14 ms·

Are We Watching the Internet Die?

189 points by cdme 3y ago

BuckRogers 3y ago
[flagged]
- bdcravens 3y ago
  The same has been said of everything from TV to cars to the printing press.
  - wk_end 3y ago
    The printing press and TV did ruin the societies that preceded them. The new societies they produced were better (in the case of the printing press) or arguably better (in the case of TV) - by some subjective metric of goodness. But there's no guarantee that the past will be like the future, or that all technological developments create better societies, or that it's always better in all ways. The development of the personal automobile improved many things but also created many catastrophes - environmental destruction, automobile fatalities, leaded gasoline, urban "renewal" and sprawl - that we're still grappling with. If we come out on the other side then yay, but even then we're talking about 150 years of some serious growing pains. Maybe the internet looks the same way.
- RiverCrochet 3y ago
  Is it the Internet that has ruined society, or various factors that use the Internet to accelerate their effects?
RiverCrochet 3y ago
> but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies This statement confuses me. I see how the fact that most people tend to cluster around a small number of platforms effectively at least trends this toward being more and more true, but what are the older "dark ages" referred to here? AOL? In the 90's you could take the easy route and sign up with AOL, but there were numerous dial-up ISPs you could choose from. Even then, you didn't have to use the AOL portal (though I'm sure non-tech savvy people who only used AOL for email never bothered to understand).
- jhbadger 3y ago
  AOL only started allowing access to the Internet at large in 1993 (thus leading to the "Eternal September" that greybeards complain about to this day). Before then, AOL users were limited to what AOL provided. And there were other such services such as CompuServe and GENIE that were similar.
  - greedo 3y ago
    AOL didn't provide Usenet access until 1994. Eternal September started when dialup ISPs started providing access in 1993.
- netsharc 3y ago
  Nowadays, for the average Internet user, content is on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube...
  - bombcar 3y ago
    And back then, the "Internet" was AOL for a while - look at old ads, they often had their "aol keyword" in large type than their URL. But shortly afterwards there was an explosion of web content and forums that over time has been digested back into giant conglomerates - but for a short, beautiful time, if you wanted something you had to go find it yourself, on site-owner's terms.
    - jareklupinski 3y ago
      > "aol keyword" i haven't had a retro memory pull that strong in a while
      - bombcar 3y ago
        It's really weird for me, because it was such a huge thing at the time, and I was there and never used it - even though my friend's connection to the Internet was through his mom's AOL account; it was just something you did and then minimized.
echelon 3y ago
A want a P2P social networking construct where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms, and leave the rest of the web/platforms to rot. We should have gone P2P in 200X, but Facebook and Google took us down a different path. Bittorrent was good. Semantic Web kind of understood the task, but it was academic and not leveraged. Now we understand the assignment and have all the experience necessary to build the thing. Mastodon and ActivityPub are not the solution. Bittorrent was.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Bittorrent is a great way to download big files. Heck, if Docker used Bittorrent to download files it might even work on my DSL connection but I guess reliability is an "enterprise" feature. Bittorrent is not a good way to download small bits of data like status updates. What do you think is so bad about ActivityPub? Should we fall back on RSS and just settle for stale data sometimes and excessive polling other times?
  - sircastor 3y ago
    I think the implication here is that ActivityPub is still server to server. Is better distributed than one closed-monolith to another, but BitTorrent was really good client to client. Protocol wise it’s probably not perfect for small updates, but imagine if you just had a magnet link to your friends’ “website” which, instead of being hosted somewhere is available when they update it and gets distributed around peers.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Sounds like Bitcoin to me. Bitcoin took so long to get invented because if you went to a computer science conference and said you'd give a talk about how you built a node network 20,000 computers in it that does as much work as 1 computer did people would just laugh at you. Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting, but peer-to-peer networks can easily be a way to make Amazon Web Services look cheap the same way that Bitcoin makes Visa and Mastercard look fast and inexpensive.
coliveira 3y ago
> None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits ... will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing They'll not make money because they're stupid. I have never participated in this kind of scam (this is what I call getting free labor to prop up a private company). But several people seem to love donating free work for private companies.
- bugbuddy 3y ago
  I am genuinely curious what is different about us posting here?
  - screenobobeano 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - throwitaway222 3y ago
      Shhh... you're not supposed to say that or they will make a Facebook login and force it.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    dang gets paid, basically That's what it comes down to - this site has a particular purpose, and it is open about it being basically a freebie given out to help Ycombinator; worth whatever hosting + dang costs these days.
    - alex_suzuki 3y ago
      does he?
  - harkinian 3y ago
    Nothing. I don't expect something in return for my HN posts, and I don't care what someone does with them. It's not a job.
INTPenis 3y ago
People keep panicking about huge internet portals but the thing is that if you compare the number of internet users 20 years ago with now there is a MASSIVE difference. That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating. Today it's EVERYBODY. And they're really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they're consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet. So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.
- shubb 3y ago
  Maybe this goes like usenet - spam technology improves to the point where the old open platform is unusable...
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    I think that's the most succinct explanation of the problem that I've ever seen.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    I'm more of a proponent for small community hosted nodes that require manual approval to join, and federate in a larger network. That way each node in the larger community can vet new members, but they can still communicate across nodes. Sort of like ActivityPub, or something like it. Not trying to prefer one design over another, we'll see what comes.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  20 years ago, the internet was already mainstream in Western markets and we were in a repreive between the old walled gardens of AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/etc and new agressively-walling gardens of Facebook/Twitter/etc. That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden's arbitrary/anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight. You're talking more about the 90's which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.
empath-nirvana 3y ago
Seems to me that there's probably a market for websites that do more curating and filtering for real people.
- assimpleaspossi 3y ago
  Seems to me that there IS a market for web sites that offer something more than social commentary, product pitches and ads. That are genuinely useful. That help accomplish needed, wanted, useful and necessary things. Yes, such places exist but are in the very minority.
- timbit42 3y ago
  So we're moving back to what Yahoo! was originally?
axus 3y ago
There's a lot of complaints here, the advice is decent but not magical. "Don't spend time and money on crap". Maybe the implication is "Do spend time and money on good services". Reddit never owed me anything, never spent any money and was paid back for the time invested. Might spend 5 minutes per week on it now. Plenty of people are trying to make a better Reddit, nobody has targeted them with unfair competition.
- chihuahua 3y ago
  Right - Reddit exists, and I can make up my own mind on whether I want to use it, how much I want to use it, and whether I want to volunteer as an unpaid mod. I do not understand people who volunteer unpaid labor and then complain bitterly about it.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    It doesn’t pay well, unless you’re crooked. I’d be more worried about those that don’t complain.
  - alx_the_new_guy 3y ago
    >I do not understand people who volunteer unpaid labor and then complain bitterly about it. Well, let's say you helped someone on Reddit. What you were intending to do is to share your life experience with someone, making their, and maybe probably someone else's life meaningfully easier/save them some time. And, hopefully, someone will treat you the same way in return. What you also have done is contributed said part of your life experience towards making some meaninglessly rich guy even richer, and who will enshittify the platform you presumably enjoy using in return, so that he can make pennies on top of the follar he already earns.
