happily?) addicted to scrolling <social app of the year> every free waking moment of every day with no sign of stopping.
Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
> Always devs or at least tech-adjecent people. A lone outlier is what you are.
We were the first to come, and we're the first to leave. We're trendsetters, while most of the society just do what everyone else does. It's just that those things don't happen overnight, it's a process.
> Meanwhile most of the population
have been peasants and slaves in most societies through most of history. The fact that there exist a handful of countries where average Joe doesn't need to worry about biological survival doesn't suddenly remove the truth that most people do and will belong to lower classes and "everyone is equal" is a meme that came to existence very recently so can't be taken seriously.
> Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it.
Most people want cheap entertainment and nothing more. That's how things have always been, whether it's gladiators fighting or cute puppy pictures on Facebook. Modern tech industry is just a reflection of this, and things will stay this way.
Obviously nothing stops you from seeking better ways to pass time, or at least building some healthy habits if you're not ready to give up on slop completely. Just like Newton chose to think about falling apples instead of drinking wine.
My comment might come across as snobbish, but I also recognize the fact that there are lots and lots of people above me, and I will never achieve their level no matter how much work I put into myself.
For 10 years. $10 a year. The important thing is to find people committed to building great sites for the long run. If you're not willing to put in a little bit of money, then it's not for you.
Meh. No, the internet isn't going away. Yes, it's not the countercultural thing it once was. Counterculture is still happening, just not on the first page you go to on the internet any more. No, manufacturing going from 20% to 14% of the economy does not mean the world is ending. And no, the random coincidence of who has a bunch of oil money right now doesn't mean anything. The internet will outlast Islam, culturally if not physically.
The new generation doesn't know how boring a world without a phone in your pocket actually was. They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back.
The world wasn't that boring without a phone in your pocket. That's just a symptom of being addicted to online engagement. People got along just fine for most of human history with the internet to entertain them.
>They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back.
Who's "we"? There's billions of people today who really do believe in religion the way that medieval Europeans did. The middle east is full of them, and there are multiple countries where the religion and government are inextricably joined together (such as Iran and Afghanistan). Sure, a large portion of the people in liberalized Western nations no longer believe that stuff the way medieval Europeans did, but there are many others who still do. The US has many of them too, trying to control government policy according to their beliefs.
I guess it was published in 2022. It hadn't become as ubiquitous yet. I would look forward to a follow up that includes some commentary on AI accelerating these issues
I've been using the Internet since the days of Netscape Navigator and 14.4 kbit/s dial-up modems. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older, but I really miss the old Internet. Ironically, it felt less "anonymous" back then, and it was easier to be part of a community — users knew each other. Now, everyone is here, and the quality of content has significantly declined.
The spirit of the old web is still alive and thriving in places that are now no longer mainstream. It takes some effort to find them but great sites are still out there.
Thanks for this. It's the best thing since webring. I recently switched to Kagi. I didn't know they were patrons of the spirit of the old web too. That makes me even happier to be giving them my money.
As others have noted before, [0][1] the ideals of the 'small web' movement are essentially just a subset of the much older IndieWeb movement, which is more deserving of the credit.
I think this is the answer. Once upon a time we were way fewer people, and many interests were shared among those people (because we pretty much were all "geeks"). We've always had trolls, spammers, etc. but it still felt like we were part of a big community.
Now everybody is here, and that feeling is no more. It's like moving from a small village or town (where everybody knows each other) to a huge city. It doesn't feel like "belonging" anymore.
And nobody makes Monty Python or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy references anymore. I had a boss 15 years ago who had watched all things Star Trek, just like me; Knew all the things. But at one point he mentioned he wasn't really a fan, it was just "required reading, part of the literature". This is an interesting one. There used to be certain things that all nerds knew, and could talk about, use as analogies and metaphors. Something to talk about just like sales people (stereotypically, used to) talk about sports. I realized early in my career that's why some people in business follow sports, so they didn't get cut out of conversations. I always had nothing to say when that topic came up. But it's tricky because geeks and nerds shouldn't be gatekeepers about what the entertainment is, or the literature, because that cuts out a lot of people who should feel included. But at the same time most people think it's generally nice to have some common things to reference, talk about, and normalize on. I think social media, politics, streaming services, etc. have totally blown away these shared frameworks in society, and it's kind of a bummer, even though it's great to have lots of choices. People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day. I guess sports is basically the last thing that's shared. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk...
