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.
> 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.
Or another point of view: Those who call for internet censorship and country-level firewalls are NOT looking for the world to get better and instead are just afraid of losing their control over the population. Which is why you first see those measures being employed in openly totalitarian systems before now being slowly adoped in supposedly free societies whose rulers like to claim to represent the population they rule over.
> The internet will survive. It will just be very different.
The internet will continue to exist, certainly. However, it does become a more hostile and unpleasant place over time. Because of that, it's much less useful to me than it used to be and that trend doesn't appear to be changing.
More hostile as in... you open some random webpage, you get 3 popup windows with porn ads playing at full volume? And when you close them, infinitely more open, like a hydra, until it locks up and you have to reboot.
Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
This was my internet experience in 1999. I think the derangement has been a constant over time.
It's true that the internet was already well down that road in 1999, but it has become much worse since then. I'm really comparing it to internet earlier than that. It was about 2000 when I started considering the internet as effectively dead in terms of being able to provide the value I used to get from it.
But "more hostile" includes not only advertising and tone, but spying, overtly hostile actors such as crackers and other criminals and so forth.
> Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you
I don't count this as part of the general degradation of the internet, though. That's more about the online gaming community. Things were that way before the internet was the most common method of online gaming.
Wait do folks not remember the "I get to tell my wife 'sudo make me a sandwich'" jokes on Freenode into the early 2000s? "Pool is closed due to AIDS" from Habbo Hotel?
I think this "genteel internet" that came pre-Web was much shorter lived than the periods after it. It reminds me of crypto where the initial halcyon period of Bitcoin seemed full of hope but once the technology had to scale it just couldn't keep its initial values due to both technological and social issues.
Interesting. My frame of reference for the internet started in 1998, after "eternal september" and the earlier culture. Which makes me curious about baseline expectations.
I agree many aspects are growing... overtly bad. I think LLMs are well on their way to rendering the mainstream internet, search, and social media effectively worthless. The signal to noise ratio is unfixable.
I still get value from my habits, which haven't changed for decades: niche forums, personal websites, blogs, podcasts, youtube. I would be satisfied as long as those remained more or less intact, the rest can go. Requires a lot of curation though.
> Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
I do have a strange nostalgia about those days. It was a culture that didn't exist in meatspace, and there was something fun about that.
However, when covid hit and my wife and I started playing games, I quickly learned my wife severely disapproves of typing "kys" to others in games, and now I try to only say positive things. It is a better experience, but then again I'm now a parent and hoping to spare my children from interacting with college me.
It's what the Internet is for -- a place where things don't matter and where you could go to blow off steam. The Dionysian night to real life's Apollonian day.
Needing to be polite in every aspect of our lives because of this stupid demand to collapse down to the lowest common denominator of humor or mental fortitude is ruining the Internet and making the world and media less fun. It's also Orwellian. There's people who want to dox you and make sure you get fired or never get hired for being mean in a CoD lobby. That's psychotic. Those people are mentally ill, and we've let them run the show and tell us what to do. And of course, it's symbiotic with corporations and advertisers who want things as anodyne and rated E as possible since that makes the most $$$ (if only we can collectively accept more mediocre art and experiences as we forget what better ones we had).
I'm glad the pendulum seems to be swinging back as people are figuring out that having had less for fun for the last 10 years accomplished absolutely nothing worth caring about.
Yeah, I think the internet is going to get back to it's roots: a place to publish documents and send emails. Those documents might be videos, but ultimately it looks to me like all the social this and that have been a big, decades long slow motion flop. It's a great replacement for telephones and TV and libraries, everything else that's come out of it seems to be, from inception, perpetually propped up by investors hoping it works out eventually. I think the time is coming now where people are beginning to see that the vision is not materializing.
Ignoring the problems of global interconnectedness doesn't make them go away. Information can be weaponized and used against you in ways that are difficult to detect and prevent. We know that propaganda, like advertising, is highly effective, and the internet is the best medium we've invented yet for broadcasting it. At what point do you prioritize issues of national security that threaten your society and way of life, over your perceived freedom to consume funny memes and dancing videos? It's increasingly clear that an unrestricted internet carries existential risks, but most people also wouldn't want to live under totalitarianism either. So there's a delicate line that "democratic" governments need to walk to ensure their subsistence, and it's on us to voice how far we're willing to sacrifice some of the "freedoms" we're used to.
Needless to say, it's going to be a bumpy ride until we figure this out.
Sorry, National Security as an excuse is still utterly broken from its abuse in the early 2000s. We aren't buying this "bomb the village in order to save it" bullshit doublethink.
