16 ms·

How the internet became shit

zero-sharp 2y ago
I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?
- btbuildem 2y ago
  The average person is locked into multiple walled gardens where ad blocking doesn't work, and the "feed" is curated specifically for maximum advertising exposure and lowered attention span.
- sevagh 2y ago
  They just see a lot of ads.
- Minor49er 2y ago
  I would expect that basic computer literacy is taught in schools, but I have no idea how these classes operate today. Seeing articles like "Gen Z Kids Apparently Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [1] make me wonder whether these courses even exist at all anymore [1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deergomoo 2y ago
  I think they're just used to it, or genuinely don't care that much. To them, reading an article through the four-line letterbox between the autoplaying video ad and the "you might also like..." box is just what the internet is.
  - Xelynega 2y ago
    They might care too, but think it's something they have no control over so don't try and change.
- nolist_policy 2y ago
  Belive it or not, but the Internet is usable even with Ads. I'd even say that Ad quality has gone up without adblock users noticing, I don't see fullscreen or 1/2 screen Ads anymore. Privacy on the other hand...
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. I don't use an adblock on my phone, and the internet is close to unusable when I venture to top google result websites on my phone.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    The vast majority of search results surfaced for me by Google, Bing, or DDG are blogspam structured to alternate between one paragraph of text and then a square ad of about the same size, which is essentially a half screen of advertising saturated into the content and the meat of the content has moved from the top of the article (as in traditional journalism) to the bottom (to maximize ad exposure). Depending on how the ads are being served, it's either a bunch of blank squares in those space because my ad block strategies successfully stopped them from loading or its a wash of color noise and bold graphic design demanding my attention. Then, there's almost always either a GDPR compliance popup over the bottom 50%-75% of the page or a "subcribe now" call to action popup over the whole thing, or (most often) both. I would so much prefer to have access to whatever Internet you do. Please tell us where to find it. In the meantime, I just avoid exploring the internet through search engines as much as I can.
janandonly 2y ago
I agree that adds not only are annoying but that companies that capture an audience first and then introduce adds are crowding out more sustainable companies that don’t rely on ads but maybe on subscriptions. Anyhow, as the internet slides ever deeper, the small web gets more fun every day. Now people may not blog as we did in the ‘00, but boy, do we micro blog on nostr as if we just discovered twitter for the first time. It seems someone invents something new every other week when I’m on Nostr. It helps to follow hundreds of people (to avoid the echo chamber effect). Ands it’s an open protocol so nobody can stop anybody from just trying out goofy stuff. I love it.
tempsy 2y ago
I feel like this applies to more than just the internet. New construction houses are crap quality. Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive. But yes Google is probably the best example of this...type in any shopping term and Google search basically turns into a more cluttered Amazon search result page.
- pixl97 2y ago
  >New construction houses are crap quality This is called survivorship bias. Plenty of hold houses were total shit. They're not around any longer. There is also a second bias of the depletion of natural materials older houses were made of, massive increases in population, and massively changed consumer tastes/requirements. >Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive. This is a mix of things occurring, though some of this can be attributed to VC culture. I mean, I can go to some restaurants and get super high quality food. But anything that has turned into a franchize is no longer about selling a product, it's more worried about growth month over month. Then when you add things like general inflation, remember your (great?) grand parents talking about nickel burgers, things in our economy march up in price over time. Oh, then add in we're selling to global markets, where if you're old enough we were generally selling to local/national markets. Communication and distribution has massively changed (a lot of this is thanks to the internet itself) which means the way markets operate have massively changed. We're just really starting to notice this now.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    > But anything that has turned into a franchize is no longer about selling a product Yeah. Sadly the infinite growth mentality has destroyed many a franchise. Most of the franchises are simply rebranded sysco foods reheated in the microwave. I pretty much just don't eat at old franchise locations anymore as a result. Why get fettuccine from olive garden when it's basically exactly the same as a frozen stouffers meal at triple the price. So a "chef" can heat it in the microwave for me? No thanks.
    - asdff 2y ago
boomboomsubban 2y ago
This feels more like an advertisement for bearblog than a meaningful critique. "Have you heard of enshittification? Well I guarantee my free product won't go that way. Sign up today!"
- umeshunni 2y ago
  It's the perfect example of the phenomenon they're describing.