Monty Python, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Star Trek are becoming old. These are references from the 70s. I'd say anime took over as the stereotypical geek culture thing. Japanese otaku and western geeks got along.
Also fantasy became popular over science fiction, the video game landscape has changed dramatically, and of course, younger geeks grew up with the internet more than with TV. Also, there are series like Stranger Things that are definitely geeky.
It's hard to believe that a 15-year-old book was a defining cultural touchstone. What do we have from 2009 that has the reach of HHGTTG in 1994? Twilight? Hunger Games?
>geeks and nerds shouldn't be gatekeepers about what the entertainment is, or the literature, because that cuts out a lot of people who should feel included.
But the sports fans never felt this way, and were always happy to cut out the geeks and nerds that didn't give two shits about the sportsball game they watched that weekend. Why should the geeks and nerds need to worry about including the sports fans, but not the other way around?
>I think social media, politics, streaming services, etc. have totally blown away these shared frameworks in society, and it's kind of a bummer, even though it's great to have lots of choices. People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day.
When Game of Thrones was the new hot TV show, it seemed like everyone and his dog was watching it, and that included the sports fans and the nerds too.
>I guess sports is basically the last thing that's shared.
Back to my first point. I don't know any sports fans in my circle of friends and work colleagues (who are all techies of course). If any are, they keep it to themselves, thankfully.
> because that cuts out a lot of people who should feel included
Why.
> People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day
That's the societal cost of having personalized experience. Nobody watches the content I watch because I pick content that's specifically relevant to just me. Even my closest friends watch different things.
Go back a couple of years and the BBS scene was that times ten. Imagine if everyone in this thread lived within 20 minutes drive of each other, knew each other's real names, and might even recognize each other if they passed on the street. Anyone else feeling too much CRT today? Want to go throw a frisbee around?
The issue is not so much that everyone is here, but that now the community is large enough to be worth putting a lot of effort into capturing sentiment and advertising. These issues happen no matter the community once it reaches a certain size. Solve that, you've solved the internet, and just about every other social ill we face today.
It isn't novelty, it is dependency. Because we are dependent on a connection we stop using it for novel reasons.
The internet age is over is correct. The age of being connected has started.
More and more people connected to the internet but not actually using it the way we saw it in the 90s and 2000s. Mid-2010s we started to see the paradigm take place.
This article feels like a window into the mind of someone who drank too deeply of being perpetually online, and now feels the pendulum swing the other way.
Like the verbal equivalent of that one time I drank far too much Gin and my stomach finally said "no" all over the bathroom floor (missed the toilet — oops).
I'm glad to never have gone down that particular path. Stuck with my flip phone for ages, etc.
But for people who did, just know that there's room for moderation. There is plenty of space between "all day online" and "the internet is over."
I like this quote from "Mutant Message Down Under":
My suggestion is that you taste the message, savor what is right for you,
and spit out the rest; after all, that is the law of the universe.
You don't have to swallow the internet whole (or let it swallow you).
>for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you. - Nietzsche
Because these apps are designed to be targeted and specific with some of the brightest minds in the world working on them, it's easy to overdose and become addicted.
I'm not sure where the healing process begins, on the larger scale. Parents with their children, I suppose? I grew up without TV; probably that twisted my mind a bit, so I recoil from that stuff somewhat automatically. It's something I wish upon others.
What a bunch of drivel. Do not even know what to say.
"predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate."
To me it fucking wildly accurate. It did revolutonize a lot for me. Yes I know some people would get a heart attack if they could not show to the rest of the world what did they have for breakfast. Not my problem. I only had good from the Internet so far.