It's not an excuse. It would be ignorant to not acknowledge the existence of information warfare, and its very real effects. The irony is that the tools the US built and gave away for the world to use are being used against it, and will likely cause its downfall. Do you think the current sociopolitical climate is unrelated? The Cambridge Analytica leak confirmed that small independent agencies can effectively disrupt democratic processes and topple governments. What do you think state actors can do?
FWIW, I don't have a dog in this fight, and I'm speaking as a neutral observer. I don't like the idea of giving more control to governments either. But it's clear that something has to be done to defend countries from this type of attack. Traditional military might can't defend you from an invisible enemy.
I think what we will also see - are pocket universes. As in- to circumvent censorship, people will download and run an ai, that mimicrys the free internet for them.
The Internet (and especially the Web) is not so much the content, but how it is linked. Without a doubt the way we link (quality) content and hide the drivel should|will|MUST evolve. And that evolution may produce something unrecognizable from the Internet of today.
Honestly I welcome the 'death' of the internet with open arms. Irrespective of the enshittification flavor of the day, the end result is the same - face to face human relationships will be back in vogue again, and the internet will go back to a complimentary role at best.
I would also like people to let go of the idea that the internet is Serious Business. People who live their lives on Twitter, discussing political matters of grave importance, people getting 'canceled' over inane shit is just ridiculous.
It should go back to trash talk and funny memes, and cat pictures and sharing baking recipes.
The "Internet" didn't kill direct human interactions, the engagement economy did. This economy will continue to exist and continue to outcompete direct contacts as long as it remains profitable, with or without the Internet.
It's not profitable though. Or, at least, not sustainable, it's short term profitable during the rise of it. How is it actually profitable to distract people from doing productive things in order to get them to waste all their time? Ultimately the music stops.
> 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.
This only applies in media that allows censorship, and controls visibility. If it doesn't, the bigots are easy to identify and weed themselves out. If it foes, the bigots can form bubbles, and foster tribalism.
Fully open and uncensored platforms do not force bigots into bubbles, but they do not prevent them from creating them willingly. If it serves the bigots' interests to form bubbles in order to foster tribalism, then they will.
Basically, if there exists a strategy for an ideology to spread under censorship, it is hard to believe that removing restrictions would make it any less effective. Bigots won't out themselves and discredit themselves on an open platform just because they can, they are not idiots.
This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of bigotry, you will probably end up being a bigot eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the bigotry with humor. Bigotry is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist.
> This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of wokism, you will probably end up being woke eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the wokism with humor. Wokism is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist.
Funny how well a simple word replacement can work.
> This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of NASCAR, you will probably end up being A NASCAR FAN eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the NASCAR with humor. NASCAR is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist.
> This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of FITNESS, you will probably end up being FIT eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the FITNESS with humor. FITNESS is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist.
> This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of CRYPTO, you will probably end up being A CRYPTO-BRO eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the CRYPTO with humor. CRYPTO is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist.
Assuming you’re serious and not just trolling - what even is wokism, aside from a name thrown at people you disagree with? Bigotry is a known, studied phenomenon. Are you saying there is not a natural tendency to prefer one’s own kind and mistrust foreigners? Are you saying that groupthink respects no particular ideology?
Wokism is a rejection of common sense, exchanged with an embrace of exotic rationalization flowers bred in the left-leaning echo chamber hothouses of academia and Tumblr.
You can reduce anything to "a name thrown at people you disagree with", and anything can be "a known, studied phenomenon". Especially if researchers can safely study it when academia is captured by an ideology that's hostile to certain viewpoints. ;D
Weird, I can't seem to find that definition anywhere. The general council of Governor DeSantis defined it in court as the following:
> the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them
I have a feeling you're describing a personally held belief rather than a societally accepted definition, which would explain why yours seems to single out specific groups and views you (assumedly) disagree with.
I think urban dictionary did a pretty good job on this one:
“Woke
When this term became popularized, initially the meaning of this term was when an individual become more aware of the social injustice. Or basically, any current affairs related like biased, discrimination, or double-standards.
However, as time passed by, people started using this term recklessly, assigning this term to themselves or someone they know to boost their confidence and reassure them that they have the moral high grounds and are fighting for the better world. And sometimes even using it as a way to protect themselves from other people's opinion, by considering the 'outsider' as non-woke. While people that are in line with their belief as woke. Meaning that those 'outsiders' have been brainwash by the society and couldn't see the truth. Thus, filtering everything that the 'outsider' gives regardless whether it is rationale or not.