    - spaced-out 3y ago
      Why did you "help" (in other words make a post/comment) that person on Reddit? Because you enjoy it, you enjoyed reading posts and comments by strangers, replying to them, and seeing your comments accumulate upvotes and other comments. Reddit gave you that experience for free.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
No. Reddit is doing an IPO, so the internet is dying? That's, um, not the greatest evidence. Neither the Reddit IPO, nor Reddit itself, show that the internet is dying. The AI angle is more reasonable. That at least has the chance of doing real damage. Sites may have to find a way to restrict the damage, and search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do. It's not an easy problem, but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew.
- 10xDev 3y ago
  >Sites may have to find a way to restrict the damage The best you can do is create AI that detects AI but that's hardly effective. Twitter can't even get rid of "PUSSY IN BIO". >search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do You mean the same search engines that prioritize Quora, Pininterest and Medium which have all also become progressively worse? > but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew. We have already witnessed the sites with the most aggressive recommendation algorithms and quick dopamine generators like TikTok win, not sites with high quality content.
AlbertCory 3y ago
I'm just thrilled he said "toe" and not "tow." Seriously: in a few years they'll be the Pets.com of our era.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- haunter 3y ago
  >in a few years they'll be the Pets.com of our era Pets.com only lasted for 2 years (November 1998 - November 2000) Reddit is active since 2005, 18 years
  - wwweston 3y ago
    Yeah, pets.com misplaces it pretty badly. For better and worse, Reddit is the usenet of the second/social/2.0 wave of the web, perhaps better at some points because of the wider reach of the web, and often worse for the same reason (as well as the picket fence of ownership).
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      18 years, but privately held, and never profitable.
abeppu 3y ago
The lead in to this post says > None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing .. and then mentions Sam Altman's investment. His announcement in fall of 2014 specifically said: > First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit So _are_ there people who were highly involved reddit community members in 2014 who will get a payday? Or did they already have a chance to cash out some time ago, and only some fraction held on until now? Or did that 10% contribution to "people in the reddit community" not happen at all?
- interestica 3y ago
  Maybe AI is facilitating a new "Commons" in that people will feel more of a right to take and reuse and consume things created by these sites with a better understanding that they collectively contributed to their creation.
  - abeppu 3y ago
    ... except the "exorbitant" pricing on API access means that it's _not_ a commons that others can take from in a scalable way.
- abeppu 3y ago
  And in fairness, I can see why it might have been hard to give shares to the reddit community: - aren't there regulatory/legal problems with having a very large number of people owning equity in a company that's not public? - associating active reddit users with real people with addresses, accounts, etc would be real lift, and potentially alienating to users who have been operating under pseudonyms - establishing that you eventually get paid for activity seems like it creates a natural incentive for low-quality/high-volume (spam?) engagement, karma rings, etc. Rewarding only the people who _actually_ add value is messy
- 3y ago
insane_dreamer 3y ago
> losing $90.8 million on $804 million of revenue in 2023 and never having turned a profit how in the world could it possibly cost $900 million a year to run Reddit?
- jsheard 3y ago
  Maybe they're using Netlify? :P
- mjard 3y ago
  Seems they spent $438,346,000 on research and development. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024006294/reddits-1q423.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    Aren't developer salaries, servers, etc., included in that? That's what I seem to recall from recent tax changes that were discussed here a few weeks ago.
    - mjard 3y ago
      > Cost of Revenue > Cost of revenue consists primarily of payments to third parties for the cost of hosting and supporting our mobile applications and website. In addition, cost of revenue includes expenses directly associated with the delivery of our advertising and other services, including advertising measurement services and credit card and other transaction processing fees. Cost of revenue also consists of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation. That was only $111,011,000. Edit: This is incorrect, R&D does include R&D salaries.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        Given their employee count, that would imply a fully loaded headcount cost of around $50k. No, I don't think so?
dangus 3y ago
Honestly, this article feels a bit like a jumble of separate ideas. Dare I say, word salad. It has too many separate barely-related ideas about some barely-related websites with a sprinkle of AI. Take the example of Reddit. Yes, third party apps were effectively banned except for those who want to deal with paying a monthly fee. As someone who used to use one of those third party apps, one of its main benefits was to avoid advertisements. Reddit is a company that has never turned a profit. I’m not sure what person expects them to keep allowing people to access their API directly and cut out advertisements. When we bust out the word “enshittification” I feel like all logic gets thrown out the window and it turns into sensationalism. A Reddit that isn’t profitable is a Reddit that will die anyway, regardless of how enshittified it is. The Internet isn’t only made up of a handful of bad websites bad corporate leadership which are on the decline, it’s still an incredibly diverse place where new ideas come to fruition.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Its not just advertisements its getting a useable site at all. The new style reddit is terrible. It takes forever to load. When you read comments they start to crop so narrow that it not only puts in dozens of line breaks it will put the break in the characters of words. Old.reddit.com in comparison loads pages in a tenth the time and shows all the comments as you’d expect. Luckily that still works or I’d fully abandon the site.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > Its not just advertisements its getting a useable site at all. Yeah, it is particularly unusable for the community/commenting aspect of the site, because of how often you need to "click to load more", which sometimes means content popping into the middle and sometimes means navigating away so that you lose your place (and sometimes previously mid-loaded stuff) when you return. IMO it's heading into some of the same pitfalls that killed Digg, which over-focused on the headline-links and promoting specific material, at the expense of the person-to-person communication.
- ozymandias1337 3y ago
  Enshittification will exist for as long as the profit-seeking motive exists. As long as MAU is the prime target, enshittification will continue.
max_ 3y ago
>once again offering users nothing in return for their hard work. What does this guy want users to get? Is the platform not enough?
- kingofthehill98 3y ago
  I just want them to stop ruining every good platform out there. The enshitfication process of Twitter and Reddit has been remarkable in this sense. I think this is the idea behind the post, users shouldn't "get" anything, they just need to stop destroying every good online experience left.
  - warkdarrior 3y ago
    Kagi shows the way forward: monthly subscription to not get an enshittified product. And once one service gets enshittified, the user will move their subscription to another service.
- fullshark 3y ago
  He's a former journalist: https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/ He resents how social media destroyed traditional media via free labor from users, that statement a perfect reflection of that sentiment.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    I mean, traditional media was never big on paying the people it interviewed or the people that were photographed (or owners of the objects photographed) unless you were some “celebrity” with an agent.
- Steuard 3y ago
  I took two points from this part of the article. First, that the expected exchange for years was "users create content, the companies provide the platforms and show ads to pay for it". But over time, the companies have not just adopted new ways of profiting off of the users (which may feel more exploitative than simple advertising) but also reduced the functionality of the platforms. And second, that if there are vast amounts of money to be made off of all this activity, it's fundamentally not just for all of that money to go to the people who run the infrastructure, rather than some of it also going to the people who create and moderate the communities that make the infrastructure worth money at all. If most of the money flowing in to a company like Reddit went directly toward improving the user experience, then maybe the original deal that "the platform itself is your reward" would still be fine. But as soon as there are executives and investors getting big cash payouts, that means that a whole lot of user-created value is being siphoned off: the deal doesn't feel nearly as fair anymore.
