This is how I feel completely, having also grown up online all the way from BBSs onwards. I literally don't even have websites to visit any more. I get on my computer, scan hacker news for a bit, check twitter for a few minutes, scan some world news site, and thats it.
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.
I have said it for a while, Hacker news is the last place that still feels like the old internet, but even then I'm not a huge fan of it. Some days I open it up to see just 30 stories about LLM's, something I have little to no interest in.
While sites like Neocities are trying to keep the old web ideals alive, even there it can be difficult to find much of value.
The fediverse still has a sense of community to me, and there are alt-webs like geminispace. All of it is anti-capitalist and anti-AI which should at least delay their eventual consumption by the rot, although holding it back entirely is impossible.
As tired as I am seeing the constant stream of LLM stories (and even worse, vibe-coded projects) on HN i'm getting just as tired of the regular posts complaining about how much the internet sucks as well. HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") but lately it seems like nothing left but vitriol and bitterness. I feel like I need to limit my exposure to this place the way I do other social media platforms because it's just too toxic.
Yes, I’m running out of websites that I value enough to spend my time. I have a large list for weekly and monthly reviews. I walk thru them periodically but the lists are rapidly diminishing in size
I'm simultaneously hearing that the internet is more addicting than cigarettes to the point where multiple states are finding success levying gigantic fines on companies for having too good of a product, and also that the internet is boring and drab. Are we on two different internets? Is the author simply immune from the hypnosis of social media?
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).
> Are we on two different internets? Is the author simply immune from the hypnosis of social media?
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.
I don't think it's necessarily just the algorithmic feeds that are addictive. Even in a social media that was completely straight forward 'friend to friend' networking, you'd still have FOMO, the curiousity about what that latest ding/notification says, and much more. And I think these things are inherently addictive.
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.
While there are still the small sites, they really are lost in the noise. The bigger players would probably prefer it that way, it prevent competition from getting a foot hold.
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.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm a new contributor, long time reader on hn. I also have an old reddit account. I have always thought hn as higher quality than reddit, but lately I'm becoming a victim of my own irritation. I can't help but click and read comments that grate me and I'm finding more an more here.
I don't want to make this into the very thing I'm trying to avoid, so my direct question is, if my interest is in building quality software with AI (in the current form, that is LLMs), where should I go to interact with like minded, friendly people? I've literally avoided reddit like the plague for the last couple of years, but perhaps I should return to certain subs there?
I'd just like to avoid a certain style of comment, remove the noise so to speak, and just trade helpful advice and opinions from people with similar goals. I can't do that here on hn, because it isn't that sort of forum. 99.9% of ask hn posts are going to get no traction.
HN unfortunately is not a forum for anything "deep", most conversations are shallow and temporary "fast". The /./Fark/Digg format brought us that.
Discord "chat" format also doesnt work, it's too immediate for good, deep interaction to happen. Same as Slack. It's been the nature since IRC. (I've seen it even in really high Signal to Noise ratio communities like Rands tech leadership slack community).
Email lists kind of cut it wrt length and temporarily. But historically the browsing/discovery format hasn't been great.
NNTP also has a good format, OK discovery and plenty of good clients. And with AI, I think Spam shouldn't be an issue.
I just wish young people were more attracted to open formats/protocols instead of proprietary services for interaction.
The Internet has been addictive since forever. Algorithmic feeds take the blame recently because simple explanation makes brain feel good, but they are at most a catalyst. We used to hog the phone lines until someone yelled that they needed to talk to someone "IRL", we installed additional phone lines, we endured 64k (32 was before my time) just so we could get one more hit of "you got mail" or post on that forum, or moderate that community, or chat with that person. It's world-wide, "free" and instantaneous communication with anyone and from anywhere. Of course it's addictive!
> more addicting than cigarettes [...] also boring and drab
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.
> I'm simultaneously hearing that the internet is more addicting than cigarettes to the point where multiple states are finding success levying gigantic fines on companies for having too good of a product, and also that the internet is boring and drab
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.