And as of now, the original meaning is slowly fading and instead, is used more often to term someone as hypocritical and think they are the 'enlightened' despite the fact that they are extremely close-minded and are unable to accept other people's criticism or different perspective. Especially considering the existence of echo chamber(media) that helped them to find other like-minded individuals, thus, further solidifying their 'progressive' opinion.”
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.
> 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.
The many forums that existed fulfilled both of those. Open to read for anyone, really big in aggregate and mostly small and private communities of participants.
> 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.
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.
Oh people have known for a long time that the average person has crazy ideas. There's a reason the US election system isn't by popular vote, our founders believed that "the mob" couldn't be trusted and there needed to be a electoral escape hatch to make sure reasonable people were elected.
With that said, what's the problem with people having ideas that seem crazy and baseless? Does it really harm you at all if someone else believes 5G causes covid? And does it harm you enough to say that their speech should be limited rather than free?
Yeah for sure. Revolutions are messy and its easy to lose sight of that when you're on the winning side. I'm personally very glad to not live under a imperial monarchy, but I do wish the founders could have kept their concerns over voters out of the way.
There are historical examples of why trusting the mob goes poorly, but keeping that on the table fundamentally ruins the point of a democratic society. Its all well and good to say we need an educated populace, but the system should offer the public a chance to live up to the ideal rather than guard against their failure.
I don’t think the founding fathers much less the ancient greek democrats anticipated the level of idiocy in the public discourse we are dealing with today. A huge swath of the country has been manipulated by propaganda to the point of not believing in reality at all. It’s a dangerous position we find ourselves in today.
I think the founding fathers actually had a more educates populace than we do today. For all the modern education and fields of study we have today, is the level of idiocy an anomaly or is it a symptom of of modern education?
I would also say the propaganda environment the founding fathers found themselves in was very nascent. It certainly wasn’t so married with findings from neuroscience or psychology supported by data like it is today. The media market was also generally more competitive. When you are down to one regional paper and thats that, there is little incentive for quality journalism and informing people factually.
> Does it really harm you at all if someone else believes 5G causes covid? And does it harm you enough to say that their speech should be limited rather than free?
I would far rather restrict their right to vote than their right to speak. If they're sufficiently influential, that also means that everyone's vote who doesn't fall for their charm is worth just that much more.
Oh that's an interesting take, I wasn't expecting that one. I don't think I've seen anyone argue for restricting voter rights over speech before.
I'm very opposed to limiting either, the US is already more restrictive with regards to both voting rights and speech than I'm comfortable with. I'd be very worried about gating voter rights to some kind of checklist of thought, removing Coting access from those deemed to be unworthy of casting a vote based on what they think or say.
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.
literally nobody thought this, perhaps except a handful of oddballs. If you want to make your case for describing the state of the internet, please avoid nonsense exaggerations like this.
A coworker of mine tried to convince me of this during the pandemic. I guess she realized I was a bit more antic establishment than normal and thought I'd like that hypothesis.
It was a small minority, but there were (and are) absolutely people who believed this. They also usually explain it poorly, I think their idea really is that 5G radio signals caused disease but it gets morphed into a claim that 5G somehow created the virus that caused the disease.
Well it seems relevant because the comment I replied to was minimizing the number of people who thought 5G may have caused covid to a miniscule number of people. I raised my experience because I only know a small number of people and did in fact know someone in real life who believed this and sent me plenty of links and whitepapers making the same claims.
Is my anecdotal experience statistically significant? Absolutely not. But I also hesitate to believe that the number of people who bought into the idea was so small as to effectively not exist.
Crazy uncles were unable to find other crazy uncles and coagulate into the fatbergs of information flow before the internet. Now the algorithms push them together.
But again, who cares if someone else or a group of people think something you find to be crazy? If they act on it that's totally different, but we have laws for that already.
I get that crazy ideas can spread, but what is the actual concern? Are you worried about people believing the ideas, or people acting on them? If the latter, are you worried about them acting in ways that aren't already illegal?
Some of them with wild ideas do things like try to storm the capitol on thought processes riddled with ridiculous ideas. I'm not an American, but watching that is scary. The same problem exists in other places and people believe absolutely wild things unquestioningly and act on them on a daily basis, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes very harmfully.
I am an American though was actually living in Europe when the capital was stormed. I was scared watching that in the middle of the night, and also confused as to how anyone pushing through barriers and doors were going through without being shot.