harkinian 3y ago
"None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing" So? It's not a paid job, nobody said it was. You don't even own your Reddit posts. If you want something in return for your time spent, don't agree to terms you disagree with. Plenty of moderators are just doing it for the sake of it.
- Thrymr 3y ago
  As linked in another thread on this story, Sam Altman said this almost 10 years ago when investing in reddit [0]: > First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership. How is that "new way to think about community ownership" going for the reddit contributors? [0] https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit
  - harkinian 3y ago
    To answer your question, no it hasn't panned out. Reddit users aren't generally paid for their posts, nor was there any promise that they would be, even from Altman. Is the implication that some people got their hopes up from one investor's opinion on this?
helpfulContrib 3y ago
[dead]
tootie 3y ago
Saying that posters and mods are not getting value from the content they generate because they are not getting paid implies that reddit as a platform has no value. If you moderate the astronomy sub because you love astronomy and get joy from the community, then you are profiting from your involvement with or without getting paid.
bitwize 3y ago
We're either watching it die, or we're watching its immune response to some nasty tumors as people fuck off back to niche forums, the fediverse, etc.
- criddell 3y ago
  The internet isn't going to die. The web may die, but the internet carries a lot more than html traffic.
  - ozymandias1337 3y ago
    Web 3.0 is ded, long live Web 4.0 !!!
    - fragmede 3y ago
      You skipped Web 3.11 for Discord groups
neilv 3y ago
Reddit revenue idea: sue the heck out of developers of various LLMs and other models trained upon relatively high-value Reddit content, and switch to licensing the Reddit corpus at fees high enough to put Reddit in the black. Also, reconcile with contributors, and reverse some recent changes.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  They just licensed the data to Google for $65m, so it’s very possible to reconcile the remaining 90M they’re in the hole for. But it’s not clear if a license will be needed. Oh and the CEO made much more than that 90M last year, so you could cut his salary and immediately be profitable, no AI sellout required.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    We don’t know who else they were already licensing it out to. I think a contract with Google is too big to keep it under the radar (or Google wants their involvement to be known).
dakial1 3y ago
Ive been using lemmy since the API shenanigans from Reddit and, apart from the not so smooth onboarding (a problem with all Fediverse applications) the experience is pretty similar to Reddit, only lacking the volume. Since Reddit is following the enshittification path to try to pump up its valuation (ex: forced push to app use) I imagine that Lemmy will continue its slow organic growth until it hits critical mass. Hopefully all reddit investors would have exited until then...
- crznp 3y ago
  I hope so too, but how is Lemmy hosted when it is at the volume of Reddit? Supporting lemmy.world on Patreon? Or if niche communities are found on niche instances, how do I participate without either keeping up with inter-instance politics or just creating local accounts? It feels possible to scale Lemmy organizationally, but it also not something to take for granted.
  - dakial1 3y ago
    Fair question. If maybe they could somehow distribute the DB load over a network of users...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lode 3y ago
One way I’ve approached this is that I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps… so rather than submitting corrections to Google/Waze/Apple maps I try to use OpenStreetMap consistently and provide as much data as I can. (Such as opening hours of nearby shops.) I know that companies use this data as the basis for commercial offerings and I am completely fine with that, but I know that the data will always be available for free as well. As a side note, in general I’ve found the local OSM community to be much nicer than the local Waze admins.
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps… I try to use OpenStreetMap consistently and provide as much data as I can That’s a good thing and I like your framing. By contrast, the article frames this as you being tricked into it by the commercial companies to which you previously directly provided data but that’s just nonsense. You weren’t tricked, and you aren’t a victim. I’m glad OpenStreetMap is there to provide the same value with open data but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    > but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone. I disagree. Google et al very much trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases. They even tell people how "popular" they are because their reviews were included in searches. Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"?
    - harkinian 3y ago
      It's possible to be popular and also profited from at the same time.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      That's manipulative but not really deceptive.
uSoldering 3y ago
There is a direct parallel from companies using open source code to build monetization platforms while paying open source developers nothing; to companies using user generated content to build LLMs. At least with LLMs it is a self-poisoning well. The internet is dead, long live the internet.
thepasswordis 3y ago
Reddits attempt at community moderation killed it. Even hyper specific subs, like city subs, are victim to the ideological whims of their moderators. My local subreddit has basically become useless because mods have banned so many people, or attempted to ban questions which are generally related to the city. They want typical city related questions or discussions to go into weekly roundup threads, and the main sub is just for current events (read: politics). It’s extremely frustrating. I know it’s kind of boring to complain about mods, but seriously Reddits moderators are what poisoned it.
- harkinian 3y ago
  Wasn't it this way from the start, though?
  - thepasswordis 3y ago
    Moderation really used to be just removing spam or abuse. At some point it became enforcing topics. While yes a subreddit about trains should stay in topic space about trains, mods have overstepped that. Take for instance the Star Trek subreddit. Criticism of Star Trek discovery is banned, despite being clearly on topic.
    - r721 3y ago
      Yeah, I think topics should be separated from communities in future Reddit-like websites. I mean it's an indisputable fact that some article is about trains, and what's arguable is whether it needs to be discussed in that particular community. In my mind it looks something like this: 1) user posts a link (and upvotes some initial topics) 2) other users vote on those topics, also can propose some additional ones 3) topic mods can superdownvote/remove some topics (in case of trolling etc.) 4) community mods select posts for their communities from available posts, possibly automatically (based on upvoted topics)
      - harkinian 3y ago
        The community thing seems fine. If you don't like how a community is run, you can go to a different one.
holoduke 3y ago
For me people are a mirror of internet. People turned into soulless super consumers. Unfortunately like many people here I am part of it. But if i had the opportunity i would step out of that world.
ozymandias1337 3y ago
Mostly Web 3.0 is dying because it is a scam.
- harkinian 3y ago
  Regardless of whether you consider it a scam, it's not worthy of the "web 3.0" title. Like, why did npm allow Ethereum to have the "web3" name instead of simply "ethereum"? It's so annoying.
  - ozymandias1337 3y ago
    npm is a member of Microsft's Cabal o' Privacy Haters; Microsft & Scum need the Web3.0 gimmick to hype up their shareholders &/or fanbois.
    - harkinian 3y ago
      Oh, they own npm, I forgot. Just when I thought I'd gotten rid of MSFT.
gamepsys 3y ago
What an awful time for a tech company to IPO, I bet they are kicking themselves for waiting so long. A decade ago the idea was to maximize for user engagement and you can always monetize later. As companies began to monetize we adopted to term " enshittification" to describe how that feels on the user perspective. Today, after several products have gone down this path, we see that the revenue of a fully monetized community is less than investors originally thought, and there are moat concerns. Reddit is way to late to IPO. They cannot sell the idea of future growth. They have already gone deep down the enshittification path and are still not profitable. On top of that, they missed the top of the market for what they are selling by several years. Are we watching the internet die? We are certainly watching a lot of it become worse, and the Reddit IPO is a good time to point that out.
bradgranath 3y ago
Oh, honey, it was dead two decades ago.
verisimi 3y ago
I think the internet is going to recede in value, on account of lack of trust. It already is mainly just a bunch of corporate shop fronts. AI is not going to improve the user experience - it's only going to become more personal and more irritating.
zemo 3y ago
> Altman and his ilk believe they're the new Leonardo Da Vincis, but they're little more than petty kings and rent-seekers trying to steal the world's magic. what’s sad is they don’t even compare themselves to historical patrons. Would we have Bernini without Borghese? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the genAI peddlers aren’t trying to grow artists and grow culture, they are trying only to grow content and sell it. It is a structure that is far less enriching for society than the patronage model.