Exactly the example I was going to use. People do not get addicted to things because those things are too enjoyable. Watching people who are addicted to slots is just depressing, they just sit there gloomily depositing every single penny they have - until they have nothing. They just have a compulsion to engage with the slots. Engage, engagement, the exact thing big tech has been trying to optimize for since day 1. It's always just been a euphemism for addiction, and they succeeded.
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.
Agreed. The ‘real internet’ is still out there, in the hinterland. You just need to make your own map to find it. And it’s not going to stick its head above the parapet and Dark Forest itself.
There are two internets: the one on your phone (ruined by outrage and mobile slop) and the one on your computer (ruined by marketing slop). They’re both dangerous and disappointing for different reasons - but mostly because independent voices got drowned out.
> Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge. It triggers our worst instincts in terms of tribalism and groupthink and makes us intellectually lazy.
Brevity is an art form, one that most do not have. Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right. 99.9999% of stuff nowadays is not sculpted it is just simplified for quick reactions.
This is too simplistic. There are simply many many issues and topics that can't be adequately explained in a few minutes. E.g. complicated weather interactions like El nino / la nina, or economic concepts like externalities.
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.
Sorry, my original comment may have some off as defending short form content in the context of social media, that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
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.
While to some degree you are right, I disagree with your assertion that "Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right." When we are talking about distributing information, I agree more with the author that short hand content breeds tribalism and makes people lazy.
I agree, I was talking more broadly. Unfortunately, on social media there is rarely time for people to sculpt well thought out takes. Those that shoot first generally win.
you are correct, there is a difference between a hot take and a laconic statement.
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.
A bottle of cool, hydrating water has been spilt onto dry dirt and soaked in, becoming mud, where the dirt and the water are not able to be separated back into their original forms. The water is the internet and the dirt is the real world. It was inevitable that the real world would absorb the internet into it.
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.
I've been slurping parts of the internet that I think are interesting—the parts I would miss if the internet died.
So many electronics magazines and books (as PDFs) from worldradiohistory.com. Ditto for magazines and such from archive.org. TV series, music videos, concerts, films from YouTube…
I suppose if the internet did go away (or I left it) I'd discover more things that I would miss (drawing a blank right now though). I expect though I would also rediscover a lot of the things that I enjoyed before the internet.
(You see, I'm old enough that the internet was not a part of my life until my mid-to-late 20's. We had fun before the internet, BTW: I made and flew kites, model rockets, did a lot more artwork…)
What I have seen is that the Internet doesn’t attract interesting people anymore and such, the time they spend creating “content” is drastically reduced compared to, let’s say 20-25 years ago. And by “content” I don’t mean tiktok or youtube shorts, but code, blogs, demos or contributing to larger projects. The dynamic is different now, people are working disconnected and from time to time they might release ready projects that previously were seeing their development cycle happening online. Otherwise, there are many projects that don’t make it on the Internet anymore.
I get the point you are trying to make but I will push back on one little part. I think lots of people are putting in more time and effort than ever BUT they have become victims of 'Audience capture'. They are out to do what others want rather than what they want, and that is the death bell of a creative person.
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.
Refusing to show the process is more of a generational culture difference than an indicator of how much effort actually went into the work.
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 with them on that. The internet is basically just infrastructure for email and some media like a podcast, otherwise the only reason I am here is because... well, I'm forced to be on a computer most of the week and not all of it is 'productive'. But after work, weekends, holidays I do not touch it.
Small Web, Gemini (protocol), RSS, and even Usenet. I have to make an effort to find the good stuff these days. But it is out there. Oh, and uBO is mandatory.
There is a point beyond which the probability of finding meaningful content is too low to justify the work required to find it. Beyond this point, limiting yourself means never trying.
Do you mean that they should [stop (absorbing everything)] and therefore absorb only _some_ things, or that they should [(stop absorbing) everything] and therefore absorb nothing?
I think what made the internet in the 90s and early 2000s more enjoyable is that it was way smaller than now and (mostly) free of bots, and trying to find that in social media and mainstream sites is counterproductive, since they are just the opposite.