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    I feel like the site is so aggressively lo-fi but tuned to creating no-frills blogs in the highly portable markdown format, that it's kind of resistant to that kind of thing. The whole thing seems sincere, and though that's not a guarantee of quality, it seems like an indicator of it.
keiferski 2y ago
When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content that sells ads or generates revenue, because their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself. It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content. Ads are banned. It would be similar to the way tenure works at universities. I doubt this would actually be successful organically, but it could work as a collective Kickstarter or nonprofit sort of thing.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  > It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content I think you invented Patreon.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    Yeah, but Patreon is still beholden to the individual-market optimizer model. I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content. Maybe a collective Patreon-like "guild" would be a starting point.
    - CactusOnFire 2y ago
      The politics of who does vs doesn't make the cut sounds difficult to manage. I think an individualist model makes sense, or barring that, a group Patreon (i.e. a music label instead of an individual band).
camdenlock 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and for using HN primarily for ideological battle. These things are not what the site is for and destroy what it is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - camdenlock 2y ago
    [dead]
xbpx 2y ago
You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system? Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle. The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different. Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and maximizing the bottom line". Capitalism is creative destruction driven by distributed profit seeking along the edges of relatively immobile statist and corporate oligopolistic structures. This always involves cycles of enshitification that end in bottom feeding until extinguished by new techno-social revolutions. GenXers were talking about the enshitification of main street with the spread of big box stores and malls in the 80s and 90s. Same system, same process, new generation.
- tempsy 2y ago
  Except this was all triggered with the end of ZIRP...this all happened relatively recently. High interest rates forced corporations to actually get serious about profitability. Layoffs, price hikes, charging more for less is all related to that.
  - xbpx 2y ago
    For sure. But there will always be good times and bad. Main streets in towns were likewise vital communities until interest rate hikes and massive deregulation in the 80s. If you want to keep quaint Norwegian looking towns pristine even through harder times you need fairly heavy regulation.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    Is 34+ years recently?
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  > The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different. It's obvious now that bringing the world to the net would make the net a lot more like the world, but you see, those of us who came up in the pre-Canter & Siegel days had actually hoped that it would make the world more like the (in the before times) net.
quasarj 2y ago
Is there really a good, working, add blocker for iOS? The one I use works some of the time, but often gets detected and blocked-back by sites...
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  Orion with uBO works well, if you can get over Orion's general bugginess.
- trefoiled 2y ago
  AdGuard is system wide and works well for me, but it isn't free
- sogen 2y ago
  Adguard (paid), has been working great out of the box on my iPhone. Tried others but this one has been the best so far. I don't use their included VPN, so don't have opinions on it. Greatest advantage is being able to use Custom Filters. One caveat: my aging iPad sometimes struggles or reload pages, and runs out of memory, not sure if I should attribute it to the adblocker or to the iPad's age, probably should restart it, or get a newer one. I would also add to the mix: • StopTheMadness Pro (paid too) which can do two great things: 1. Show native video controls, and 2. Can skip YouTube ads (and the developer is quite responsive)
  - sogen 2y ago
    Can't edit, but wanted to say _DNS_ instead of VPN in my original comment.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Enshittification isn't just when things turn crappy, it's a 3-step process. Corner the market by providing good service to business users and consumers. Abuse your users because there aren't many other choices. Abuse your business users.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Typically you'll need some form of monopoly, close monopoly, or collusion between competing entities. For websites this can be the 'network-effect' cost. You use that site because everyone else you know uses that site. The web itself is an environment ripe for abuse because, again typically, your end user doesn't pay directly for the services (they are the product). This is pretty much why every large social media site is an advertizer. About the only way to make money pushing web pages is by selling your users to advertisers.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
I don't know, I came to the internet (IRC/News) ~1990 and the WWW ~1993, when I wrote my first "homepage". I lived through the dotcom boom ~2000 with my own startup. Sure internet was great back then, but I find it great today too. I create my own content on the internet just like 10 or 20 years ago on my website. I talk to people who send me an email about content on my website. I meet great people on LinkedIn. I'm not on Facebook and practically left Twitter. I assume like in other contexts people imagine a past that never existe