At least in the US though, speech is protected specifically from government censorship. Facebook can censor whatever they want, but the government can't take part in it at all. Historically, American culture has stood strongly behind free speech and we're very uncomfortable with the idea of punishing a person for what they say. Once you act on an idea that's a different story, but we have laws that already cover that.
> I was scared watching that in the middle of the night,
It sounds to me like you should lower your caffeine intake. Nobody sober-minded watching that on TV should have felt scared; it was obviously a mob of clowns goofing around, not an insurrectionist army.
> and also confused as to how anyone pushing through barriers and doors were going through without being shot.
Because it was obvious to everyone that it was just a mob of clowns goofing around, not an insurrectionist army. The tiny minority that got violent and probed too far got violently dealt with though.
> Historically, American culture has stood strongly behind free speech and we're very uncomfortable with the idea of punishing a person for what they say.
One funny thing to tie this with is that Congress is literally "the People's House". It would be a very American interpretation of things to say that anyone should have the right to protest at/in the Capitol. Those Congress critters shouldn't have run away and hid as if they're dictators holing up in the bunker when the peasant have surrounded the royal palace; they should have met the non-violent rioters and talked with them. Their job is to represent those people that are angry out there!
And, optically, that would have been a win-win for all of us: either they bravely diffuse the situation and get respect OR they get assaulted, in which case the "OMG INSURRECTIONIST" rhetoric would prove to be actually warranted.
Oh, also, another deeply American valence is revolution. Take for that what you will. ;D
We have a very different understanding of the potential fallout from a takeover of the US Congress. Its easy to write them off as clowns now, but in the moment how is they known? Those people didn't go through security checks and it wasn't known what they may have been carrying with them.
What would have happened if they got into Congressional chambers? Or got their hands on congressmen? PR the VP? We simply don't know.
It wasn't caffeine that scared me. It was the potential for a civil war. That seems outlandish now that we know was Jan 7th looked like. But honestly, can you say it wouldn't have happened should they have reached Pence or Pelosi?
I don't like either of those politicians, or government in general. But its a for agile house of cards, and a mob of people forcing their way into the capital building while all of Congress is in session is a terrible sign. I don't know how you write that off as a clown show, and I don't know what tipped you off to that being a clown show rather than something potentially more serious. Maybe I just missed it.
Anti-vaxxers putting the greater population at risk.
Storming pizza parlors.
Protesting election results in violent and extreme ways.
Coalesced crazy is dangerous, full stop. Stupid ideas being dragged out into the sunlight used to work but these folk are being fed nothing but crazy by the algorithms of social media, so it stopped working.
Those dangers already have legal solutions without regulating speech though. Talking about some conspiracy theories isn't, and shouldn't be, a crime. Acting on them, say by trespassing or commuting acts of violence are already illegal. Depending on what authorities can prove, conspiracy to commit certain acts is already a crime.
Regulating social media isn't a solution, and definitely not the solution. For one thing, if the state officially took a role in regulating speech on social media they would be bound by constitutional powers.
You could actually see censorship on social media sites decrease when they are required to respect individuals' rights to free speech and protection from government censorship. Why do you think they currently do it quietly and behind closed doors? As long as the government isn't openly censoring us on social media the censorship isn't unconstitutional. As soon as its government regulated we will see supreme court rulings likely deciding that the government censoring speech online is unconstitutional and a violation of the first amendment.
One recent example is QAnon and its popularity throughout the Republican party, all the way up to the former president. Once a crazy idea reaches critical mass and gains political power, legality becomes irrelevant. Nazism was similarly insane and conspiratorial, and we all know what happened there.
The Nazi Party wasn't particularly popular in Germany until the great depression, but I've never seen it described as having been viewed as insane or conspiratorial by Germans of the time.
Regardless of the often overused WWII analogies, how would banning voter rights work in your example of QAnon and the Republican Party? Would you want to see anyone believing QAnon conspiracies banned from voting, even if you are correct that the ideology has taken over much of the Republican Party? I'm not sure that banning most voters in one of two parties we have would go over well, nor would it leave us with a democracy or much of an election process.
> The Nazi Party wasn't particularly popular in Germany until the great depression, but I've never seen it described as having been viewed as insane or conspiratorial by Germans of the time.
Some of the core beliefs underpinning Nazism were based on bizarre occultism and antisemitic conspiracy theories. I suppose people simply ignored or brushed off what they didn't like, much as they do with QAnon politicians today.
> Regardless of the often overused WWII analogies, how would banning voter rights work in your example of QAnon and the Republican Party?