In comparison, I've found small net places such as Mastodon or smolnets much more enjoyable even though the population is much smaller (which is nice since they also don't generate more information than I have time for). As a rule of thumb: The less interesting a place is for companies, the more pleasant it probably is.
Greed ruins everything.It’s all about greed and cost keep going up & up. Hell you can even binge watch anymore unless it’s something old. I don’t even subscribe to Netflix anymore. It’s all garbage, nothing but garbage.
> I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I think it could happen.
When everyone first started tagging each other's face and location, I immediately hated it. It felt like an incredible violation of privacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would do it. Now, finally, the zeitgeist is starting to catch up, and it's common to hear even "normies" worry about who is snooping on their data.
This process took about 20 years. I suspect LLM etiquette will take roughly the same.
I've been on the "internet" since before there was one, back in 1984-6 when bang paths were email addresses and DNS hadn't been invented yet. I was on one of the earliest BBSs (pre-FIDO) in Melbourne run by Peter Jetson and "Bear's Bull" running on a CDC-6000 at RMIT.
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.
I agree, but if we're being very honest I think the reason is just nostalgia. And I think that you can still find what you're looking for, but it's less in-your-face (as in; it's not a url on altavista.com).
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.
Earlier today I saw that Tik Tok has 2 billion monthly active users and the average user uses it for 100 minutes a day. The app is so addictive that I feel it’s not right to say the user using it every day for 100 minutes at a time is enjoying themselves. To me this doesn’t look like an organic expression of the youth’s desire to explore and create in ways different from precious generations.
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!
That's indeed true, I share your concern, and I think most will call 2 hr/day rookie numbers. But there is also youth out there that do things differently. And (most) laws and understanding of the situation are changing for the better.
But it's life-spent on what otherwise? I agree it's better spend creating and socializing, but will it be, if there was no tiktok? I guess socializing, yes.
Every generation has its own vilified time waster. Can I truthfully say that time spent on TikTok is worse than the 4+ hours a day I spent playing Skyrim in 2011?
I’d bet it is. Playing Skyrim involves a least some thinking from the player. Have you ever succumbed to a scrolling binge? It’s honestly painful. You just sit there for many hours in a row not feeling fulfilled by anything.
A better comparison in my opinion is to television of the 80s-90s. Though I do think longer form content is better for you.
The average viewer only actually watches something like 10 seconds of every video. It’s not like in comics or TV where you actually follow a story, though tv binges did feel to me similar to scrolling short form content. The latter led to binging every time I used it and tv did not, however.
The internet is fine. It's the web that sucks now. It matters, because we can build a different web without throwing out the internet.
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.
Funnily enough this is what both Medium and Substack were trying to do but both have ended up being sucked into the system.
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.
I don't think it's universal. People have been using sound waves to communicate for millena and so far nobody has capitalized on it.
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.
Well, at the base layer I think we need a CRDT of some kind. For my prototype I'm using a GSet of tuples, union for merge.
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.
Last week I finally deleted my LinkedIn account, the last social account I had. This week, I'm close to deleting my YouTube account. There's less content I want to see and more slop than ever. Apple Music is on the chopping block. These days, I only use it to preview vinyl records that catch my eye. Once my iPhone dies, I'm done with smartphones.
I will say this with ditching the smart phone. I have done it but also gone back to it. But it is merely used for specific tasks. SMS, a camera, weather report, the occasional podcast or audio book. And that's about it. Things that are difficult to do on a flip phone but alright on a 'smart' phone.
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.
I paid for a yearly AppBlock subscription. I tried locking up my phone (literally, in a drawer with a lock), uninstalling almost everything, and just plain old willpower, but I'm the type that needs to see money go out in order to motivate myself sometimes. It's been a few months and working well for me. In fact I only pick up my phone to see if I have any whatsapp/line notifications.