- syntactile 3y ago
  I love this framing of the dynamics, as a cultural concern as much as an economic one, because it cuts to the chase in a way that the AGI or open/closed themes never seem to. The extent to which anyone cares about the internet or software more broadly can only really achieve parity with past and present realities; there is no meaningful transcendence beyond the viscera of human experience because -- like trees in the forest -- we can only care about what we care about. And what has made the world a truly great place is not post-humanist striving but the connective tissue of culture that gives us access to other people, great artists and pedestrians alike, who are just like us, real. Everything else is a vice.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
>it's become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly it has become apparent? oh, this is someone having their "light bulb" moment. wait till they read about actual slavery in 2024!
seydor 3y ago
Reddit was done long before the IPO, even before the moderator revolt. I don't really find value in any of the niche subreddits, the only use i found is discussing, er sorry, shitposting about politics again and again as a pastime. Sure there are times when you can get an answer if you shout loud enough in some subreddit but it 's rare anymore. I don't even know why they are IPOing so long after their product peaked. Are any investors seriously expecting future returns? People keep finding ways to discuss , all around the internet. No, the internet is not dying as a communication medium, it's dying as a content medium. IMO, twitter has made a comeback as a more relaxed, (and yes, more free) discussion place. The format is not conductive to information density but maybe they 'll figure something better
throwanem 3y ago
The comparison with low-background steel is especially interesting, because since we ('we' the human species) effectively stopped doing atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1960s, background levels have returned to within a few microsieverts per year of pre-war normal, and there barely still exists any specific need for materials manufactured prior to 1945.
nickdothutton 3y ago
We probably are watching the Internet die. If we want something better then we are going to have to build it.
- nerdo 3y ago
  You can't, it's very expensive and controlled now: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-nuts-show-nuts-doesnt-work-in-2022 https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-n...
  - kps 3y ago
    Your link cannot be viewed without an account. Or is that your point?
    - nerdo 3y ago
      They’re burning 30 million dollars a year on a site that’s torched over a billion since its inception. Just give the product manager one signup for their kpi before they/them are put out on the street.
  - caekislove 3y ago
    >"You'll need to be on Tumblr to see this particular blog " I see what you did there! EDIT: https://web.archive.org/web/20221102132003/https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-nuts-show-nuts-doesnt-work-in-2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20221102132003/https://www.tumbl...
- pixl97 3y ago
  The internet or the web? Because putting a trillion in infrastructure for your own internet doesn't seem likely. Now if you're talking about running on IP, we'll whatever system you're going to build is going to inherent all the problems of the internet instantly when someone here on HN makes a IP to magic wonderland gateway a day later.
hn8305823 3y ago
Don't worry about the Internet, it will survive this just fine. It was designed to reroute around damage like the "Reddit IPO".
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  The era of "The Net" as a magical place away from the world and its troubles is well and truly gone. I think that's what oldsters like us mourn the most - the world has invaded full force and brought its troubles with it. It's just that now we're starting to notice, as those easy-peasy centralized platforms inevitably turn the screws even as the spammers vandalize anything that's open.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    When the internet was young the predators were small, but now that it's grown the predators are nation state sized. You can be DDOSed off forever if some monied actor chooses that for you. And that is tiny, as you say, to the raw torrent of spam looking to infected your site with their message. It's enough to kill any host.
JohnFen 3y ago
I think that we are. The web mostly died a good while ago, killed by commercialization. I think that trend has continued and will continue until the blood-draining is complete. But it depends on what you want the web to be, I suppose.
- rchaud 3y ago
  The death knell was when blogs with personality and a single-topic focus started posting those "Here's our favourite vaccuum cleaner for Thanksgiving" type garbage.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    That is but one cut in the thousand cuts that killed the internet. The fact your useful site could be DDOSed by any kiddy so you had to put it behind cloudflare is but another. The fact that security became a huge burden on most self hosted software was another. Moderation and spam if you allowed posting is just another. Getting all of your content copied and Google boosting the copier above you yet another.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"These people have names - Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which has its own model called LLaMA), Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft - and they are responsible for trying to standardize the internet and turn it into a series of toll roads that all lead to the same place." Treacherous cretins.
p0w3n3d 3y ago
Internet is being divided into big conglomerates ruled by the most wealthy corporations. Knowledge is being held back and closed behind login-walls and pay-walls. There is a global censorship introduced in which people are being convicted automatically, and only then they can only prove innocence, but sometimes they don't because no one answers or there is no way of discussing the matter with a human being
- naveen99 3y ago
  Corporations are owned by people. Corporations aren’t wealthy, they are wealth.
rchaud 3y ago
People talk about a "decentralized Internet" and immediately start talking about pie-in-the-sky solutions: Web3, Gopher, private Discords, etc. We already had a successful era of decentralization with vBulletin and PHPbb boards in the 2000s. Reddit and Facebook Pages took over that niche, and started pulling up the ladder behind them by de-emphasizing posts that linked out to a third party site. The message was clear: got something to post? Post it on the site directly, don't link. Their advertising business relies on people spending as much time as possible on [myPlatform], as opposed to [yourSite]. Heck, even that famous article about "dead Internet" has its source in a forum topic, not a viral tweet. Because it's a forum post, it's not arbitrarily limited to 280 characters, there's actually room for nuance, both in the OP and the replies to it. https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/ https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
- FMecha 3y ago
  And there was also IRC chat, which is a protocol, not a software/platform. On the forums end, there's also things like ProBoards, which works like Discord in sense that they are hosted by a company (and thus pursuant to their terms), in which they act as the community "hub".
  - ozymandias1337 3y ago
    I miss those days when most websites implemented this.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    For the old 2000s boards, there is Tapatalk, which was a lifesaver back in 2011-13 when many boards did not have mobile-friendly layouts. Unfortunately, Tapatalk enshittified rapidly by adding insane amounts of ads and other dark patterns to their app, forcing me to uninstall it.
    - FMecha 3y ago
      Also they took over InvisionFree/Zetaboards, which also destroyed their customization.
EasyMark 3y ago
The internet obviously isn't dying. It may be returning to the sphere of the nerds though, where there is an corporate, milquetoast internet for the plebes and a more open, decentralized network for us nerds. Unless the government starts filtering all traffic and activity the internet network will live on.
Clubber 3y ago
> Are We Watching the Internet Die? Short answer, no. I was in college when the internet went public. It's very much alive and well and exceeding all expectations.
dark__paladin 3y ago
Yes.
sotix 3y ago
This blog post is the death of the internet. As you scroll down, it suddenly forces a pop up to subscribe to the blog via email. There is no respect to the reader at all and makes the internet a worse place to use. Perhaps the message would be more effective if it wasn’t doing what it laments.
- ozymandias1337 3y ago
  I Agree, this is just typical boomer behaviour.
qustrolabe 3y ago
5 times this website popped "subscribe to my newsletter". 2 times as full screen annoying pop up and 3 times in between paragraphs. If this crap is not direct evidence of "internet dying" idk what is
- aendruk 3y ago
  I even acquiesced (using a fake address expressing my displeasure with their aggression) to the first popup yet the bombardment continued.
AbstractH24 3y ago
We've been saying this for decade[s] now haven't we? The question is no longer is it dying, its how do we change it or even replace it.