- j45 2y ago
  It's great in a different way. Old ways are always dying and new ways are always emerging. Change just has to be good for the many, and not the few.
- Xelynega 2y ago
  I don't think the fact that communities like this still exist is a point against them. They state in the article that they are also involved in communities they would consider "old internet" using modern tools. I think their thesis was that as a whole the internet has become a more shit experience for the people using it. If you sampled 1000 random internet users decades ago they would have an experience closer to yours, if you did the same today I think it would be a lot "shittier"(to a lot of internet ysers, Facebook/twitter is "the internet")
godelski 2y ago
I'll tell you why the internet became shit: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. No, seriously. There's no one big thing or even a bunch of big things. Instead it is a ton of little things that accumulate over decades. While this video is about voting[0], it is better we recognize that voting is actually about social choice. The crazy thing is that we can continually attempt to maximize our own objectives and because we live in a many player system this strategy can lead to a worse setting than where we began. I want that to sink in. Because, we like to paint people to be evil (there's definitely clear cases) but most of the time there's no conspiracy and it is just the nature of a chaotic system and our strategies. Our world is complex enough that we can no longer employ strategies where we only consider the optimization objectives of us and our immediate allies. To optimize our objectives we need to actually consider those far from (i.e. people we disagree with) us and actually work with them in some capacity. The article brings up Reddit, so I'll use it as an example (and goes for HN too). Lots of people even try to be helpful and will write comments (maybe this is for themselves too), but you'll often see a long chain of nearly identical comments/replies that aren't done in a joke. They're simply done because people didn't read the other replies before replying themselves (sometimes there are collisions), and the more this happens the more likely people are not going to read all the replies. Momentum is one hell of a force. You'll also see naive and wrong comments float to the top while detailed correct comments are lost in the sea (I'm not saying my conjecture is correct, but you can see this phenomena on any subreddit in your domain expertise unless it is very niche). Just because people are trying to be helpful, might stroke their own ego because they presume correctness, and others reading can validate because it sounds reasonable. I mean how often do we hear for calls of debate? Debate isn't a means to get to objective truths, though it can be useful in matters that have no objective truths (e.g. this meta discussion itself). Truth has a lower bound in complexity, but we don't like complexity and we don't like chaos. We like conspiracies because we fear the chaos so much, because it is better to have evil men in charge than no one at the wheel. But I'm claiming a significant part of enshitification is due to the latter. That we can reduce it if we coordinate better by not just looking for our own/local gains. Yeah, you could say that I'm even doing it as I'm writing here. Hard to tell. But I'll also welcome disagreement to my comments and we can discuss. I think things will always be noisy but it's working through and with that noise that gets us further. There are no global optimas in large solution spaces like these, so there'll always be critiques and trade-offs. Which we could say is damning, or we can see as a blessing as it gives more spice to life and allow us to adapt to the dynamic state of things where the importance of those differences is ever changing. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw
pmarreck 2y ago
It's too bad that bearblog has no discussion of each article, but I suppose that's considered a feature, not a bug
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
banish-m4 2y ago
Documented here /s https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit
JohnMakin 2y ago
Honestly, the phase we're in right now reminds me a LOT of the dot-com bubble burst. Low interest rates, tons of venture capital, companies hemorhaging cash and still skyrocketing their valuation, and from what I recall (I know memory can be faulty) towards the end of the bubble as companies got desperate to generate revenue we started to see nigh-unusable ad-riddled pages that looked very much like what we see these days. Even though it'd be bad for me personally and for my career, I do hope the bubble bursts soon. There is no chance this is sustainable.
epalm 2y ago
> companies that offer a free service but start charging once they've locked in a client-base (I'm looking at you Heroku). I don’t know much about Heroku, or if it’s been enshittified (yet?), but a company that offers a free product and somewhere down the line starts charging for it sounds fine to me. And anyone who believed a product produced by real people working at a real company could be free forever was kidding themselves. (In general though I agree with the sentiment of the article.)
fsckboy 2y ago
I was surprised where that piece went, because I was thinking about enshittification from the other direction. Where he goes is "people now search reddit instead of google to get higher quality results because less monetizing." But what I had in mind in terms of the internet becoming shit is, how did reddit become so shitty compared to where reddit started? And my expected answer was going to be in the direction of "eternal september".

