9 ms·

What I want from the internet

100 points by chrbutler 3y ago

paulcole 3y ago
[flagged]
- chrbutler 3y ago
  That's fair! Would love to hear (sincerely) how you would answer this question.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Personally, I prefer the internet of today to the internet of the past. There's so much more to do and I just don't have any nostalgia for 1997-2002 (the first 5 years I used the internet) or any other time period in the past. The internet has gotten consistently better and more useful over time. The one thing I would like (but will never get) is the way to pay directly for more things rather than pay indirectly with ads.
    - chrbutler 3y ago
      I think that's a totally valid perspective – and I agree to some extent. There are absolutely things about the internet that are better today than the way they used to be. As for the micropayments thing – I couldn't agree more. Jaron Lanier has had a lot to say about that, and I remain hopeful that someday we can find a functional model other than advertising.
- CyberKimura 3y ago
  What does his race have to do with it?
  - paulcole 3y ago
    [flagged]
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> And the internet used to be more work to experience. Today, it’s more work to avoid. Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps. There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful of destinations. I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow. Outside that though I do prefer roads less taken.
- chrbutler 3y ago
  I like that analogy!
- htag 3y ago
  I'm also fond of the internet-as-public-square paradigm. All news worthy events are posted in it. There's sections of the square dedicated to classifieds and vendors. There's a spot with chess sets. Yes, there's also some people on soap boxes yelling into the crowd. I can usually ignore them just fine.
- fsflover 3y ago
  > The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps. https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
- gspencley 3y ago
  That's a good analogy. I like technology and modern cities in the abstract. They provide people with easy access to certain things that were historically scarce. Some of those things are life saving, like cutting edge medicine. But I can't live in a city. I hate the noise, the crowds, the people, the crime, the pollution and the vast majority of the time I'm not in any sort of immediate need for what they provide. Fine for the odd Saturday adventure one or twice a year. Any more than that and no thanks. I always come away feeling stressed out, anxious, tired and worse off for the experience. Ironically, online shopping and remote work is what has made living in a city unnecessary.
l7l 3y ago
Thanks for sharing! Having the same feeling for a while now.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" if they post their own work while no one else ever posts it etc and then listening to people whine about the internet and how they wish this, that or the other while you roll your eyes and think to yourself again "This is the internet you helped create. If you don't like it, make other choices."
- chrbutler 3y ago
  Exactly! Not sure if you made it to the end, but that's essentially the parting message.
- BKirkpatrick 3y ago
  [dead]
- DamnInteresting 3y ago
  The problem isn't self-promotion per se, the problem is the sheer amount of self-promotion that occurs when it is allowed. If any is permitted, then often all is permitted, and a forum becomes inundated with people vying for attention. Classic tragedy of the commons.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    You are missing the point. Entirely. If you know of an independent creator and they do something you like, share it.
    - DamnInteresting 3y ago
      Entirely you say? I was addressing this portion of your comment: > I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" I agree whole-heartedly with your share it sentiment, but if that was your original point, it was unfortunately obscured.
uneekname 3y ago
Hi Christopher, I really liked this article. > It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet. I agree. Even just setting up an RSS reader and finding a little community of blogs to follow can take a lot of work. Interact with those blogs, whether that's by submitting comments to individual posts, posting responses on your own blog, or doing something fancier with IndieWeb protocols [0], takes time and know-how. Hacker News, subreddits, etc. can remove some of that friction, at the cost of less personalization and more spam. There are so so many cool ideas in the small internet. Project Gemini [1] comes to mind, as do linkrolls and the Marginalia search engine [2]. There have been a lot of folks finding meaningful communities in the fediverse recently too. I think the small internet both benefits and suffers from this fractal of different tools and communities: among so much diversity, it's simultaneously difficult and rewarding to find your place. I hope that over time, we'll be able to reduce the difficulty and increase the reward by building better tools for discovering and participating in these communities. Anyways, even if we're hard to find sometimes, there are a lot of us who feel at-home reading our RSS readers, posting to a blog from time-to-time, and maybe even making new tools to make these activities easier. I feel certain that over time, we'll be better connected in ways that make us happy. [0] https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/ [1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ [2] https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
- chrbutler 3y ago
  Yes to all of this. And thanks for the links! I hadn't heard of Gemini before. I'll check them out asap.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Yeah, no mention of the Fediverse was baffling...
jasode 3y ago
>It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet. You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide. I think the author ignores another reason that people (especially us techies) don't like to admit: The majority of people don't care about following a list of personal websites. Instead, websurfers just get whatever snippets of information they want (e.g. food recipe, medical trivia) from whatever website happens to have it and then move on. The disinterest in personal websites comes from both the websurfers and many content authors themselves. Some examples from the content creators... Clay Shirky's essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" happens to be on the HN front page right now. But he doesn't maintain his personal website anymore. He gave reasons for it[1] and even said he regrets letting it rot. But even today, his personal website remains empty and previous links all return 404 errors. But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cshirky https://twitter.com/cshirky John Carmack's old personal website "altdevblogaday.com" is gone now.