The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either.
A few things affect this:
- Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The internet experience is getting gradually worse.
- Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s.
- Artificial intelligence. The situation will only be exacerbated by letting AI loose on the internet. Whatever humans can do online, AI can do much, much better—or worse, depending on your perspective.
The outcome of these things will be that countries will have a more restricted and censored version of the current internet. We'll follow China's example, and have a European internet, US internet, etc.
The internet will survive. It will just be very different.
I don't think it's just an advertising/cancel culture problem. It's partially a problem with the internet being so decentralized that spammers and scammers can operate with impunity, pushing a ton of work onto people running online communities because countries like India and Russia don't properly go after cybercriminals - even if someone SaaSified forums, this is still a significant burden.
It's also kind of a UI problem: if Google search starts to suck and gets filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core pull-model of the web. If Reddit starts to suck and get filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core push-model of the web. Together the two kind of Embraced-Extended-Extinguished the web, but maybe something like an RSS reader, different web client (eg a browser that didn't nudge you into making google queries as the main way to operate it), and more capable search engine would be able to fix these.
I think that was the aspiration, but nobody realized there were so many people who thought 5G caused corona (and similar lack of thought process) until it was too late.
But hey, those people won greatly, who can and want.
Sure, there is way more advertising and bots these days but there is WAY more content available today than 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Definitely way more diversity of content too.
Small and private does not necessarily imply exclusive. There are such communities where you can easily join or lurk.
> or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence
And that still works for me like that. They might not be visible on the first results page but once you start to research a topic in depth you can find them.
There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests?
IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
A prime example of why gatekeeping is necessary and working.
I had a chat with a former politician and he was definitely pleasant, but extremely cynical, he pointed out instances of corruption everywhere. Although to be fair he was probably just being realistic not cynical. Cynicism is a good filter against dumb trends, hustler types and "emperor's clothes" situations.
If you want to find a platform with true signal to noise golden ratio, you either have to find one on the rise, NOT made by a well known name, and place a timer on it, or you have to find one people think is long dead.
This article has a tone of a giant, unacknowledged fear of passing that is using some notion of "the Internet" as a demonstratory puppet. "The Internet" too shall pass[0], and it should be the most obvious and neutral thing in the world; the overdramatizing part of this article does makes no sense.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass
In fact I would say this is the singular reason why Facebook declined. I just don't want my 8th grade classmate to see that I liked my cousin's wedding photos 20 years later, y'know?
Liking a video makes your feed piled up with a semi-relevant crap for a week.
Sometimes (increasingly often) I have to dislike an otherwise good video because I don’t want to screw up my recommendations.
Also “don’t recommend channel” for truly obnoxious ones. I follow through 3-4 of their videos so that they start to appear in the side column and then kill it from there, removing all traces afterwards.
In my experience,
- Don’t recommend channel - strong flag, but doesn’t modify “interests”.
- Not interested - removes this exact video with a very low key tuning of recommendations, if at all.
- Dislike - a slightly pronounced signal for recommendations. But still clueless cause no info on why.
- Like - you’ll drown in content similar to this, but not the same quality. Get ready to shovel it and miss your previous interests completely.
- Comment - similar to like.
The default careless youtube experience without all that stopped working around 5 years ago (at least). Can’t imagine using it as is and not degenerating into something inhuman.
It's interesting to me that somebody would try and curate their experience in this shitshoveling assault on the nerves that is Youtube recommendations.
Can you maybe recommend some extensions please? I’m only using unhook (some of) and sponsorblock, but it would be nice to e.g. dislike videos right from the feed or ban channels from their video or a channel page. Oh, and the one that loads X button in history immediately.
Business cycle wise:
- it starts out mellow, with lots of positive ROI and few downsides. Few know about it at first.
- as awareness grows, so does competition. While there is a ton of room to grow, this isn’t a problem. Growth doesn’t have to be at the cost of a competitors market share, there are tons of available untapped opportunities.