189 points by cdme 3y ago

BuckRogers 3y ago

[flagged]

bdcravens 3y ago
The same has been said of everything from TV to cars to the printing press.
- wk_end 3y ago
  The printing press and TV did ruin the societies that preceded them. The new societies they produced were better (in the case of the printing press) or arguably better (in the case of TV) - by some subjective metric of goodness. But there's no guarantee that the past will be like the future, or that all technological developments create better societies, or that it's always better in all ways. The development of the personal automobile improved many things but also created many catastrophes - environmental destruction, automobile fatalities, leaded gasoline, urban "renewal" and sprawl - that we're still grappling with. If we come out on the other side then yay, but even then we're talking about 150 years of some serious growing pains. Maybe the internet looks the same way.
RiverCrochet 3y ago
Is it the Internet that has ruined society, or various factors that use the Internet to accelerate their effects?

RiverCrochet 3y ago

> but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies This statement confuses me. I see how the fact that most people tend to cluster around a small number of platforms effectively at least trends this toward being more and more true, but what are the older "dark ages" referred to here? AOL? In the 90's you could take the easy route and sign up with AOL, but there were numerous dial-up ISPs you could choose from. Even then, you didn't have to use the AOL portal (though I'm sure non-tech savvy people who only used AOL for email never bothered to understand).

jhbadger 3y ago
AOL only started allowing access to the Internet at large in 1993 (thus leading to the "Eternal September" that greybeards complain about to this day). Before then, AOL users were limited to what AOL provided. And there were other such services such as CompuServe and GENIE that were similar.
- greedo 3y ago
  AOL didn't provide Usenet access until 1994. Eternal September started when dialup ISPs started providing access in 1993.
netsharc 3y ago
Nowadays, for the average Internet user, content is on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube...
- bombcar 3y ago
  And back then, the "Internet" was AOL for a while - look at old ads, they often had their "aol keyword" in large type than their URL. But shortly afterwards there was an explosion of web content and forums that over time has been digested back into giant conglomerates - but for a short, beautiful time, if you wanted something you had to go find it yourself, on site-owner's terms.
  - jareklupinski 3y ago
    > "aol keyword" i haven't had a retro memory pull that strong in a while
    - bombcar 3y ago
      It's really weird for me, because it was such a huge thing at the time, and I was there and never used it - even though my friend's connection to the Internet was through his mom's AOL account; it was just something you did and then minimized.

echelon 3y ago

A want a P2P social networking construct where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms, and leave the rest of the web/platforms to rot. We should have gone P2P in 200X, but Facebook and Google took us down a different path. Bittorrent was good. Semantic Web kind of understood the task, but it was academic and not leveraged. Now we understand the assignment and have all the experience necessary to build the thing. Mastodon and ActivityPub are not the solution. Bittorrent was.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Bittorrent is a great way to download big files. Heck, if Docker used Bittorrent to download files it might even work on my DSL connection but I guess reliability is an "enterprise" feature. Bittorrent is not a good way to download small bits of data like status updates. What do you think is so bad about ActivityPub? Should we fall back on RSS and just settle for stale data sometimes and excessive polling other times?
- sircastor 3y ago
  I think the implication here is that ActivityPub is still server to server. Is better distributed than one closed-monolith to another, but BitTorrent was really good client to client. Protocol wise it’s probably not perfect for small updates, but imagine if you just had a magnet link to your friends’ “website” which, instead of being hosted somewhere is available when they update it and gets distributed around peers.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Sounds like Bitcoin to me. Bitcoin took so long to get invented because if you went to a computer science conference and said you'd give a talk about how you built a node network 20,000 computers in it that does as much work as 1 computer did people would just laugh at you. Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting, but peer-to-peer networks can easily be a way to make Amazon Web Services look cheap the same way that Bitcoin makes Visa and Mastercard look fast and inexpensive.

coliveira 3y ago

> None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits ... will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing They'll not make money because they're stupid. I have never participated in this kind of scam (this is what I call getting free labor to prop up a private company). But several people seem to love donating free work for private companies.

bugbuddy 3y ago
I am genuinely curious what is different about us posting here?
- screenobobeano 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwitaway222 3y ago
    Shhh... you're not supposed to say that or they will make a Facebook login and force it.
- bombcar 3y ago
  dang gets paid, basically That's what it comes down to - this site has a particular purpose, and it is open about it being basically a freebie given out to help Ycombinator; worth whatever hosting + dang costs these days.
  - alex_suzuki 3y ago
    does he?
- harkinian 3y ago
  Nothing. I don't expect something in return for my HN posts, and I don't care what someone does with them. It's not a job.

INTPenis 3y ago

People keep panicking about huge internet portals but the thing is that if you compare the number of internet users 20 years ago with now there is a MASSIVE difference. That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating. Today it's EVERYBODY. And they're really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they're consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet. So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.

shubb 3y ago
Maybe this goes like usenet - spam technology improves to the point where the old open platform is unusable...
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  I think that's the most succinct explanation of the problem that I've ever seen.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  I'm more of a proponent for small community hosted nodes that require manual approval to join, and federate in a larger network. That way each node in the larger community can vet new members, but they can still communicate across nodes. Sort of like ActivityPub, or something like it. Not trying to prefer one design over another, we'll see what comes.
swatcoder 3y ago
20 years ago, the internet was already mainstream in Western markets and we were in a repreive between the old walled gardens of AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/etc and new agressively-walling gardens of Facebook/Twitter/etc. That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden's arbitrary/anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight. You're talking more about the 90's which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.

empath-nirvana 3y ago

Seems to me that there's probably a market for websites that do more curating and filtering for real people.

assimpleaspossi 3y ago
Seems to me that there IS a market for web sites that offer something more than social commentary, product pitches and ads. That are genuinely useful. That help accomplish needed, wanted, useful and necessary things. Yes, such places exist but are in the very minority.
timbit42 3y ago
So we're moving back to what Yahoo! was originally?

axus 3y ago

There's a lot of complaints here, the advice is decent but not magical. "Don't spend time and money on crap". Maybe the implication is "Do spend time and money on good services". Reddit never owed me anything, never spent any money and was paid back for the time invested. Might spend 5 minutes per week on it now. Plenty of people are trying to make a better Reddit, nobody has targeted them with unfair competition.

chihuahua 3y ago
Right - Reddit exists, and I can make up my own mind on whether I want to use it, how much I want to use it, and whether I want to volunteer as an unpaid mod. I do not understand people who volunteer unpaid labor and then complain bitterly about it.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  It doesn’t pay well, unless you’re crooked. I’d be more worried about those that don’t complain.
- alx_the_new_guy 3y ago
  >I do not understand people who volunteer unpaid labor and then complain bitterly about it. Well, let's say you helped someone on Reddit. What you were intending to do is to share your life experience with someone, making their, and maybe probably someone else's life meaningfully easier/save them some time. And, hopefully, someone will treat you the same way in return. What you also have done is contributed said part of your life experience towards making some meaninglessly rich guy even richer, and who will enshittify the platform you presumably enjoy using in return, so that he can make pennies on top of the follar he already earns.
  - spaced-out 3y ago
    Why did you "help" (in other words make a post/comment) that person on Reddit? Because you enjoy it, you enjoyed reading posts and comments by strangers, replying to them, and seeing your comments accumulate upvotes and other comments. Reddit gave you that experience for free.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

No. Reddit is doing an IPO, so the internet is dying? That's, um, not the greatest evidence. Neither the Reddit IPO, nor Reddit itself, show that the internet is dying. The AI angle is more reasonable. That at least has the chance of doing real damage. Sites may have to find a way to restrict the damage, and search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do. It's not an easy problem, but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew.