[2] But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack Those 2 guys are obviously internet-savvy and need no lectures on personal websites -- and yet they chose to abandon them. As to examples for websurfers, if you ask normal people if they sometimes search the internet for a cooking recipe, they'll say "yes". But if then followup with "Can you name a cooking website you got a recipe from?", most will say "no". The average websurfer cared more about the recipe and not the particular website. Sure, some will make a mental note of the domain url and maybe even bookmark it but many won't. The lack of interest for following "little websites" continues to be reinforced with tools like ChatGPT. Most people would rather get some synthesized information instead of visiting a bunch of different websites they don't care about. I think this past comment about RSS not being relevant to regular people is uncomfortable for some to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707 I bought this internet yellow pages book in 1995 when the consumer-accessible internet was new: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Internet+Yellow+Pages+1st+ed&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Internet+Yellow+Pages+1s... That book represents a different time when indie websites were a purposeful destination to visit. I notice that a lot of people don't bother doing that anymore. Me included. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31041194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31041194 [2] requires Wayback Machine: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programming-in-c/ http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm...
rektide 3y ago
By far the best article about where we are today that I've seen! The idea of the internet as a body that has gone comatose, that isn't really reacting or changing, is a good metaphor for me, matches my feelings. There's still so much potential, but we aren't in an interactive phase; we are continuing along only with the inertia we had. But we could collectively wake up at any point, could restart creating interwoven connected experiences of our own.
throwuwu 3y ago
Just put down your phone. Or better yet, just use the smolnet sites that already exist. If you pine for the days of a small, nerdy and exclusive internet then just go there it’s just a few clicks away.
- chrbutler 3y ago
  you had me at smolnet. sincere lol over here.
- pixl97 3y ago
  At least until you piss some kiddy off and the entire subnet you're on is receiving a TB/s of packets till the point your ISP drops you or you have to hide behind cloudflare.
intrasight 3y ago
I like to consider what will the Internet be in ten years. Who will control it? How will we interact with it? Will there be any humans present? Frankly, I am not too optimistic that it'll be the Internet that we want.
- chrbutler 3y ago
  I've seen reports lately that bot traffic is accounting for nearly half of all internet traffic, which is truly wild. https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/bad-bot-traffic-report-almost-half-of-all-2021-internet-traffic-was-not-human/ https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/bad-bot-traffic-r...
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    And depending on what group you listen to most of the internet traffic is for pornography, or possibly bittorrent.
    - intrasight 3y ago
      I would assume today that the vast majority of Internet traffic is movie streaming for non-pirate sources. But I could be wrong.
- pixl97 3y ago
  People say its "dead internet theory", but I think Thoughty2 correctly calls it "dead internet prophecy"
camgunz 3y ago
I mostly buy Eternal September, or as rephrased by David Foster Wallace: "[The internet] is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." Like, the internet is banal because we're (the rich world) all on it. It's not a weird little niche anymore. So it's now subject to all the (rich) world's problems. Racism is a problem on Twitter not because of content moderation difficulties or the lack of sufficient compute power to run sufficiently intelligent AI, but because it's a problem off Twitter too. Getting nickel and dimed, scammed, deluged by ads, or tricked by dark patterns is a problem on major platforms because it's a problem in meatspace too. We all know this, because our main fear with AI (the latest and greatest tech) is that it will soon also have all of these problems, and just amplify them even more than the internet did. It totally will! But FWIW I think cool things are happening. Wireguard and Tailscale are cool. I hate to admit it, but some Blockchain stuff is cool. MLS is cool. ActivityPub is (maybe) cool. You just gotta get out of the browser.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > You just gotta get out of the browser. I agree with this. The internet is a great tool. The web is extremely problematic and growing less useful over time. Too many people think that the internet and the web are the same thing.
  - chrbutler 3y ago
    Yes, I struggle with that all the time - and not getting bogged down into yet another explainer that they are not the same thing!
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Firewalls pretty much have made the internet and web the same thing, as discussed on HN in many threads. About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS. The internet's usefulness as a tool has been greatly compromised because of this.
    - 3y ago
micropresident 3y ago
This can be addressed. Protocols not platforms™. However, these protocols need to have spam mitigation mechanisms built it. We need "RPoW" tokens deployed ubiquitously.
- chrbutler 3y ago
  I need that on a t-shirt.
lioeters 3y ago
What I think can improve the situation is "curation", particularly manual, effort-intensive, thoughtful and reasonably timely curation by a person or people with good taste. That's asking a lot, with many subjective variables, but it's what keeps bringing me back to Hacker News, the consistently high signal-to-noise ratio.
- chrbutler 3y ago
  Yes, I think this is a good point – it certainly reflects how I find the things I value most. People I know or have come to "know" by following for years have always the best sources of information for me.
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Where is the RSS feed on your site? I tried /feed and /RSS and .RSS none of which work. There is also no visible link that I was able to see. Assuming I'm correct in my assumption that there is none, I find the lamenting the loss of "the structure that a personal website, can-to-can structure, an RSS feed, and a browser provide" (emphasis mine) deeply ironic. And no, email newsletters are not a valid replacement, no matter how much you benefit from pushing them. Maybe you should contribute to the internet you want to see?
- chrbutler 3y ago
  Hmm, there is an RSS feed. https://www.chrbutler.com/feed.rss https://www.chrbutler.com/feed.rss
pxoe 3y ago
it's rambly, but it's still not clear 'what is it that they want from the internet'. "you could find a point in there somewhere, but really, you had to"
efficientsticks 3y ago
Thank you for the article. During lockdown I made a search engine that you might like to try: https://highbrow.se/ https://highbrow.se/ No special algorithms and just the plain slightly spammy but endearing internet :)
_madmax_ 3y ago
There's no way to turn back time, if there was, I would probably be living in 1997 forever. I'm all for a bit of nostalgia, but we must admit that the internet is indeed dead, we surf an encyclopedia thats mostly a money machine poisonning everything it touches. It ruins everything, everywhere.