- eventually, it starts to become crowded. Now competition starts to become more heated and cut throat. Old tricks to stay competitive stop working, and there is an arms race to develop new ones.
- at some point, some/many players don’t feel they can compete based on fundamentals (positively), and it starts to become a race to the bottom. With some/many players starting to scam or commit fraud, be scary/manipulative, squeeze suppliers to a destructive degree, etc. Zero sum game instead of green field.
- this causes demand side restrictions and additional costs as customers start to get scared/overwhelmed, and cut back or get more demanding on quality.
- this causes a downward spiral that worsens the situation industry wide, eventually bankrupting marginal suppliers and maybe even big ones, until things stabilize or change.
On the social side, a lot of people population wide are flat out not doing it anymore. Including women. Similar to dating apps.
Which is why some advertisers, politicians, businesses keep getting even more insane and craven trying to extract even more value from the remaining people - to keep the numbers going up and right. So they don’t have to ‘look down’ and be potentially bankrupt. The loudest players in this type of environment are almost always the ones in the worst position.
This is also playing out in American Politics and Media right now.
It isn’t just engineer or blue collar types, who IMO were already predisposed to not engaging with it.
Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
Minuses:
- there are going to be a lot more deeply traumatized people with a profoundly negative outlook on human nature, now and even more in the future.
- society is going to get a whole lot poorer while this plays out.
I disagree. Tech literacy is going down, partially due to an overreliance on dashboard-style mobile apps and phishing scams are still widely effective. I have seen people lose mails and accounts to strategies that have been unchanged for an easily googleable 11 years now. Perhaps the inevitability of exposure is a numbers game, but I'm overall pessimistic, I think a lot of scams will become a lot more "personal sounding" due to AI agents, and a preparedness reset is coming.
Facebook and microblogs use the same infra and can be accessed via the same means (web browser, etc).
At least from anecdotal experience, the really good stuff has been getting easier to find through IRL-ish means, like asking a colleague for the invite link.
I haven't really seen behind the invite veil much, since I'm about as far as it gets from someone cool you'd want in your group chat, but from what I've seen, "good" things are happening and thoughts are thought. It's just happening in private.
There were comments or an article somewhere about someone being sad about "very deep technical discussions being held on discord servers and that knowledge being ultimately lost". I don't think it's that bad of a thing though since that knowledge was never intended for the public and being ultimately lost and forgotten is what the people writing said messages are expecting of it. Certainly, as a person, I care more about myself having less of a digital papertrail than someone in the indefinite future not being able to solve their nieche non-essential problem.
I could elaborate more on the "onlyfans has replaced sex" and the such, which are, IMO, while somewhat true, are conclusions to which the author arrived to from a wrong place, thus continuing to think in that direcion would get them further from the truth, not closer to it.
In the end, just as human brain is a sort of general purpose multimodal input-output machine, the internet can be used for all sorts of purposes. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will fall out of fashion, without getting a solid cultutal foothold. The test of time works as well as ever.
Having to click on multiple links to just make sense of a conversation?
It's the reason I can't even get myself to follow places like NANOG and LKML; because the experience is just so painful. It makes you almost immediately want to disengage from the subject matter.
It's not even a particularly novel idea, right? Chatrooms have been a thing just about since packet switching was a thing, this one is just a polished implementation of that idea. Trouble is, the one metric that matters to Google (inter-linking, engagement, etc) can't happen when the content can't be crawled in the first place. So our pleasant, intellectually simulating content stays hidden where the rest of the internet never notices it.
I am of the opinion that Discord does any niche community a great disservice by first locking content behind an invite link and, once invited, content is locked behind pages and pages of search results if the content is even still available.
I’m sure there is bias on my part because I cut my teeth on forums of the ‘00s to the mid ‘10s, but the siloing and fragmentation of information has ultimately divided up centers of knowledge into smaller and smaller pieces. Those in the know will know and those not will be shut out.