Other than that it's just an occasional google maps usage. I never browse anymore. My home PC has reddit/youtube DNS'd to 127.0.0.1. This isn't impermeable but it creates small gaps of boredom where I'm more likely to go for a walk or pick up a kettlebell. Adding up small wins is where the ship starts to turn around
At least with youtube you can turn off your watch history and a whole bunch of other things. Then proactively curate playlists. Cudos for Youtube for making it really easy to opt out of "the algorithm"
Social media is a race to the bottom. Who can make the most addictive platform possible while also preventing others from getting too much of a foot hold.
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.
I think it's time for people to have their own homepages. Building and customizing a homepage is more fun than you'd think.
What's the main reason the internet feels less fun these days? I think it's because there are fewer people actually communicating. But wouldn't it be more fun if we communicated through homepages? Maybe someday there will be a community—a hub for people who have their own homepages—where only those with homepages can participate
As a counter position I enjoy the internet these days maybe more than before. Back in 1999 there was almost no good content. These days there's huge amounts of content from experts in any field you can think of, often in direct video form from top people in the field. There's also more crap - you have to be selective.
Even AI/LLMs I'm kind of fascinated by although I dislike their writing as much as anyone. But the singularity type stuff is a unique moment in history and interesting to watch.
i realized for me the convenience just isn't there anymore. the ads, surveillance, toxicity, misinformation, slop. it's just not worth being online anymore. read a book, meet with people, attend talks, go to a museum...
I am sick to death of the seemingly obligatory oh-but-im-all-in-on-ai disclaimer embedded in what is otherwise a (totally valid) critique of AI. Have the courage of your convictions already.
I think most people see AI as an economic inevitability, immune to what any of us thinks. Why spend the time and energy making a reasoned critique if nobody has a real choice in the end? It's like railing against the concept of money or the existence of the mosquito.
It's not an either-or. Some of us are genuinely excited about what AI can do (or has already done for specific personal projects etc), while also being dismayed about what it's used to do on the internet at large.
That's like saying "I don't enjoy the roads any more" and the solution is the same: go "off the beaten tracks" to find solace. The internet is the thing which binds many networks together, both the commercial drivel-pushing "AI"-generated haunts of sleezebags, propagandists, the-current-thing activists, influencer-ridden shitholes and more as well as the odd interesting thing which piques your interest. 99.999% of street addresses on the road network aren't of interest either but the 0.001% which are make it worth taking to the road to reach them.
Hey, anonymous down-voter, why not tell us where you disagree instead of pressing that annoying get_this_thing_which_I_do_not_agree_with_greyed_off_the_page button? Inquiring minds want to know what triggered you, where you think my reasoning went wrong.
You should try chatting with a large language model—it's incredibly useful! The only thing is, I'm not sure if the answers it gives are actually correct.
This is how I feel completely, having also grown up online all the way from BBSs onwards. I literally don't even have websites to visit any more. I get on my computer, scan hacker news for a bit, check twitter for a few minutes, scan some world news site, and thats it.
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.
I have said it for a while, Hacker news is the last place that still feels like the old internet, but even then I'm not a huge fan of it. Some days I open it up to see just 30 stories about LLM's, something I have little to no interest in.
While sites like Neocities are trying to keep the old web ideals alive, even there it can be difficult to find much of value.
HN sans AI/LLM
https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
The fediverse still has a sense of community to me, and there are alt-webs like geminispace. All of it is anti-capitalist and anti-AI which should at least delay their eventual consumption by the rot, although holding it back entirely is impossible.
As tired as I am seeing the constant stream of LLM stories (and even worse, vibe-coded projects) on HN i'm getting just as tired of the regular posts complaining about how much the internet sucks as well. HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") but lately it seems like nothing left but vitriol and bitterness. I feel like I need to limit my exposure to this place the way I do other social media platforms because it's just too toxic.
Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.
In 90s I had a paper notebook with all websites that existed. After internet grew in size, I had a bookmarks’ file with thousands of them.
I had also a box with audio tapes.
Audio tapes are still functional. Links in bookmarks are 95 pct dead.
Internet is vanity. It was meant to be a communication tool. Now it’s some species of messy yellow pages.
On my grave, I think it won’t be written that I was a really good member of xyz bbforum :)
I would rather be remembered as a valuable member of local discussion club…
It maybe a reason why frequent internet users who remember the past, feel tired.