100 points by chrbutler 3y ago

paulcole 3y ago

[flagged]

chrbutler 3y ago
That's fair! Would love to hear (sincerely) how you would answer this question.
- paulcole 3y ago
  Personally, I prefer the internet of today to the internet of the past. There's so much more to do and I just don't have any nostalgia for 1997-2002 (the first 5 years I used the internet) or any other time period in the past. The internet has gotten consistently better and more useful over time. The one thing I would like (but will never get) is the way to pay directly for more things rather than pay indirectly with ads.
  - chrbutler 3y ago
    I think that's a totally valid perspective – and I agree to some extent. There are absolutely things about the internet that are better today than the way they used to be. As for the micropayments thing – I couldn't agree more. Jaron Lanier has had a lot to say about that, and I remain hopeful that someday we can find a functional model other than advertising.
CyberKimura 3y ago
What does his race have to do with it?
- paulcole 3y ago
  [flagged]

JKCalhoun 3y ago

> And the internet used to be more work to experience. Today, it’s more work to avoid. Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps. There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful of destinations. I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow. Outside that though I do prefer roads less taken.

chrbutler 3y ago
I like that analogy!
htag 3y ago
I'm also fond of the internet-as-public-square paradigm. All news worthy events are posted in it. There's sections of the square dedicated to classifieds and vendors. There's a spot with chess sets. Yes, there's also some people on soap boxes yelling into the crowd. I can usually ignore them just fine.
fsflover 3y ago
> The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps. https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
gspencley 3y ago
That's a good analogy. I like technology and modern cities in the abstract. They provide people with easy access to certain things that were historically scarce. Some of those things are life saving, like cutting edge medicine. But I can't live in a city. I hate the noise, the crowds, the people, the crime, the pollution and the vast majority of the time I'm not in any sort of immediate need for what they provide. Fine for the odd Saturday adventure one or twice a year. Any more than that and no thanks. I always come away feeling stressed out, anxious, tired and worse off for the experience. Ironically, online shopping and remote work is what has made living in a city unnecessary.

l7l 3y ago

Thanks for sharing! Having the same feeling for a while now.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" if they post their own work while no one else ever posts it etc and then listening to people whine about the internet and how they wish this, that or the other while you roll your eyes and think to yourself again "This is the internet you helped create. If you don't like it, make other choices."