I never said anything about banning voters. I was just lamenting how easily the crazies can coalesce and gather power these days. Don't know what the solution is. Maybe we're just doomed.
With regards to potential solutions, I think it really comes down to fighting for a system we believe is sustainable long term and resilient to bad ideas floating around the population. To me that means doubling down on many of the core ideals of the American system, throwing out where we've gone wrong, and doubling down on free speech.
Ultimately all we can do is trust that the system is designed to withstand. If we don't think the system can work without breaking our own rules to "do the right thing" then what are we really doing? As long as people can speak their minds and hash out disagreements in public we're all better off. When ideas that may end up being dangerous are forced to stay behind closed doors we really have a problem.
Yep, just realized I got comments threads crossed here. Ignore the banning voters question, sorry about that!
My understanding of the history of how the Nazi Party took power is a bit different than what you're describing, curious what you may have seen that I haven't. My understanding is that the party was always based on racist ideology but that it only went antisemitic in the 30s around the time Hitler gained power.
Sorry again about the voting question, that's very confusing when I got the context wrong here!
Given that the original comment implied that the reason we could not have an "open and really big" internet is because of the handful of oddballs that thought 5G towers caused Corona, yes, it might as well be literally nobody.
The number shouldn't matter though. We can have an open and big internet regardless of how many people believe in ideas that seem to be batshit crazy to the average person. Who cares what someone else chooses to think or believe?
you can still have an open and really big internet with these people, the question is if it remains anything like the bastion of great thought the "open and really big" part implies (along with the example provided in the original post I was replying to)
oddballs, i agree. but a dangerous group of oddballs.
> Across Britain, more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism have taken place against wireless towers and other telecom gear this month, according to police reports and a telecom trade group. In roughly 80 other incidents in the country, telecom technicians have been harassed on the job.
that is not a small number, we discuss smaller things on HN. And these are only the cases that have manifested in to arson or harassment, so includes zero couch conspiracy theorists.
> Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web)
I fully agree with you there. This is why I remarked on the private (or perhaps better said, semi-private) nature of forums/chats I use with high SnR today. I’m disappointed it has gone this way, but then the 90s was a long time ago now and I was certainly more naive then.
To draw an analogy, I think distance/privacy brings its own benefits. There’s a reason the corporate giants of the 50s, 60s, and 70s put their research campus away from the main HQ centre of gravity.
In the late 80s/early-90s, it was quite a “hike” to get to the Internet. Either you were at University or as in my case, you had to get modem, cable, KA9Q, terminal emulator, Kermit, rz/sz, etc working together to reach it. Even when browsers became a thing, you may have needed to compile one, or get Winsock working if on a Pee Cee.
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.
> 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.
What I like is that there's always someone on here who's a legit expert on any subject imaginable. Like someone can post a pic of an obscure tape drive from the 60s and almost instantly someone can tell you all about it.
Or a rigorous back and forth on the horse-riding tribes who spawned the Indo-European languages.
Or people can put in context some outlandish quantum computing headline in a way that you'd never get from the actual article.
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.
In the 90s we dreamed of replicators, holodecks and supportive technologies. The crew of the Enterprise certainly didn't walk around with their head in their tri-quarters all day.
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.
> unfortunately my firstname+lastname is globally unique.
This is why I have never used, and will never use, my real world identity on the internet in the decades I've been interacting on it. Instead, I use consistent internet-only identities. It allows me to communicate honestly and openly.
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.
The biggest single mistake we collectively made online is deciding to engage online at all with our true identities. Privacy is only a real concern because so many things we do online can be tied to our real lives.
Get rid of identities and the fire hose of click bait social media and I'd expect the internet goes back to something much more similar to what we often see people wax poetic about, a smaller web that's people goofing off and writing random stuff on their own site.
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.
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.
I’ve found that ageism is kind of not even a thing. The problem is that the cool parties are not where they used to be but as people age they usually don’t update their priors. Same goes for the internet.
The Internet is TCP/IP, BGP, and other core protocols and the physical wires that carry them.
Public wide open free for all space are a major use case but they aren't a necessity and they may not survive the spam tsunami of LLMs and troll farms.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
Interesting read. Check out the section "Decline in time spent online". It kicked up for Covid, but is now back to pre-Covid levels:
2016: 6h29
2017: 6h46
2018: 6h48
2019: 6h38
2020: 6h55
2021: 6h57
2022: 6h37
But users are now spending more of that time on social media (about 40%).