10xDev 3y ago
>Sites may have to find a way to restrict the damage The best you can do is create AI that detects AI but that's hardly effective. Twitter can't even get rid of "PUSSY IN BIO". >search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do You mean the same search engines that prioritize Quora, Pininterest and Medium which have all also become progressively worse? > but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew. We have already witnessed the sites with the most aggressive recommendation algorithms and quick dopamine generators like TikTok win, not sites with high quality content.

AlbertCory 3y ago

I'm just thrilled he said "toe" and not "tow." Seriously: in a few years they'll be the Pets.com of our era.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
haunter 3y ago
>in a few years they'll be the Pets.com of our era Pets.com only lasted for 2 years (November 1998 - November 2000) Reddit is active since 2005, 18 years
- wwweston 3y ago
  Yeah, pets.com misplaces it pretty badly. For better and worse, Reddit is the usenet of the second/social/2.0 wave of the web, perhaps better at some points because of the wider reach of the web, and often worse for the same reason (as well as the picket fence of ownership).
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    18 years, but privately held, and never profitable.

abeppu 3y ago

The lead in to this post says > None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing .. and then mentions Sam Altman's investment. His announcement in fall of 2014 specifically said: > First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit So _are_ there people who were highly involved reddit community members in 2014 who will get a payday? Or did they already have a chance to cash out some time ago, and only some fraction held on until now? Or did that 10% contribution to "people in the reddit community" not happen at all?

interestica 3y ago
Maybe AI is facilitating a new "Commons" in that people will feel more of a right to take and reuse and consume things created by these sites with a better understanding that they collectively contributed to their creation.
- abeppu 3y ago
  ... except the "exorbitant" pricing on API access means that it's _not_ a commons that others can take from in a scalable way.
abeppu 3y ago
And in fairness, I can see why it might have been hard to give shares to the reddit community: - aren't there regulatory/legal problems with having a very large number of people owning equity in a company that's not public? - associating active reddit users with real people with addresses, accounts, etc would be real lift, and potentially alienating to users who have been operating under pseudonyms - establishing that you eventually get paid for activity seems like it creates a natural incentive for low-quality/high-volume (spam?) engagement, karma rings, etc. Rewarding only the people who _actually_ add value is messy
3y ago

insane_dreamer 3y ago

> losing $90.8 million on $804 million of revenue in 2023 and never having turned a profit how in the world could it possibly cost $900 million a year to run Reddit?

jsheard 3y ago
Maybe they're using Netlify? :P
mjard 3y ago
Seems they spent $438,346,000 on research and development. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024006294/reddits-1q423.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  Aren't developer salaries, servers, etc., included in that? That's what I seem to recall from recent tax changes that were discussed here a few weeks ago.
  - mjard 3y ago
    > Cost of Revenue > Cost of revenue consists primarily of payments to third parties for the cost of hosting and supporting our mobile applications and website. In addition, cost of revenue includes expenses directly associated with the delivery of our advertising and other services, including advertising measurement services and credit card and other transaction processing fees. Cost of revenue also consists of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation. That was only $111,011,000. Edit: This is incorrect, R&D does include R&D salaries.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Given their employee count, that would imply a fully loaded headcount cost of around $50k. No, I don't think so?

dangus 3y ago

Honestly, this article feels a bit like a jumble of separate ideas. Dare I say, word salad. It has too many separate barely-related ideas about some barely-related websites with a sprinkle of AI. Take the example of Reddit. Yes, third party apps were effectively banned except for those who want to deal with paying a monthly fee. As someone who used to use one of those third party apps, one of its main benefits was to avoid advertisements. Reddit is a company that has never turned a profit. I’m not sure what person expects them to keep allowing people to access their API directly and cut out advertisements. When we bust out the word “enshittification” I feel like all logic gets thrown out the window and it turns into sensationalism. A Reddit that isn’t profitable is a Reddit that will die anyway, regardless of how enshittified it is. The Internet isn’t only made up of a handful of bad websites bad corporate leadership which are on the decline, it’s still an incredibly diverse place where new ideas come to fruition.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Its not just advertisements its getting a useable site at all. The new style reddit is terrible. It takes forever to load. When you read comments they start to crop so narrow that it not only puts in dozens of line breaks it will put the break in the characters of words. Old.reddit.com in comparison loads pages in a tenth the time and shows all the comments as you’d expect. Luckily that still works or I’d fully abandon the site.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > Its not just advertisements its getting a useable site at all. Yeah, it is particularly unusable for the community/commenting aspect of the site, because of how often you need to "click to load more", which sometimes means content popping into the middle and sometimes means navigating away so that you lose your place (and sometimes previously mid-loaded stuff) when you return. IMO it's heading into some of the same pitfalls that killed Digg, which over-focused on the headline-links and promoting specific material, at the expense of the person-to-person communication.
ozymandias1337 3y ago
Enshittification will exist for as long as the profit-seeking motive exists. As long as MAU is the prime target, enshittification will continue.

max_ 3y ago

>once again offering users nothing in return for their hard work. What does this guy want users to get? Is the platform not enough?

kingofthehill98 3y ago
I just want them to stop ruining every good platform out there. The enshitfication process of Twitter and Reddit has been remarkable in this sense. I think this is the idea behind the post, users shouldn't "get" anything, they just need to stop destroying every good online experience left.
- warkdarrior 3y ago
  Kagi shows the way forward: monthly subscription to not get an enshittified product. And once one service gets enshittified, the user will move their subscription to another service.
fullshark 3y ago
He's a former journalist: https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/ He resents how social media destroyed traditional media via free labor from users, that statement a perfect reflection of that sentiment.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  I mean, traditional media was never big on paying the people it interviewed or the people that were photographed (or owners of the objects photographed) unless you were some “celebrity” with an agent.
Steuard 3y ago
I took two points from this part of the article. First, that the expected exchange for years was "users create content, the companies provide the platforms and show ads to pay for it". But over time, the companies have not just adopted new ways of profiting off of the users (which may feel more exploitative than simple advertising) but also reduced the functionality of the platforms. And second, that if there are vast amounts of money to be made off of all this activity, it's fundamentally not just for all of that money to go to the people who run the infrastructure, rather than some of it also going to the people who create and moderate the communities that make the infrastructure worth money at all. If most of the money flowing in to a company like Reddit went directly toward improving the user experience, then maybe the original deal that "the platform itself is your reward" would still be fine. But as soon as there are executives and investors getting big cash payouts, that means that a whole lot of user-created value is being siphoned off: the deal doesn't feel nearly as fair anymore.

harkinian 3y ago

"None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing" So? It's not a paid job, nobody said it was. You don't even own your Reddit posts. If you want something in return for your time spent, don't agree to terms you disagree with. Plenty of moderators are just doing it for the sake of it.