Appreciation on the internet is mostly fictional (not really real) and we feel it unconsciously…
I just make AI videos nowadays and post on Reddit, rarely even browse HN.
Yes, I’m running out of websites that I value enough to spend my time. I have a large list for weekly and monthly reviews. I walk thru them periodically but the lists are rapidly diminishing in size
I'm simultaneously hearing that the internet is more addicting than cigarettes to the point where multiple states are finding success levying gigantic fines on companies for having too good of a product, and also that the internet is boring and drab. Are we on two different internets? Is the author simply immune from the hypnosis of social media?
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).
> Are we on two different internets? Is the author simply immune from the hypnosis of social media?
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.
I don't think it's necessarily just the algorithmic feeds that are addictive. Even in a social media that was completely straight forward 'friend to friend' networking, you'd still have FOMO, the curiousity about what that latest ding/notification says, and much more. And I think these things are inherently addictive.
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.
While there are still the small sites, they really are lost in the noise. The bigger players would probably prefer it that way, it prevent competition from getting a foot hold.
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.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm a new contributor, long time reader on hn. I also have an old reddit account. I have always thought hn as higher quality than reddit, but lately I'm becoming a victim of my own irritation. I can't help but click and read comments that grate me and I'm finding more an more here.
I don't want to make this into the very thing I'm trying to avoid, so my direct question is, if my interest is in building quality software with AI (in the current form, that is LLMs), where should I go to interact with like minded, friendly people? I've literally avoided reddit like the plague for the last couple of years, but perhaps I should return to certain subs there?
I'd just like to avoid a certain style of comment, remove the noise so to speak, and just trade helpful advice and opinions from people with similar goals. I can't do that here on hn, because it isn't that sort of forum. 99.9% of ask hn posts are going to get no traction.
HN unfortunately is not a forum for anything "deep", most conversations are shallow and temporary "fast". The /./Fark/Digg format brought us that.
Discord "chat" format also doesnt work, it's too immediate for good, deep interaction to happen. Same as Slack. It's been the nature since IRC. (I've seen it even in really high Signal to Noise ratio communities like Rands tech leadership slack community).
Email lists kind of cut it wrt length and temporarily. But historically the browsing/discovery format hasn't been great.
NNTP also has a good format, OK discovery and plenty of good clients. And with AI, I think Spam shouldn't be an issue.
I just wish young people were more attracted to open formats/protocols instead of proprietary services for interaction.
> 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.
> is not the addictive algorithmic feeds.
The Internet has been addictive since forever. Algorithmic feeds take the blame recently because simple explanation makes brain feel good, but they are at most a catalyst. We used to hog the phone lines until someone yelled that they needed to talk to someone "IRL", we installed additional phone lines, we endured 64k (32 was before my time) just so we could get one more hit of "you got mail" or post on that forum, or moderate that community, or chat with that person. It's world-wide, "free" and instantaneous communication with anyone and from anywhere. Of course it's addictive!
> more addicting than cigarettes [...] also boring and drab
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.
Addiction is really boring and makes you really boring. That’s part of why it’s so terrible.
When William Burroughs was on heroin he would spend 6 hours or so a day just staring at his shoe.
> I'm simultaneously hearing that the internet is more addicting than cigarettes to the point where multiple states are finding success levying gigantic fines on companies for having too good of a product, and also that the internet is boring and drab
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.
Cigarettes is a good analogy. It is both addictive but broadly doesn't really help out the individual consuming them.
"Too good of a product" is an odd way to put it when you could apply the same logic to slot machines.
Exactly the example I was going to use. People do not get addicted to things because those things are too enjoyable. Watching people who are addicted to slots is just depressing, they just sit there gloomily depositing every single penny they have - until they have nothing. They just have a compulsion to engage with the slots. Engage, engagement, the exact thing big tech has been trying to optimize for since day 1. It's always just been a euphemism for addiction, and they succeeded.
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.