I personally don't socialize on the forums though. My unfiltered thought process doesn't need to be searchable for the next century. It's okay for some communication to be ephemeral.
It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.
Think of it like this...
Radio didn't die, it evolved, into streaming music.
TV didn't die, it evolved to streaming TV>
The printed medium did not die, it evolved into HTML and web pages, a fancier form of type setting.
The telegraph didn't die, it evolved into digital communications.
See, it's not that things die and go away, it is a process of improving how humans interact.
Some may find it difficult, or maybe the isolation is a problem, then there is an evolution.
It will not stop, it will evolve to the next step.
What that is, will be fun to watch.
I hope I am still here to see it.
I wait in anticipation, not negativity.
New media exploration is new, fresh, and chaotic. The kids on Discord channels and those watching streamers and VTubers have this same energy. The old guys looking for mailing lists are sneaking a peek in between looking at their kids, doing their household chores, and finishing work. The vibes are off cause of the audience.
But the article isn't really about that, to the extent it's really about anything except the author's need to feel very, very smart. It's a vague gesture at how "over" it they are, for any value of "it". Best to pat them on the head condescendingly and then move on.
I think better lessons in media literacy would help a lot of situations like this, however there is very strong incentive in our world to prevent a high degree of media literacy from taking root, as it would obviate a lot of methods used for controlling subsets of the population.
Maybe this time it will be different, eh?
But then once it ended, it feels like being stuck online with nothing else to do all day burnt a lot of people out on the internet and online activities. Perhaps they decided it was best to make up for lost time once real life 'reopened'. Or perhaps they took one look at the online panopticon, and realised it wasn't adding as much to their lives as they thought.
Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.
Important to note that this happens every summer. Especially a pre-us-election summer. People are out there living their lives, having fun, and avoiding the constant barrage of politics online. Things will be back in the fall.
Sauce: My email open rates observed over the past 10 years. Summers always see a lull in online activity
Also you may be experiencing your age cohort growing up. I’m mid 30’s and have noticed a significant decline in online activity as people my age juggle kids and career and increasingly have zero time to spend online. The younger folk without these encumbrances don’t hang out where I’m used to looking.
Whenever I hang out (irl) with younger coworkers it’s obvious that people 10 years younger still spend just as much if not more time online than we did at that age.
All the doomerism is gone if you avoid it.
You can take back your life if you just go for it
We're having a party and you're invited
Come to soyjak.party + soyjakwiki.net, we're having a party and you're invited
What seems to be happening is churn. Geocities was supplanted by Myspace, which was crushed by Facebook, which was marginalized by Tiktok... Does this ever settle, or what?
The real breakthrough would be if someone came up with something like Craigslist that won on price. Operate at a low enough cost that just charging for ads in areas where people purposefully look at ads, such as apartment rentals, is enough to keep the the thing going. Make social so cheap that the big players go bust.
<http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-pub/bge/bge4.htm>
(It's ... nothing but a compilation of epigrams. Fediverse Toots, if you will.)
Setting aside what does "end of the world" actually mean, who's making this statement?
Almost nobody is, since practically every instance is someone referencing somebody else with little commitment. Essentially this is arguing against a person instead of some wide-spread view.
Even if it was wide spread, does it even matter?
It obviously can't be true since end of the world in any reasonable understanding contains end of the internet. So what exactly is this point and argument against it trying to show? I have no idea since believing or not in something dying generally matters little to it being (or not) in such process.
Let's say it is important. What are the arguments that it is incorrect beyond being obviously so?
Well, some unrelated people before you were incorrect about unrelated shape of future so you, but not the author, probably are too. Then he follows this by putting words in mouth of the people he disagrees with, before he swerves into his own experiencing of internet consumption and resulting numbness. I guess based on his expectations of near future there's an expectation of universality of his experience, but even if it was universal (and huge amounts of emotions exhibited online create at least some doubt that it is), why would it contribute to internet's death? It obviously doesn't stop him from scrolling, or writing and otherwise engaging on internet. Again, I have no idea.