Thrymr 3y ago
As linked in another thread on this story, Sam Altman said this almost 10 years ago when investing in reddit [0]: > First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership. How is that "new way to think about community ownership" going for the reddit contributors? [0] https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit
- harkinian 3y ago
  To answer your question, no it hasn't panned out. Reddit users aren't generally paid for their posts, nor was there any promise that they would be, even from Altman. Is the implication that some people got their hopes up from one investor's opinion on this?

helpfulContrib 3y ago

[dead]

tootie 3y ago

Saying that posters and mods are not getting value from the content they generate because they are not getting paid implies that reddit as a platform has no value. If you moderate the astronomy sub because you love astronomy and get joy from the community, then you are profiting from your involvement with or without getting paid.

bitwize 3y ago

We're either watching it die, or we're watching its immune response to some nasty tumors as people fuck off back to niche forums, the fediverse, etc.

criddell 3y ago
The internet isn't going to die. The web may die, but the internet carries a lot more than html traffic.
- ozymandias1337 3y ago
  Web 3.0 is ded, long live Web 4.0 !!!
  - fragmede 3y ago
    You skipped Web 3.11 for Discord groups

neilv 3y ago

Reddit revenue idea: sue the heck out of developers of various LLMs and other models trained upon relatively high-value Reddit content, and switch to licensing the Reddit corpus at fees high enough to put Reddit in the black. Also, reconcile with contributors, and reverse some recent changes.

vineyardmike 3y ago
They just licensed the data to Google for $65m, so it’s very possible to reconcile the remaining 90M they’re in the hole for. But it’s not clear if a license will be needed. Oh and the CEO made much more than that 90M last year, so you could cut his salary and immediately be profitable, no AI sellout required.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  We don’t know who else they were already licensing it out to. I think a contract with Google is too big to keep it under the radar (or Google wants their involvement to be known).

dakial1 3y ago

Ive been using lemmy since the API shenanigans from Reddit and, apart from the not so smooth onboarding (a problem with all Fediverse applications) the experience is pretty similar to Reddit, only lacking the volume. Since Reddit is following the enshittification path to try to pump up its valuation (ex: forced push to app use) I imagine that Lemmy will continue its slow organic growth until it hits critical mass. Hopefully all reddit investors would have exited until then...

crznp 3y ago
I hope so too, but how is Lemmy hosted when it is at the volume of Reddit? Supporting lemmy.world on Patreon? Or if niche communities are found on niche instances, how do I participate without either keeping up with inter-instance politics or just creating local accounts? It feels possible to scale Lemmy organizationally, but it also not something to take for granted.
- dakial1 3y ago
  Fair question. If maybe they could somehow distribute the DB load over a network of users...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lode 3y ago

One way I’ve approached this is that I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps… so rather than submitting corrections to Google/Waze/Apple maps I try to use OpenStreetMap consistently and provide as much data as I can. (Such as opening hours of nearby shops.) I know that companies use this data as the basis for commercial offerings and I am completely fine with that, but I know that the data will always be available for free as well. As a side note, in general I’ve found the local OSM community to be much nicer than the local Waze admins.

nyokodo 3y ago
> I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps… I try to use OpenStreetMap consistently and provide as much data as I can That’s a good thing and I like your framing. By contrast, the article frames this as you being tricked into it by the commercial companies to which you previously directly provided data but that’s just nonsense. You weren’t tricked, and you aren’t a victim. I’m glad OpenStreetMap is there to provide the same value with open data but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  > but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone. I disagree. Google et al very much trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases. They even tell people how "popular" they are because their reviews were included in searches. Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"?
  - harkinian 3y ago
    It's possible to be popular and also profited from at the same time.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    That's manipulative but not really deceptive.

uSoldering 3y ago

There is a direct parallel from companies using open source code to build monetization platforms while paying open source developers nothing; to companies using user generated content to build LLMs. At least with LLMs it is a self-poisoning well. The internet is dead, long live the internet.

thepasswordis 3y ago

Reddits attempt at community moderation killed it. Even hyper specific subs, like city subs, are victim to the ideological whims of their moderators. My local subreddit has basically become useless because mods have banned so many people, or attempted to ban questions which are generally related to the city. They want typical city related questions or discussions to go into weekly roundup threads, and the main sub is just for current events (read: politics). It’s extremely frustrating. I know it’s kind of boring to complain about mods, but seriously Reddits moderators are what poisoned it.

harkinian 3y ago
Wasn't it this way from the start, though?
- thepasswordis 3y ago
  Moderation really used to be just removing spam or abuse. At some point it became enforcing topics. While yes a subreddit about trains should stay in topic space about trains, mods have overstepped that. Take for instance the Star Trek subreddit. Criticism of Star Trek discovery is banned, despite being clearly on topic.
  - r721 3y ago
    Yeah, I think topics should be separated from communities in future Reddit-like websites. I mean it's an indisputable fact that some article is about trains, and what's arguable is whether it needs to be discussed in that particular community. In my mind it looks something like this: 1) user posts a link (and upvotes some initial topics) 2) other users vote on those topics, also can propose some additional ones 3) topic mods can superdownvote/remove some topics (in case of trolling etc.) 4) community mods select posts for their communities from available posts, possibly automatically (based on upvoted topics)
    - harkinian 3y ago
      The community thing seems fine. If you don't like how a community is run, you can go to a different one.

holoduke 3y ago

For me people are a mirror of internet. People turned into soulless super consumers. Unfortunately like many people here I am part of it. But if i had the opportunity i would step out of that world.

ozymandias1337 3y ago

Mostly Web 3.0 is dying because it is a scam.

harkinian 3y ago
Regardless of whether you consider it a scam, it's not worthy of the "web 3.0" title. Like, why did npm allow Ethereum to have the "web3" name instead of simply "ethereum"? It's so annoying.
- ozymandias1337 3y ago
  npm is a member of Microsft's Cabal o' Privacy Haters; Microsft & Scum need the Web3.0 gimmick to hype up their shareholders &/or fanbois.
  - harkinian 3y ago
    Oh, they own npm, I forgot. Just when I thought I'd gotten rid of MSFT.

gamepsys 3y ago

What an awful time for a tech company to IPO, I bet they are kicking themselves for waiting so long. A decade ago the idea was to maximize for user engagement and you can always monetize later. As companies began to monetize we adopted to term " enshittification" to describe how that feels on the user perspective. Today, after several products have gone down this path, we see that the revenue of a fully monetized community is less than investors originally thought, and there are moat concerns. Reddit is way to late to IPO. They cannot sell the idea of future growth. They have already gone deep down the enshittification path and are still not profitable. On top of that, they missed the top of the market for what they are selling by several years. Are we watching the internet die? We are certainly watching a lot of it become worse, and the Reddit IPO is a good time to point that out.

bradgranath 3y ago

Oh, honey, it was dead two decades ago.

verisimi 3y ago

I think the internet is going to recede in value, on account of lack of trust. It already is mainly just a bunch of corporate shop fronts. AI is not going to improve the user experience - it's only going to become more personal and more irritating.

zemo 3y ago

> Altman and his ilk believe they're the new Leonardo Da Vincis, but they're little more than petty kings and rent-seekers trying to steal the world's magic. what’s sad is they don’t even compare themselves to historical patrons. Would we have Bernini without Borghese? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the genAI peddlers aren’t trying to grow artists and grow culture, they are trying only to grow content and sell it. It is a structure that is far less enriching for society than the patronage model.