chrbutler 3y ago
Exactly! Not sure if you made it to the end, but that's essentially the parting message.
BKirkpatrick 3y ago
[dead]
DamnInteresting 3y ago
The problem isn't self-promotion per se, the problem is the sheer amount of self-promotion that occurs when it is allowed. If any is permitted, then often all is permitted, and a forum becomes inundated with people vying for attention. Classic tragedy of the commons.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  You are missing the point. Entirely. If you know of an independent creator and they do something you like, share it.
  - DamnInteresting 3y ago
    Entirely you say? I was addressing this portion of your comment: > I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" I agree whole-heartedly with your share it sentiment, but if that was your original point, it was unfortunately obscured.

uneekname 3y ago

Hi Christopher, I really liked this article. > It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet. I agree. Even just setting up an RSS reader and finding a little community of blogs to follow can take a lot of work. Interact with those blogs, whether that's by submitting comments to individual posts, posting responses on your own blog, or doing something fancier with IndieWeb protocols [0], takes time and know-how. Hacker News, subreddits, etc. can remove some of that friction, at the cost of less personalization and more spam. There are so so many cool ideas in the small internet. Project Gemini [1] comes to mind, as do linkrolls and the Marginalia search engine [2]. There have been a lot of folks finding meaningful communities in the fediverse recently too. I think the small internet both benefits and suffers from this fractal of different tools and communities: among so much diversity, it's simultaneously difficult and rewarding to find your place. I hope that over time, we'll be able to reduce the difficulty and increase the reward by building better tools for discovering and participating in these communities. Anyways, even if we're hard to find sometimes, there are a lot of us who feel at-home reading our RSS readers, posting to a blog from time-to-time, and maybe even making new tools to make these activities easier. I feel certain that over time, we'll be better connected in ways that make us happy. [0] https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/ [1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ [2] https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/

chrbutler 3y ago
Yes to all of this. And thanks for the links! I hadn't heard of Gemini before. I'll check them out asap.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Yeah, no mention of the Fediverse was baffling...

jasode 3y ago

>It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet. You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide. I think the author ignores another reason that people (especially us techies) don't like to admit: The majority of people don't care about following a list of personal websites. Instead, websurfers just get whatever snippets of information they want (e.g. food recipe, medical trivia) from whatever website happens to have it and then move on. The disinterest in personal websites comes from both the websurfers and many content authors themselves. Some examples from the content creators... Clay Shirky's essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" happens to be on the HN front page right now. But he doesn't maintain his personal website anymore. He gave reasons for it[1] and even said he regrets letting it rot. But even today, his personal website remains empty and previous links all return 404 errors. But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cshirky https://twitter.com/cshirky John Carmack's old personal website "altdevblogaday.com" is gone now.[2] But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack Those 2 guys are obviously internet-savvy and need no lectures on personal websites -- and yet they chose to abandon them. As to examples for websurfers, if you ask normal people if they sometimes search the internet for a cooking recipe, they'll say "yes". But if then followup with "Can you name a cooking website you got a recipe from?", most will say "no". The average websurfer cared more about the recipe and not the particular website. Sure, some will make a mental note of the domain url and maybe even bookmark it but many won't. The lack of interest for following "little websites" continues to be reinforced with tools like ChatGPT. Most people would rather get some synthesized information instead of visiting a bunch of different websites they don't care about. I think this past comment about RSS not being relevant to regular people is uncomfortable for some to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707 I bought this internet yellow pages book in 1995 when the consumer-accessible internet was new: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Internet+Yellow+Pages+1st+ed&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Internet+Yellow+Pages+1s... That book represents a different time when indie websites were a purposeful destination to visit. I notice that a lot of people don't bother doing that anymore. Me included. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31041194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31041194 [2] requires Wayback Machine: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programming-in-c/ http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm...

rektide 3y ago

By far the best article about where we are today that I've seen! The idea of the internet as a body that has gone comatose, that isn't really reacting or changing, is a good metaphor for me, matches my feelings. There's still so much potential, but we aren't in an interactive phase; we are continuing along only with the inertia we had. But we could collectively wake up at any point, could restart creating interwoven connected experiences of our own.

throwuwu 3y ago

Just put down your phone. Or better yet, just use the smolnet sites that already exist. If you pine for the days of a small, nerdy and exclusive internet then just go there it’s just a few clicks away.