So all of it does not really add up to much, but I admit it is entertainingly written which is more than most of us manage.
I still advocate that style - and being drunk with style - can lead the writer to singularly original and contemporaneous ideas. Language is a dynamic object, filled with the spirit of the age, and very high sensitivity to it within a philosophical context can act as a catalyst.
I guess our main disagreement is if he has original ideas. I've only read a couple of things he wrote so I'm certainly not in position to have the definitive opinion, but neither of his articles impressed me.
This whole article reads as "i expected things to stay the same and they are"
There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways - netflix, apple tv, etc. So they're not in theaters? Miniseries are the new movies. Your streaming box is the new theater.
Bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style? Stop reading best-sellers, and focus on more curated and genre lists, such as Goodreads. Again, you expected the new york times bestseller list to be the arbiter of "good" and that is no longer true.
And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap
Broaden your horizons or slide beneath the static.
Sorry, this just isn't true. If you aren't listening to the "top 40 crap", then you aren't listening to pop, you're listening to something that isn't pop at all.
There aren't any tiny pop acts at all. Those aren't pop. The definition of "pop music" is that it's popular, hence the name. If it's some band that barely anyone knows about, they might be great (in your opinion), but they're not popular by any reasonable definition, and thus aren't "pop music".
When people complain that modern pop music is all terrible, it's a perfectly valid position. The music industry is not at all like it was 40 years ago. It doesn't mean that all recent music is bad.
A lot of the pop music kvetching is usually code for “new music that I like and find familiar is hard to find.”
Are there? People parrot this over and over but rarely provide any reliable evidence.
Even if there is interesting stuff being done, if it has no impact past three people then it is by definition not "great".
By most measures I can think of, there are NOT lots of "great" things being made.
This is the IMDB top 250 list, which I take as a reference for "best of all times" movies. 30 of them are from this decade. Some of them may drop off (there is a slight bias towards recent movies), so let's keep 25 of them, so 1/10, the list is over 100 years, so we are about average.
Not many in the top spots though, the best being Parasite (2019), #33, which I expect to stay high, and Dune: part 2 (2024) at #35, but I expect it to drop a bit as it is a current year movie.
Anyways, it is neither a particularly good nor a particularly bad time for movies.
And how does your definition of greatness apparently presuppose widespread impact, but somehow presumably exclude any modern films that have demonstrably widespread impact?
Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down.
Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so.
I'm reminded of the punk documentary where the original punks were horrified that the people who came after and idolized them missed the whole point.
If this is the case across the board, it can't be an indicator of decreasing quality. It's more likely that with the internet and streaming, box office revenues simply matter less than they once did. Everyone is competing with streaming and the internet, no one wants to go to a theater anymore.
Same with music. No one cares about Billboard anymore now that everything is on Soundcloud and Spotify, and no matter how niche someone's tastes are, there's probably an entire ecosystem of content for it. I recently found out dungeon synth was a thing.
>Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down.
Where is it documented? Show me the documentation. I doubt that if you combined all movies releasing this year in theaters, and everything on every streaming service, that even half would be sequels.
>Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so.
What's your thesis here? That no modern music is ever played at weddings? That music played at weddings is an objective measure of artistic quality and cultural impact? Why even bother asking this question if you're going to answer on my behalf?
But as far as impact goes, again, it's simply impossible for any music to have the same impact in the internet age as it did pre-internet. That isn't an indicator of quality going down, it's an indicator of the scope of available media becoming so broad and diffuse that no one thing, regardless of quality, can capture the market like it did when pop culture was more centralized.
Now take this story and extend it to anything you like. The dying publishing industry forcing authors to bring an audience with them minimizes risk for flops but with that goes away any point for the industry to exist, and any incentive for originality, etc.
Nothing was ever perfect but it also seems disingenuous to say that nothing is worse. Some may feel it doesn’t matter which is a different topic, but the decline of art and culture is certainly real
However, it feels like you are experiencing a profound poverty of all of those exact things. You elitist little shit.
