> And the internet used to be more work to experience. Today, it’s more work to avoid.
Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps.
There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful of destinations.
I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow.
I recently googled something like "modal fabric weave diagram".
On my phone I was given five places to buy modal clothing and a message that "x other similar results have been omitted".
I persisted, I rephrased. I was asked if I was a robot, I clicked on CAPTCHAs, and now Google is willing to give me some results that are relevant to textile design but I still haven't been able to find out what weave patterns are common in modern modal fabrics.
On my work computer Google knows I'm an engineer so it gives me papers on visco-elastic properties of the fabric but it's not actually processing my query well and giving me weaves, it's just saying "I guess you're fancy and technical, huh?"
In 1997 there would have been a text/image website with forty diagrams of various weave patterns and it would have come up in the top twenty results.
I would like a little more 1997 in my internet, please.
In 1997 there wouldn't have been 50,000 spam responses in the query.
In 1997 there would have been some place that made it, or someone interested in it that would have made the site for their own interests in spreading the information.
Today there are countless entities looking to scrape a penny from your view in any way possible, and will create an ocean of spam in order to capture that revenue.
At least with search engines we cannot go back. That internet is dead. Any new system you create to bring back the old internet will attract the previous group because your system would be valuable, and like parasites, they will steal value from your system.
> In 1997 there wouldn't have been 50,000 spam responses in the query.
If what the GP wants exists, and none of the given options are any bit similar to it, why do you think the amount of spam is relevant?
If Google couldn't find a real thing between a mountain of invented low quality content, you would have a point. But Google keeps pushing unrelated results instead.
Define "real thing". Again in the past it's really easy, people didn't put much "fake" content up. Now there is mountain of documents that have 'content' that matches your request... How much energy are you going to put in to determine if its low or high quality content? I did the search that OP did and I got tangentially related documents, but not the exact think that OP was likely looking for. And this defines the problem, there is far more noise than signal, and the ancient internet did not look like that at all.
I click on it and search for the keywords I gave and they aren't in the result.
Put the search in quotes. Nope.
Add +, -, whatever. Uh-uh.
Inspect the source. Search for the keyword in hidden keyword tags. Nada. The result is not fake, it's just not a result for my search.
Google is no longer a search engine. It is only a suggestion engine. It is the Mega-Clippy. "You look like you might want to buy Modal underwear!"
This works for the majority of searches but it's useless for research into any novel corridor. And now Bing using ChatGPT to get closer, for sure, but only until they figure out how to inject advertising into it better.
We really needed the first big search engine to stay focused on search instead of suggestion and they chose not to. That's where we are.
It would be a lot better if you could just search an index of all the words on the web, and then we can refine our queries against the results to narrow things down even more. As it is right now, search just doesn't work anymore.
These days, the internet is more a city from a cyberpunk movie where everything is covered with ads, everywhere. So much that some of use filtering glasses to hide ads from us. Tracking devices are everywhere and your every move is recorded and stored in a database of a company that produces very realistic sounding androids.
Oh yeah, and anyone with enough holodeck processing power can make an artificial video of you saying and doing anything they want.
I like technology and modern cities in the abstract. They provide people with easy access to certain things that were historically scarce. Some of those things are life saving, like cutting edge medicine.
But I can't live in a city. I hate the noise, the crowds, the people, the crime, the pollution and the vast majority of the time I'm not in any sort of immediate need for what they provide. Fine for the odd Saturday adventure one or twice a year. Any more than that and no thanks. I always come away feeling stressed out, anxious, tired and worse off for the experience.
Ironically, online shopping and remote work is what has made living in a city unnecessary.
I like that, and you're right. I find that discussions in the comment of HN articles almost always tell me something I don't know. Sometimes it feels like secret knowledge :)
Except that it's not. YouTube is a giant hole of suck that brings everybody else down to their level.
YouTube being subsidized has driven any competitor out of the space. Since YouTube has a monopoly, your content will get copied and posted over there even if you don't give permission. Since YouTube is backed by Google, they are larger than lawsuits which could bring them to heel.