chrbutler 3y ago
you had me at smolnet. sincere lol over here.
pixl97 3y ago
At least until you piss some kiddy off and the entire subnet you're on is receiving a TB/s of packets till the point your ISP drops you or you have to hide behind cloudflare.

intrasight 3y ago

I like to consider what will the Internet be in ten years. Who will control it? How will we interact with it? Will there be any humans present? Frankly, I am not too optimistic that it'll be the Internet that we want.

chrbutler 3y ago
I've seen reports lately that bot traffic is accounting for nearly half of all internet traffic, which is truly wild. https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/bad-bot-traffic-report-almost-half-of-all-2021-internet-traffic-was-not-human/ https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/bad-bot-traffic-r...
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  And depending on what group you listen to most of the internet traffic is for pornography, or possibly bittorrent.
  - intrasight 3y ago
    I would assume today that the vast majority of Internet traffic is movie streaming for non-pirate sources. But I could be wrong.
pixl97 3y ago
People say its "dead internet theory", but I think Thoughty2 correctly calls it "dead internet prophecy"

camgunz 3y ago

I mostly buy Eternal September, or as rephrased by David Foster Wallace: "[The internet] is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." Like, the internet is banal because we're (the rich world) all on it. It's not a weird little niche anymore. So it's now subject to all the (rich) world's problems. Racism is a problem on Twitter not because of content moderation difficulties or the lack of sufficient compute power to run sufficiently intelligent AI, but because it's a problem off Twitter too. Getting nickel and dimed, scammed, deluged by ads, or tricked by dark patterns is a problem on major platforms because it's a problem in meatspace too. We all know this, because our main fear with AI (the latest and greatest tech) is that it will soon also have all of these problems, and just amplify them even more than the internet did. It totally will! But FWIW I think cool things are happening. Wireguard and Tailscale are cool. I hate to admit it, but some Blockchain stuff is cool. MLS is cool. ActivityPub is (maybe) cool. You just gotta get out of the browser.

JohnFen 3y ago
> You just gotta get out of the browser. I agree with this. The internet is a great tool. The web is extremely problematic and growing less useful over time. Too many people think that the internet and the web are the same thing.
- chrbutler 3y ago
  Yes, I struggle with that all the time - and not getting bogged down into yet another explainer that they are not the same thing!
- pixl97 3y ago
  Firewalls pretty much have made the internet and web the same thing, as discussed on HN in many threads. About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS. The internet's usefulness as a tool has been greatly compromised because of this.
  - 3y ago

micropresident 3y ago

This can be addressed. Protocols not platforms™. However, these protocols need to have spam mitigation mechanisms built it. We need "RPoW" tokens deployed ubiquitously.

chrbutler 3y ago
I need that on a t-shirt.

lioeters 3y ago

What I think can improve the situation is "curation", particularly manual, effort-intensive, thoughtful and reasonably timely curation by a person or people with good taste. That's asking a lot, with many subjective variables, but it's what keeps bringing me back to Hacker News, the consistently high signal-to-noise ratio.

chrbutler 3y ago
Yes, I think this is a good point – it certainly reflects how I find the things I value most. People I know or have come to "know" by following for years have always the best sources of information for me.

_Algernon_ 3y ago

Where is the RSS feed on your site? I tried /feed and /RSS and .RSS none of which work. There is also no visible link that I was able to see. Assuming I'm correct in my assumption that there is none, I find the lamenting the loss of "the structure that a personal website, can-to-can structure, an RSS feed, and a browser provide" (emphasis mine) deeply ironic. And no, email newsletters are not a valid replacement, no matter how much you benefit from pushing them. Maybe you should contribute to the internet you want to see?

chrbutler 3y ago
Hmm, there is an RSS feed. https://www.chrbutler.com/feed.rss https://www.chrbutler.com/feed.rss

pxoe 3y ago

it's rambly, but it's still not clear 'what is it that they want from the internet'. "you could find a point in there somewhere, but really, you had to"

efficientsticks 3y ago

Thank you for the article. During lockdown I made a search engine that you might like to try: https://highbrow.se/ https://highbrow.se/ No special algorithms and just the plain slightly spammy but endearing internet :)

_madmax_ 3y ago

There's no way to turn back time, if there was, I would probably be living in 1997 forever. I'm all for a bit of nostalgia, but we must admit that the internet is indeed dead, we surf an encyclopedia thats mostly a money machine poisonning everything it touches. It ruins everything, everywhere.