Children from poor families perform worse on intelligence tests.
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/39/5/820/7008955?login=...
Lack of cognitive abilities correlates with low income.
Your move.
This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably on the endangered list. TikTok is probably the last big social and has an increasingly negative reputation, meaning it'll probably be "out" pretty soon.
The public Internet is probably dying, a victim of spam and over-commoditization.
Individual incentives have also shifted substantially. Having a post go viral or be of some help to someone else used to be enough of an incentive to post on the internet. Now people want to make a job out of it, which shifts the nature of the posts due to different incentives requiring different optimizations. Also people aren't hosting their own websites that they support out of their own pocket that often anymore. People would rather post their content on other people's websites that are ad supported and therefore have incentives that bias what is posted there or gets traction on that platform.
>They were wrong,
The fact that both Google and Facebook are based on precisely this suggests to me that it is not the theory that is wrong but the execution of the other examples. Uber - where you drive - just isn’t all that interesting to advertisers
I’d say the more important perspective is one of walled garden. The companies with tight walled gardens seem to succeed the best at hijacking these personal behavioural exhausts of data aka surveillance capitalism etc
On paper this looks good for the marketer. Why yes, we can take our captured population and send them ads to local partners who now get these customers patronizing their business. Seems like it would be a great lucrative deal for both parties, right?
Of course logic says it doesn't work like that. Like I said, no one sits there looking at uber ads the entire ride. No one tells the uber driver "hey wait, I know I was trying to get where I was going but all the sudden I am surprisingly hungry, lets divert a half mile and potentially 20 minutes so I could get a $4 bacon egg and cheese." It just doesn't happen.
But the dance must continue of course. Maybe the uber people responsible for this feature don't even care at all that it works, only that their shareholders think it works and their advertising partners also think it works. That is incentive enough to keep up the farce even with no supporting data because the money, in the end, is very real. After all, everyone on earth knows about coke thats sold in every store on earth, but the ads still need to be purchased because the purchase itself is a more important metric than the end result.
Oh wait :\
Just train a LLM, your new search engine. Like-minded folks making the enshittified portions transparent.
E-mail spam used to be a thing, until one day it wasn't. AI just generalizes the process.
- People will use it drastically less. I got rid of my smart phone ~2 years ago and it's been a huge life improvement. Still on the computer a lot, but when I leave the room I'm in the real world again.
- When they do use it it will be drastically higher quality. I'm working on building the World Wide Scroll as a successor to the web (https://wws.scroll.pub/), an idea I first had 12 years ago (https://breckyunits.com/spacenet.html), but took a while to figure out all the infra.
Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
We were the first to come, and we're the first to leave. We're trendsetters, while most of the society just do what everyone else does. It's just that those things don't happen overnight, it's a process.
> Meanwhile most of the population
have been peasants and slaves in most societies through most of history. The fact that there exist a handful of countries where average Joe doesn't need to worry about biological survival doesn't suddenly remove the truth that most people do and will belong to lower classes and "everyone is equal" is a meme that came to existence very recently so can't be taken seriously.
> Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it.
Most people want cheap entertainment and nothing more. That's how things have always been, whether it's gladiators fighting or cute puppy pictures on Facebook. Modern tech industry is just a reflection of this, and things will stay this way.
Obviously nothing stops you from seeking better ways to pass time, or at least building some healthy habits if you're not ready to give up on slop completely. Just like Newton chose to think about falling apples instead of drinking wine.
My comment might come across as snobbish, but I also recognize the fact that there are lots and lots of people above me, and I will never achieve their level no matter how much work I put into myself.
I wish I could tell you more than what's on the website there now.
Right now it's a ticket on a voyage into the unknown!
The new generation doesn't know how boring a world without a phone in your pocket actually was. They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back.
Who's "we"? There's billions of people today who really do believe in religion the way that medieval Europeans did. The middle east is full of them, and there are multiple countries where the religion and government are inextricably joined together (such as Iran and Afghanistan). Sure, a large portion of the people in liberalized Western nations no longer believe that stuff the way medieval Europeans did, but there are many others who still do. The US has many of them too, trying to control government policy according to their beliefs.