To each their own. This rapidly lost my attention due to the meandering, abstract writing style. I ended up skim reading down to the conclusion, deciding it was a nihilistic take on things, and moving on.
Variety is the spice of life though, I’m glad it was enjoyed by others.
This is by far the most common complaint I see directed towards the writings and media that I enjoy the most, both in fiction and in non-fiction. Oblique narratives where nothing happens, nobody is happy, everyone dies, and no message is taught or learned are my favourite. Interstellar. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Full Metal Jacket. Most recently, the latest instalment of EPIC: The Musical.
I can't really explain why I like them so much. They scratch a cosmic itch I don't fully understand, and the answer isn't simply validating negative sentiment toward the world or other trivial possibilities that immediately spring to mind.
I don't disagree with many of his points, but to call him over-dramatic would be an understatement. The article doesn't seem to make any attempt at justifying the hook besides "the internet is already over because all things will end". And it's presented as some sort of revelation, written in the most pretentious possible way, and ends with a statement of how different his writing is from "the internet". Some kind of boogeyman compilation of everything wrong with life in a digital world.
> "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.
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've never successfully used discord, sure I have an older computer and slow internet but I just don't understand why facebook and the like are fine but discord never displays for me.
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.
Political decisions and sex are part of being a human being so I encourage communities to sometimes do that. Not all of them, but we need more spaces for adults to be adults. Too many hacker spaces are sterile in this way. Moderation is worth the challenge.
The specific space I participate in is a game development community. Due to it's very nature, it attracts minors. Because we keep our doors open, we have a strong incentive to keep the discussion clean, and generally we find that political discussions get hateful extremely quickly, which is the main motivation.
Thankfully there are lots of other servers that have more lax inclusion of adult topics, if that's your fancy. I think it's okay for different communities to have different standards.
The invention of the printing press enabled people of relatively modest means to mass distribute their message through pamphlets.
Over the following centuries, that gave us all kinds of innovations and revolutions, like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Some said things that needed to be said, but in many cases, successful pamphleteers didn't feel a need to be fair or accurate.
As the centuries went on, many people decided that the time it took to read a pamphlet was almost always worth more than what they were getting out of it. So, we got book publishers and newspaper proprietors whose key value added was their guarantee that what they were publishing met a minimum standard of value, and people were willing to pay for that because it was better value than reading self-published books or pamphlets, even when free.
If the mainstream Internet follows the same path, it might come to have more in common with MSN of 1996 than with Facebook of twenty years later.
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.
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.
What a wonderful article. It really helped me to understand what I've been feeling as of late.
The companies that built what we think of as the modern internet, they tried to build perpetual motion machines. They've built unsustainable businesses chasing investor money, based on the idea that they can sell people things better, give them more of what they want, entire environments built around interaction and engagement. And then, like the foresight lacking Rube Goldberg engineers they are, they created a thing that can do all the engagement for them and unleashed it. I have no doubt in my mind that when the last user deletes their Facebook app from their phone, engagement will be at an all time high.
I remember reading something about how most internet bandwidth usage is not people sending things to each other, but machines mindlessly sending nonsense, and what we see is a fraction of the total. It appears that that is the fate of the visible internet as well, and coming very soon.
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.
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 obviously can't be true since end of the world in any reasonable understanding contains end of the internet.
No, it obviously can be true. I can imagine many ways "the end of the world" could occur. Also, maybe it's not crystal clear what "the end of the world" means to you, but for me, and likely other people, it means the collapse of human civilization, which could happen from nuclear war, climate change, etc.
Just because "the end of the world" would include "the death of the internet" doesn't imply that by imagining the end of the world you're also imagining the ways in which every aspect of the world get destroyed. When I imagine the end of the world I don't focus on what happens to say, Paris, specifically, but I do know, implicitly, that the end of the world would include the end of Paris.
All you did is bring back the point that "end of the world" is woefully undefined in his article and discussing it makes it therefore difficult at best.
We obviously disagree on what it means. For me it doesn't mean something of high value to me would end/disappear. It does mean in almost axiomatic way that if internet is still working, then the world hasn't ended as some part of civilization is clearly still running to a very high degree necessary for that to be the case.
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.
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?
Agreed, and for me, the main thesis of the article was that we should create things that we want to create, without concerning ourselves about how much engagement, reach, impact etc. they will have.
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.
One, Asking for even a dollar makes it inaccessible to a vast part of the world's population. Two, it just makes the project sound like a scam.
There are a myriad of "simple web" projects out there that do technically a "basic web like in the good ol' days", no money required, and actually have specs and implementations to show, in contrast to "a folder".