If you wanted YouTube to improve, split it out from Google again.
I don't disagree that YouTube would be better off away from Google, nor that it's a monopoly, but in terms of content it is magnificent.
Vintage films, tutorials for the most niche practices, 4K videos of exotic locations, a better music selection than Spotify: all at your fingertips on one site.
YouTube is the modern-day video library of Alexandria. Yes, there are many negatives to it running the way it is, but it's undeniable that such a powerful gathering of information resources is available only on their platform.
Maybe splitting YT is a good idea, but even with all the junk YT still is a jewel. There are incredible things in there - art, lectures, philosophy, so much value packed inside.
I'm also fond of the internet-as-public-square paradigm. All news worthy events are posted in it. There's sections of the square dedicated to classifieds and vendors. There's a spot with chess sets.
Yes, there's also some people on soap boxes yelling into the crowd. I can usually ignore them just fine.
It went from an Internet of amateurs (those with an actual love for what they are talking about) to professionals (which are very slick, but the money is always there).
You can still find great content in videos and music from amateurs, but the professionals "outshout" most of them; and the best amateurs end up getting sucked into being professionals. Once your livelihood is on the line, things change.
Here's a simple example. In the mid 90s, if you found a website with recipes, it would have been by a cook with some technical ability and it would have been dedicated to recipes.
Such sites may still exist, but heaven help trying to find them amongst all the "professional" recipe SEO spam that exists today.
Not bombcar, but I take it to mean that professionals have more resources they can pour into publicizing their stuff. It's not so much taking away amateurs' space as overwhelming amateurs' voices, thereby diminishing their power.
I just don't understand it. Publishing space online is infinite and will continue to be infinite no matter how popular somebody else gets. Who gets overwhelmed by somebody else publishing something?
Those with more resources have...more resources. More money they can put into spreading their word wider. They often know people in media who can increase the number of voices that are talking, the ears that are hearing. I can say anything I want online, as many times as I want. I still won't have the reach of someone who is boosted by national news, the New York Times, a Facebook group with thousands of member, a friendly YouTube or TikTok influencer.
The users have a certain responsibility for finding what they are interested in themselves. If you rely only on Google in this year, you will miss out. Everything can not be on the front page at the same time. It's the same if you go to a store IRL, with the exception that you of course are free to start your browsing anywhere else than on Google - like most people do today with social media.
I describe it as, the internet of books and text became the internet of videos and music.
Except that the internet never was books, and was only text due to technological limitations.
When we started networking all the computers together, we (myself included) had this vision of an information utopia where everyone would be able to access all of the information previously locked up in books, magazines, and newspapers.
But that never really happened. Instead, people started making new content — the faster, cheaper, and lower quality, the better.
The old content remained locked up in libraries. Some of it managed to move behind paywalls, but the vast majority of the information — and lessons — learned in the last 500 years has been forgotten because it's not free and easy to access.
We had this naïve vision that with everyone online, people would rally around the best of what humanity had to offer, and we'd all be exposed to the planet's best art, literature, music, and knowledge. Instead, we got mostly the exact opposite of what we set out to build.
>the vast majority of the information — and lessons — learned in the last 500 years has been forgotten because it's not free and easy to access.
I guess I don't really agree with that. Yes, a lot of very detailed information (and primary sources) about things is in research libraries, at least some of which are not open to the general public. But that doesn't mean all that information is lost. A lot of historical information is accessible to the (admittedly relatively small percentage of) people willing to put the effort into digging it up.
> had this vision of an information utopia where everyone
When it comes to new technology and the impact it will have people are almost always wrong. The printing press not only made better books, it created oceans of shitty ones.
But we've had Sturgeon's Revelation[0] since 1957, and the idea has existed much longer. Why would one expect anything different just because it's "on the internet?"
Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps.
There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful of destinations.
I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow.
Outside that though I do prefer roads less taken.