Agreed. The ‘real internet’ is still out there, in the hinterland. You just need to make your own map to find it. And it’s not going to stick its head above the parapet and Dark Forest itself.
There are two internets: the one on your phone (ruined by outrage and mobile slop) and the one on your computer (ruined by marketing slop). They’re both dangerous and disappointing for different reasons - but mostly because independent voices got drowned out.
A ⊆ X ∧ p ∈ X ⇏ p ∈ A
If you’re not a math major I can translate:
“if A is a subset of X and p is in X, that does not imply that p is in A”
> Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge. It triggers our worst instincts in terms of tribalism and groupthink and makes us intellectually lazy.
I can't agree more with this.
Brevity is an art form, one that most do not have. Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right. 99.9999% of stuff nowadays is not sculpted it is just simplified for quick reactions.
This is too simplistic. There are simply many many issues and topics that can't be adequately explained in a few minutes. E.g. complicated weather interactions like El nino / la nina, or economic concepts like externalities.
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.
Sorry, my original comment may have some off as defending short form content in the context of social media, that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
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.
While to some degree you are right, I disagree with your assertion that "Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right." When we are talking about distributing information, I agree more with the author that short hand content breeds tribalism and makes people lazy.
I agree, I was talking more broadly. Unfortunately, on social media there is rarely time for people to sculpt well thought out takes. Those that shoot first generally win.
you are correct, there is a difference between a hot take and a laconic statement.
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.
A bottle of cool, hydrating water has been spilt onto dry dirt and soaked in, becoming mud, where the dirt and the water are not able to be separated back into their original forms. The water is the internet and the dirt is the real world. It was inevitable that the real world would absorb the internet into it.
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.
Confessions of a Data Hoarder
I've been slurping parts of the internet that I think are interesting—the parts I would miss if the internet died.
So many electronics magazines and books (as PDFs) from worldradiohistory.com. Ditto for magazines and such from archive.org. TV series, music videos, concerts, films from YouTube…
I suppose if the internet did go away (or I left it) I'd discover more things that I would miss (drawing a blank right now though). I expect though I would also rediscover a lot of the things that I enjoyed before the internet.
(You see, I'm old enough that the internet was not a part of my life until my mid-to-late 20's. We had fun before the internet, BTW: I made and flew kites, model rockets, did a lot more artwork…)
What I have seen is that the Internet doesn’t attract interesting people anymore and such, the time they spend creating “content” is drastically reduced compared to, let’s say 20-25 years ago. And by “content” I don’t mean tiktok or youtube shorts, but code, blogs, demos or contributing to larger projects. The dynamic is different now, people are working disconnected and from time to time they might release ready projects that previously were seeing their development cycle happening online. Otherwise, there are many projects that don’t make it on the Internet anymore.
I get the point you are trying to make but I will push back on one little part. I think lots of people are putting in more time and effort than ever BUT they have become victims of 'Audience capture'. They are out to do what others want rather than what they want, and that is the death bell of a creative person.
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.
Refusing to show the process is more of a generational culture difference than an indicator of how much effort actually went into the work.
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 with them on that. The internet is basically just infrastructure for email and some media like a podcast, otherwise the only reason I am here is because... well, I'm forced to be on a computer most of the week and not all of it is 'productive'. But after work, weekends, holidays I do not touch it.
Small Web, Gemini (protocol), RSS, and even Usenet. I have to make an effort to find the good stuff these days. But it is out there. Oh, and uBO is mandatory.
But to TFA's point, yeah, it's screwed.
Stop absorbing everything. Limit yourself.
There is a point beyond which the probability of finding meaningful content is too low to justify the work required to find it. Beyond this point, limiting yourself means never trying.
The juice ain't worth the squeeze.
Do you mean that they should [stop (absorbing everything)] and therefore absorb only _some_ things, or that they should [(stop absorbing) everything] and therefore absorb nothing?
Absorb and consume only some of the things.
Although now that I think of it, stopping absorbing everything, or, _absorbing nothing_, might be a good mindfulness practice.