I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?

btbuildem 2y ago
The average person is locked into multiple walled gardens where ad blocking doesn't work, and the "feed" is curated specifically for maximum advertising exposure and lowered attention span.
sevagh 2y ago
They just see a lot of ads.
Minor49er 2y ago
I would expect that basic computer literacy is taught in schools, but I have no idea how these classes operate today. Seeing articles like "Gen Z Kids Apparently Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [1] make me wonder whether these courses even exist at all anymore [1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deergomoo 2y ago
I think they're just used to it, or genuinely don't care that much. To them, reading an article through the four-line letterbox between the autoplaying video ad and the "you might also like..." box is just what the internet is.
- Xelynega 2y ago
  They might care too, but think it's something they have no control over so don't try and change.
nolist_policy 2y ago
Belive it or not, but the Internet is usable even with Ads. I'd even say that Ad quality has gone up without adblock users noticing, I don't see fullscreen or 1/2 screen Ads anymore. Privacy on the other hand...
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. I don't use an adblock on my phone, and the internet is close to unusable when I venture to top google result websites on my phone.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  The vast majority of search results surfaced for me by Google, Bing, or DDG are blogspam structured to alternate between one paragraph of text and then a square ad of about the same size, which is essentially a half screen of advertising saturated into the content and the meat of the content has moved from the top of the article (as in traditional journalism) to the bottom (to maximize ad exposure). Depending on how the ads are being served, it's either a bunch of blank squares in those space because my ad block strategies successfully stopped them from loading or its a wash of color noise and bold graphic design demanding my attention. Then, there's almost always either a GDPR compliance popup over the bottom 50%-75% of the page or a "subcribe now" call to action popup over the whole thing, or (most often) both. I would so much prefer to have access to whatever Internet you do. Please tell us where to find it. In the meantime, I just avoid exploring the internet through search engines as much as I can.

janandonly 2y ago

I agree that adds not only are annoying but that companies that capture an audience first and then introduce adds are crowding out more sustainable companies that don’t rely on ads but maybe on subscriptions. Anyhow, as the internet slides ever deeper, the small web gets more fun every day. Now people may not blog as we did in the ‘00, but boy, do we micro blog on nostr as if we just discovered twitter for the first time. It seems someone invents something new every other week when I’m on Nostr. It helps to follow hundreds of people (to avoid the echo chamber effect). Ands it’s an open protocol so nobody can stop anybody from just trying out goofy stuff. I love it.

tempsy 2y ago

I feel like this applies to more than just the internet. New construction houses are crap quality. Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive. But yes Google is probably the best example of this...type in any shopping term and Google search basically turns into a more cluttered Amazon search result page.