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.
Dynamic IPs for residential connections where already the norm in the early 2000s (remember dyndns.org and freedns.afraid.org?) yet self-hosted content was much more prominent than it is now. So where asymmetric lines.
That 'self-hosting' you are referring to was actually 'hosting your own stuff on other people's computers in a data center somewhere, most likely the ISP that originally took away your static IP so you can't do it yourself'. True self-hosting is from your own basement.
I'm honestly in the 'old guy from the 1990s' camp. ... once there was a fleeting glimpse of beauty, called 'Internet'.
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.
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.
On all three, I'd like to point out that I covered these in my original post. You expect to look at box office takes, source your media from large studios, and go to weddings between boring people.
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.”
And FWIW I think there's plenty of high quality and original/creative music out there nowadays. But the 'top 40' category does seem quite stale and boring (judging by the music I hear in shopping malls/bars...).
What would you say this is derivative of, and how is this more derivative than other music? What is an example of not-derivative music by this criteria?
Nearly all music depends on some kind of prior art. You can be reductive about any genre of music; for a couple hundred years choral and classical European music was nearly all about devotion to God.
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
>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.
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.
You can't use those studies to say "poor people" = "stupid". That kind of blanket statement is the kind of fairy tale elites tell each other to make them feel good about being selfish rich pricks ("oh, I worked hard for what I have. They just don't work hard enough" kind of bullshit).
Some children from poor families perform worse on intelligence tests.
Lack of cognitive abilities correlates with low income in some cases that we studied.
Poverty is not an indicator of intelligence, or courage, or character. Poverty is an indicator that something in our society is profoundly broken and needs fixing.
I work in a medical practice. I see all kinds. I see dumb rich people and I see smart poor people.
And here's some poor people, or people who grew up poor: Stephen King. Aristotle. Jennifer Lopez. Oprah. Ghandi. Jim Carey. Shania Twain. JK Rowling. Jesus of Nazareth. Charles Dickens (who wrote stories about grinding poverty).
I'm not a fan of some of those people, but I'd love to speak to any and all of them, because I'm sure I'd learn something!
> You can't use those studies to say "poor people" = "stupid".
You started talking about intelligence. I only said I don't want to hang out with poor people, for one reason or another.
From my perspective, it's the entire package of the problems they come with. It's true that there are many interesting people from unprivileged background, but when interacting with a random poor person, you're unlikely to run into someone interesting.
> In 1977, Ken Olsen declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.’
To be fair, he was talking about big iron mainframes. He envisioned everyone having a dumb terminal in their home rather than a microcomputer (which we effectively call "the pc").
First thing - what was fun? I think fan pages with a lots of interesting content, forums with interesting topics, IIRC channels with interesting groups.
All had one thing in common: interesting creators.
Previously Google connected you with interesting pages, now Google is answering machine. Now you are not connected with people, but with Google algorithm. You are connected with amazon deals, news outlets. You will not find XYZ blog on it that easily.
Previously Facebook was designed to connect you with people, now you are connected with memes, ads, bots, and companies, news outlets.
Previously YouTube connected users with creators, now it is full of corporations, big media. You cannot down vote, you cannot easily browse subscriptions. YouTube does not care about users, comment section has limited amount of moderation tools.
Dead internet theory. Bots create your feeds through algorithms. Bots comment threads through malicious accounts. Now Bots will also create content.
Manual labor is often more precise, more artsy. Moving to automation, to factories killed some of that. I think this is what happens with the Internet. We are living in a factory now.
There is a limit to enshittification, before users are tired and go elsewhere.
I think a big change is also cultural. Fewer people seem to be interested in their focus of choice remaining just a hobby. It's just too tempting to turn your audience into a profit generator when that's just a few clicks away (or so it seems) and you are getting companies offering to throw money at you for promotional deals. It also doesn't help that all the big platforms like to promote those who have succeeded in making being online their job, and in return that job includes gaming the algorithms to make sure they are seen.
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
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
I think what is ending is not the Internet, but eternal September. Because soon every person in the world is online and there will be no more new people to continually corrupt the netiquette that we've built. Eventually we as a society will learn and form habits and social rules (or even laws) that create more harmony than chaos online. It's chaos right now because we're overwhelmed not just by people, but by corporations who do not have any framework for behavior that is conducive to a sustainable, functional Internet. Even corporations will eventually understand that this is destructive to their business in the long run.
Perhaps, just like with civilization IRL, it will start with pockets of societies that have specific ideals for collaboration. And then the successful pockets grow to include more and more.