I think what made the internet in the 90s and early 2000s more enjoyable is that it was way smaller than now and (mostly) free of bots, and trying to find that in social media and mainstream sites is counterproductive, since they are just the opposite.
In comparison, I've found small net places such as Mastodon or smolnets much more enjoyable even though the population is much smaller (which is nice since they also don't generate more information than I have time for). As a rule of thumb: The less interesting a place is for companies, the more pleasant it probably is.
Greed ruins everything.It’s all about greed and cost keep going up & up. Hell you can even binge watch anymore unless it’s something old. I don’t even subscribe to Netflix anymore. It’s all garbage, nothing but garbage.
> I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I think it could happen.
When everyone first started tagging each other's face and location, I immediately hated it. It felt like an incredible violation of privacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would do it. Now, finally, the zeitgeist is starting to catch up, and it's common to hear even "normies" worry about who is snooping on their data.
This process took about 20 years. I suspect LLM etiquette will take roughly the same.
I've been on the "internet" since before there was one, back in 1984-6 when bang paths were email addresses and DNS hadn't been invented yet. I was on one of the earliest BBSs (pre-FIDO) in Melbourne run by Peter Jetson and "Bear's Bull" running on a CDC-6000 at RMIT.
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.
I guess it might be a good example of evolution in action. Evolution benefits those that can adapt the best, not those with the most abilities.
I agree, but if we're being very honest I think the reason is just nostalgia. And I think that you can still find what you're looking for, but it's less in-your-face (as in; it's not a url on altavista.com).
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.
Earlier today I saw that Tik Tok has 2 billion monthly active users and the average user uses it for 100 minutes a day. The app is so addictive that I feel it’s not right to say the user using it every day for 100 minutes at a time is enjoying themselves. To me this doesn’t look like an organic expression of the youth’s desire to explore and create in ways different from precious generations.
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!
That's indeed true, I share your concern, and I think most will call 2 hr/day rookie numbers. But there is also youth out there that do things differently. And (most) laws and understanding of the situation are changing for the better.
Based on that stat, if the average life time is 80 years, Tik tok burns up 4,800 lifetimes a day. (380,000 years) Ouch!
But it's life-spent on what otherwise? I agree it's better spend creating and socializing, but will it be, if there was no tiktok? I guess socializing, yes.
Every generation has its own vilified time waster. Can I truthfully say that time spent on TikTok is worse than the 4+ hours a day I spent playing Skyrim in 2011?
I’d bet it is. Playing Skyrim involves a least some thinking from the player. Have you ever succumbed to a scrolling binge? It’s honestly painful. You just sit there for many hours in a row not feeling fulfilled by anything.
A better comparison in my opinion is to television of the 80s-90s. Though I do think longer form content is better for you.
Or reading comics/watching TV in the 80s?
The average viewer only actually watches something like 10 seconds of every video. It’s not like in comics or TV where you actually follow a story, though tv binges did feel to me similar to scrolling short form content. The latter led to binging every time I used it and tv did not, however.
Pretty sure discord is the PHPbb of today. That seems to be the place where people's congregate and the communities are smaller.
It does have that feeling still but one does get the sense that they are on the path toward aggressive monetization.
The internet is fine. It's the web that sucks now. It matters, because we can build a different web without throwing out the internet.
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.
How?
Funnily enough this is what both Medium and Substack were trying to do but both have ended up being sucked into the system.
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.
I don't think it's universal. People have been using sound waves to communicate for millena and so far nobody has capitalized on it.
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.
Well, at the base layer I think we need a CRDT of some kind. For my prototype I'm using a GSet of tuples, union for merge.
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.
Last week I finally deleted my LinkedIn account, the last social account I had. This week, I'm close to deleting my YouTube account. There's less content I want to see and more slop than ever. Apple Music is on the chopping block. These days, I only use it to preview vinyl records that catch my eye. Once my iPhone dies, I'm done with smartphones.
The internet had so much potential. Shame.
I will say this with ditching the smart phone. I have done it but also gone back to it. But it is merely used for specific tasks. SMS, a camera, weather report, the occasional podcast or audio book. And that's about it. Things that are difficult to do on a flip phone but alright on a 'smart' phone.