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/a-users-guide-to-the-zairja-...
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-cacophony
The second one is a bit closer to touching on the same themes, but both are a little more allegorical than TFA.
HN: “well, this was bound to happen anyway without AI, it’s just fearmongering, dont pay any attention to the man behind the curtain” hehe
https://ooh.directory is constantly growing if you want to look for things to read.
https://kagi.com/smallweb Is a fun alternative way to discover new content.
I started a series almost a year ago to help people discover interesting humans and their blogs: https://peopleandblogs.com/
Bearblog has a discovery section: https://bearblog.dev/discover/
The spirit of the old web is still alive and thriving in places that are now no longer mainstream. It takes some effort to find them but great sites are still out there.
* https://search.marginalia.nu/
* https://wiby.me/surprise/
* https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3hn0a7/what_smal...
EDIT: and because this one just brings me joy, that it exists, with such excruciating detail (:
* https://www.trilobites.info/
Thanks for this. It's the best thing since webring. I recently switched to Kagi. I didn't know they were patrons of the spirit of the old web too. That makes me even happier to be giving them my money.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269071
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790502
Forums were the cornerstone of the old internet and more or less completely extinct today.
https://www.leanternet.com/
(Scroll all the way down; HN is mentioned first).
I think this is the answer. Once upon a time we were way fewer people, and many interests were shared among those people (because we pretty much were all "geeks"). We've always had trolls, spammers, etc. but it still felt like we were part of a big community.
Now everybody is here, and that feeling is no more. It's like moving from a small village or town (where everybody knows each other) to a huge city. It doesn't feel like "belonging" anymore.
Things are moving on, we are just getting old.
But today, HHGTTG is very nearly 45 years old.
For how many decades should references to novel fiction persist, do you suppose?
In 2009, we already had pocket supercomputers.
But the sports fans never felt this way, and were always happy to cut out the geeks and nerds that didn't give two shits about the sportsball game they watched that weekend. Why should the geeks and nerds need to worry about including the sports fans, but not the other way around?
>I think social media, politics, streaming services, etc. have totally blown away these shared frameworks in society, and it's kind of a bummer, even though it's great to have lots of choices. People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day.
When Game of Thrones was the new hot TV show, it seemed like everyone and his dog was watching it, and that included the sports fans and the nerds too.
>I guess sports is basically the last thing that's shared.
Back to my first point. I don't know any sports fans in my circle of friends and work colleagues (who are all techies of course). If any are, they keep it to themselves, thankfully.
Why.
> People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day
That's the societal cost of having personalized experience. Nobody watches the content I watch because I pick content that's specifically relevant to just me. Even my closest friends watch different things.
The internet age is over is correct. The age of being connected has started.
More and more people connected to the internet but not actually using it the way we saw it in the 90s and 2000s. Mid-2010s we started to see the paradigm take place.
Like the verbal equivalent of that one time I drank far too much Gin and my stomach finally said "no" all over the bathroom floor (missed the toilet — oops).
I'm glad to never have gone down that particular path. Stuck with my flip phone for ages, etc.
But for people who did, just know that there's room for moderation. There is plenty of space between "all day online" and "the internet is over."
I like this quote from "Mutant Message Down Under":
You don't have to swallow the internet whole (or let it swallow you).Because these apps are designed to be targeted and specific with some of the brightest minds in the world working on them, it's easy to overdose and become addicted.
t. recovering addict
I'm not sure where the healing process begins, on the larger scale. Parents with their children, I suppose? I grew up without TV; probably that twisted my mind a bit, so I recoil from that stuff somewhat automatically. It's something I wish upon others.
"predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate."
To me it fucking wildly accurate. It did revolutonize a lot for me. Yes I know some people would get a heart attack if they could not show to the rest of the world what did they have for breakfast. Not my problem. I only had good from the Internet so far.