Reading this kind of hurts. The observations are correct, it's just most of the conclusions the author comes to are deranged. And how they're written? It all just sounds like it was written by a tinfoil hat wearing english major desperate to stay relevant.
First of all, the internet isn't on the verge of imploding, it's just in flux, as per usual. It also isn't stagnating, at least not on such a grand scale. Though it does feel as though it's lost a bit of steam in the last few years. That could be due to the homegeneitiy of the current investment landscape.
The author tries to sell us a doom spiral by comparing the state of services. They attempt to connect different services as if they're representative of a pulse for the internet as a whole. But the differences between Facebook and Tik Tok are vast, between Twitter and MySpace, between forums and Discord. Declining numbers in any of these does not indicate decline in any other service, nor the internet as a whole. Not to mention most of these are controlled by monolithic entities who also don't contribute to the web outside their bloated bubbles, the performance of these services are largely based on the performance of these companies and their investments. If one dies, it's a largely isolated event.
All the most recent, negative changes were made by spurious investments into anything that even seemed remotely profitable by eager investors. These bubbles will burst, and when they do, some people won't even notice the change. Some, of course, will be forced to adapt, or to leave the internet entirely. That'll likely mean the www will lose a lot of its traffic, but that doesn't sound bad for the internet as a whole... in fact it sounds good.
Companies are only making the internet worse because they believe there's money to be made. That, as the author points out, is not really going to be true for much longer, at least not for the current wave of companies. And when that happens, new companies will have to step in and pick up the pieces if they want to profit off the internet. Unfortunately for them, there's just not enough lubrication to keep an aging population of users relearning all their old habits in new environments.
I believe the internet, as it is now, will not survive for the individual. However, every individual must make that journey on their own terms. The author clearly made their journey ages ago, or perhaps was always skeptical. Others, however still have to make that trek. I have a few younger friends still in the beginning of their internet obsession where they (somehow) can still find regular content that interests them on the www. This group is likely to be the last large wave for advertisers. So, when they're done, that's it; The internet won't be worth investing in, and everyone who only ever used it kill time will go along side the companies. Those that made the journey will stay if they have use for a post-corporate internet.
The article, of course, assumes that the internet is just for fapping and killing time, when in reality it's used for a lot more than just that. Fapping and killing time is just what's being subsidized by the numerous companies invested in the internet. The article doesn't consider this, it doesn't consider that there were points before the current one, or that there are even corners of the internet where people share software and ideas. No, it just assumes that once this fad dies, the internet dies. I personally believe the internet has uses outside what companies invest in, and it's not hard to use it for just those purposes. That's enough of a reason to keep coming back.
All that being said, I do agree with the author regarding causes on the internet. One essentially does nothing when they try to devote their time to a cause online. Unless one explicitly uses the internet to organize action with others in meatspace, the internet is essentially worthless as a medium for revolution. Actually, it's worse than worthless, it's detrimental as it encourages non-action. In most cases even supporting forces who would ostracize those that would push for more forceful and aggressive action against the status quo. The corporate internet has largely made revolutionaries into pacifists, a trait which makes them non-threatening to those in power.
Even calmly explaining all this is a bit mastubatory and counter-productive. What I should be doing is running in local elections, organizing meetups, or sabotaging power structures in a variety of ways. I should be speaking in plain language about all of this, and freely expressing myself. Instead I'm here, explaining the obvious flaws of an article, while simultaneously not-so-subtly advertising my views regarding the web like it matters.
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.
No they absolutely cannot. Ads skew the incentives whether they are intrusive or not. Also the entire point of ads is to get the user to do something aside from his own goals so they are in direct opposition of point 1.
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?
I think you are missing the point. It's not that interest in these things is what is essential to the old internet but that a shared interest and shared language is - and this includes as gp has pointed out metaphors and imagery.
But to your question, Tolkien, Asimov, Lovecraft, et al. are still a heavy influence on modern Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror. Why do you think a mere 45 years should mean that something is no longer referenced?
>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.
maybe it could help those doomer "internet is over!" types to even try to look at internet in a positive way - or at least it'd give us a tell through what they'd come up with, if anything at all
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.
I've had mostly good, but I will be the first to admit that the internet sucked up a lot more of my time than would have been ideal. Most of the benefits I get from the internet are not how I use the internet in my day to day life. Like you said, not your problem, but when talking about this in the context of the masses using it as they do now, you get 2 outcomes: people withering and dying while staring at a screen, or this entire industry collapsing catastrophically.
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.