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.
I paid for a yearly AppBlock subscription. I tried locking up my phone (literally, in a drawer with a lock), uninstalling almost everything, and just plain old willpower, but I'm the type that needs to see money go out in order to motivate myself sometimes. It's been a few months and working well for me. In fact I only pick up my phone to see if I have any whatsapp/line notifications.
Other than that it's just an occasional google maps usage. I never browse anymore. My home PC has reddit/youtube DNS'd to 127.0.0.1. This isn't impermeable but it creates small gaps of boredom where I'm more likely to go for a walk or pick up a kettlebell. Adding up small wins is where the ship starts to turn around
I really liked my Windows Phone, mostly because it didnt have apps on it.
Although it did have facebook, it was facebook delivered by Microsoft engineers and was missing a lot of features.
I absolutely loved Windows Phone. It hit all the right notes on usability even if it didn't have the best app support.
Still bitter about that over a decade later.
At least with youtube you can turn off your watch history and a whole bunch of other things. Then proactively curate playlists. Cudos for Youtube for making it really easy to opt out of "the algorithm"
What's the rationale behind ditching musicapp? It just delivers files to you with some UI fluff on top.
That is a fair take. Personally, I use my android basically an iPod. Only offline files via VLC.
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 always appreciate a good Disco Elysium reference.
This happened when AOL came online and destroyed early BBS and Usenet culture too.
The problem isn't the internet but rather the sites that people use on it, and the monolithic nature of "social media".
Social media will be viewed as a failed experiment in the future.
Social media is a race to the bottom. Who can make the most addictive platform possible while also preventing others from getting too much of a foot hold.
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.
I think it's time for people to have their own homepages. Building and customizing a homepage is more fun than you'd think. What's the main reason the internet feels less fun these days? I think it's because there are fewer people actually communicating. But wouldn't it be more fun if we communicated through homepages? Maybe someday there will be a community—a hub for people who have their own homepages—where only those with homepages can participate
As a counter position I enjoy the internet these days maybe more than before. Back in 1999 there was almost no good content. These days there's huge amounts of content from experts in any field you can think of, often in direct video form from top people in the field. There's also more crap - you have to be selective.
Even AI/LLMs I'm kind of fascinated by although I dislike their writing as much as anyone. But the singularity type stuff is a unique moment in history and interesting to watch.
i realized for me the convenience just isn't there anymore. the ads, surveillance, toxicity, misinformation, slop. it's just not worth being online anymore. read a book, meet with people, attend talks, go to a museum...
I am sick to death of the seemingly obligatory oh-but-im-all-in-on-ai disclaimer embedded in what is otherwise a (totally valid) critique of AI. Have the courage of your convictions already.
I think most people see AI as an economic inevitability, immune to what any of us thinks. Why spend the time and energy making a reasoned critique if nobody has a real choice in the end? It's like railing against the concept of money or the existence of the mosquito.
It's not an either-or. Some of us are genuinely excited about what AI can do (or has already done for specific personal projects etc), while also being dismayed about what it's used to do on the internet at large.
The irony, or perhaps cognitive dissonance, inherent in this position is staggering to me.
The lengths a human being goes to remain part of the in-group is mindboggling.
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.
That's like saying "I don't enjoy the roads any more" and the solution is the same: go "off the beaten tracks" to find solace. The internet is the thing which binds many networks together, both the commercial drivel-pushing "AI"-generated haunts of sleezebags, propagandists, the-current-thing activists, influencer-ridden shitholes and more as well as the odd interesting thing which piques your interest. 99.999% of street addresses on the road network aren't of interest either but the 0.001% which are make it worth taking to the road to reach them.
Hey, anonymous down-voter, why not tell us where you disagree instead of pressing that annoying get_this_thing_which_I_do_not_agree_with_greyed_off_the_page button? Inquiring minds want to know what triggered you, where you think my reasoning went wrong.
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You should try chatting with a large language model—it's incredibly useful! The only thing is, I'm not sure if the answers it gives are actually correct.