syntactile 3y ago
I love this framing of the dynamics, as a cultural concern as much as an economic one, because it cuts to the chase in a way that the AGI or open/closed themes never seem to. The extent to which anyone cares about the internet or software more broadly can only really achieve parity with past and present realities; there is no meaningful transcendence beyond the viscera of human experience because -- like trees in the forest -- we can only care about what we care about. And what has made the world a truly great place is not post-humanist striving but the connective tissue of culture that gives us access to other people, great artists and pedestrians alike, who are just like us, real. Everything else is a vice.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

>it's become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly it has become apparent? oh, this is someone having their "light bulb" moment. wait till they read about actual slavery in 2024!

seydor 3y ago

Reddit was done long before the IPO, even before the moderator revolt. I don't really find value in any of the niche subreddits, the only use i found is discussing, er sorry, shitposting about politics again and again as a pastime. Sure there are times when you can get an answer if you shout loud enough in some subreddit but it 's rare anymore. I don't even know why they are IPOing so long after their product peaked. Are any investors seriously expecting future returns? People keep finding ways to discuss , all around the internet. No, the internet is not dying as a communication medium, it's dying as a content medium. IMO, twitter has made a comeback as a more relaxed, (and yes, more free) discussion place. The format is not conductive to information density but maybe they 'll figure something better

throwanem 3y ago

The comparison with low-background steel is especially interesting, because since we ('we' the human species) effectively stopped doing atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1960s, background levels have returned to within a few microsieverts per year of pre-war normal, and there barely still exists any specific need for materials manufactured prior to 1945.

nickdothutton 3y ago

We probably are watching the Internet die. If we want something better then we are going to have to build it.

nerdo 3y ago
You can't, it's very expensive and controlled now: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-nuts-show-nuts-doesnt-work-in-2022 https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-n...
- kps 3y ago
  Your link cannot be viewed without an account. Or is that your point?
  - nerdo 3y ago
    They’re burning 30 million dollars a year on a site that’s torched over a billion since its inception. Just give the product manager one signup for their kpi before they/them are put out on the street.
- caekislove 3y ago
  >"You'll need to be on Tumblr to see this particular blog " I see what you did there! EDIT: https://web.archive.org/web/20221102132003/https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-nuts-show-nuts-doesnt-work-in-2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20221102132003/https://www.tumbl...
pixl97 3y ago
The internet or the web? Because putting a trillion in infrastructure for your own internet doesn't seem likely. Now if you're talking about running on IP, we'll whatever system you're going to build is going to inherent all the problems of the internet instantly when someone here on HN makes a IP to magic wonderland gateway a day later.

hn8305823 3y ago

Don't worry about the Internet, it will survive this just fine. It was designed to reroute around damage like the "Reddit IPO".

flyinghamster 3y ago
The era of "The Net" as a magical place away from the world and its troubles is well and truly gone. I think that's what oldsters like us mourn the most - the world has invaded full force and brought its troubles with it. It's just that now we're starting to notice, as those easy-peasy centralized platforms inevitably turn the screws even as the spammers vandalize anything that's open.
- pixl97 3y ago
  When the internet was young the predators were small, but now that it's grown the predators are nation state sized. You can be DDOSed off forever if some monied actor chooses that for you. And that is tiny, as you say, to the raw torrent of spam looking to infected your site with their message. It's enough to kill any host.

JohnFen 3y ago

I think that we are. The web mostly died a good while ago, killed by commercialization. I think that trend has continued and will continue until the blood-draining is complete. But it depends on what you want the web to be, I suppose.

rchaud 3y ago
The death knell was when blogs with personality and a single-topic focus started posting those "Here's our favourite vaccuum cleaner for Thanksgiving" type garbage.
- pixl97 3y ago
  That is but one cut in the thousand cuts that killed the internet. The fact your useful site could be DDOSed by any kiddy so you had to put it behind cloudflare is but another. The fact that security became a huge burden on most self hosted software was another. Moderation and spam if you allowed posting is just another. Getting all of your content copied and Google boosting the copier above you yet another.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"These people have names - Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which has its own model called LLaMA), Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft - and they are responsible for trying to standardize the internet and turn it into a series of toll roads that all lead to the same place." Treacherous cretins.

p0w3n3d 3y ago

Internet is being divided into big conglomerates ruled by the most wealthy corporations. Knowledge is being held back and closed behind login-walls and pay-walls. There is a global censorship introduced in which people are being convicted automatically, and only then they can only prove innocence, but sometimes they don't because no one answers or there is no way of discussing the matter with a human being

naveen99 3y ago
Corporations are owned by people. Corporations aren’t wealthy, they are wealth.

rchaud 3y ago

People talk about a "decentralized Internet" and immediately start talking about pie-in-the-sky solutions: Web3, Gopher, private Discords, etc. We already had a successful era of decentralization with vBulletin and PHPbb boards in the 2000s. Reddit and Facebook Pages took over that niche, and started pulling up the ladder behind them by de-emphasizing posts that linked out to a third party site. The message was clear: got something to post? Post it on the site directly, don't link. Their advertising business relies on people spending as much time as possible on [myPlatform], as opposed to [yourSite]. Heck, even that famous article about "dead Internet" has its source in a forum topic, not a viral tweet. Because it's a forum post, it's not arbitrarily limited to 280 characters, there's actually room for nuance, both in the OP and the replies to it. https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/ https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

FMecha 3y ago
And there was also IRC chat, which is a protocol, not a software/platform. On the forums end, there's also things like ProBoards, which works like Discord in sense that they are hosted by a company (and thus pursuant to their terms), in which they act as the community "hub".
- ozymandias1337 3y ago
  I miss those days when most websites implemented this.
- rchaud 3y ago
  For the old 2000s boards, there is Tapatalk, which was a lifesaver back in 2011-13 when many boards did not have mobile-friendly layouts. Unfortunately, Tapatalk enshittified rapidly by adding insane amounts of ads and other dark patterns to their app, forcing me to uninstall it.
  - FMecha 3y ago
    Also they took over InvisionFree/Zetaboards, which also destroyed their customization.

EasyMark 3y ago

The internet obviously isn't dying. It may be returning to the sphere of the nerds though, where there is an corporate, milquetoast internet for the plebes and a more open, decentralized network for us nerds. Unless the government starts filtering all traffic and activity the internet network will live on.

Clubber 3y ago

> Are We Watching the Internet Die? Short answer, no. I was in college when the internet went public. It's very much alive and well and exceeding all expectations.

dark__paladin 3y ago

Yes.

sotix 3y ago

This blog post is the death of the internet. As you scroll down, it suddenly forces a pop up to subscribe to the blog via email. There is no respect to the reader at all and makes the internet a worse place to use. Perhaps the message would be more effective if it wasn’t doing what it laments.

ozymandias1337 3y ago
I Agree, this is just typical boomer behaviour.

qustrolabe 3y ago

5 times this website popped "subscribe to my newsletter". 2 times as full screen annoying pop up and 3 times in between paragraphs. If this crap is not direct evidence of "internet dying" idk what is

aendruk 3y ago
I even acquiesced (using a fake address expressing my displeasure with their aggression) to the first popup yet the bombardment continued.

AbstractH24 3y ago

We've been saying this for decade[s] now haven't we? The question is no longer is it dying, its how do we change it or even replace it.