pixl97 2y ago
>New construction houses are crap quality This is called survivorship bias. Plenty of hold houses were total shit. They're not around any longer. There is also a second bias of the depletion of natural materials older houses were made of, massive increases in population, and massively changed consumer tastes/requirements. >Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive. This is a mix of things occurring, though some of this can be attributed to VC culture. I mean, I can go to some restaurants and get super high quality food. But anything that has turned into a franchize is no longer about selling a product, it's more worried about growth month over month. Then when you add things like general inflation, remember your (great?) grand parents talking about nickel burgers, things in our economy march up in price over time. Oh, then add in we're selling to global markets, where if you're old enough we were generally selling to local/national markets. Communication and distribution has massively changed (a lot of this is thanks to the internet itself) which means the way markets operate have massively changed. We're just really starting to notice this now.
- cogman10 2y ago
  > But anything that has turned into a franchize is no longer about selling a product Yeah. Sadly the infinite growth mentality has destroyed many a franchise. Most of the franchises are simply rebranded sysco foods reheated in the microwave. I pretty much just don't eat at old franchise locations anymore as a result. Why get fettuccine from olive garden when it's basically exactly the same as a frozen stouffers meal at triple the price. So a "chef" can heat it in the microwave for me? No thanks.
  - asdff 2y ago

boomboomsubban 2y ago

This feels more like an advertisement for bearblog than a meaningful critique. "Have you heard of enshittification? Well I guarantee my free product won't go that way. Sign up today!"

umeshunni 2y ago
It's the perfect example of the phenomenon they're describing.
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  I feel like the site is so aggressively lo-fi but tuned to creating no-frills blogs in the highly portable markdown format, that it's kind of resistant to that kind of thing. The whole thing seems sincere, and though that's not a guarantee of quality, it seems like an indicator of it.

keiferski 2y ago

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content that sells ads or generates revenue, because their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself. It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content. Ads are banned. It would be similar to the way tenure works at universities. I doubt this would actually be successful organically, but it could work as a collective Kickstarter or nonprofit sort of thing.

jjmarr 2y ago
> It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content I think you invented Patreon.
- keiferski 2y ago
  Yeah, but Patreon is still beholden to the individual-market optimizer model. I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content. Maybe a collective Patreon-like "guild" would be a starting point.
  - CactusOnFire 2y ago
    The politics of who does vs doesn't make the cut sounds difficult to manage. I think an individualist model makes sense, or barring that, a group Patreon (i.e. a music label instead of an individual band).

camdenlock 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and for using HN primarily for ideological battle. These things are not what the site is for and destroy what it is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- camdenlock 2y ago
  [dead]

xbpx 2y ago

You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system? Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle. The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different. Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and maximizing the bottom line". Capitalism is creative destruction driven by distributed profit seeking along the edges of relatively immobile statist and corporate oligopolistic structures. This always involves cycles of enshitification that end in bottom feeding until extinguished by new techno-social revolutions. GenXers were talking about the enshitification of main street with the spread of big box stores and malls in the 80s and 90s. Same system, same process, new generation.

tempsy 2y ago
Except this was all triggered with the end of ZIRP...this all happened relatively recently. High interest rates forced corporations to actually get serious about profitability. Layoffs, price hikes, charging more for less is all related to that.
- xbpx 2y ago
  For sure. But there will always be good times and bad. Main streets in towns were likewise vital communities until interest rate hikes and massive deregulation in the 80s. If you want to keep quaint Norwegian looking towns pristine even through harder times you need fairly heavy regulation.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Is 34+ years recently?
082349872349872 2y ago
> The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different. It's obvious now that bringing the world to the net would make the net a lot more like the world, but you see, those of us who came up in the pre-Canter & Siegel days had actually hoped that it would make the world more like the (in the before times) net.

quasarj 2y ago

Is there really a good, working, add blocker for iOS? The one I use works some of the time, but often gets detected and blocked-back by sites...

idle_zealot 2y ago
Orion with uBO works well, if you can get over Orion's general bugginess.
trefoiled 2y ago
AdGuard is system wide and works well for me, but it isn't free
sogen 2y ago
Adguard (paid), has been working great out of the box on my iPhone. Tried others but this one has been the best so far. I don't use their included VPN, so don't have opinions on it. Greatest advantage is being able to use Custom Filters. One caveat: my aging iPad sometimes struggles or reload pages, and runs out of memory, not sure if I should attribute it to the adblocker or to the iPad's age, probably should restart it, or get a newer one. I would also add to the mix: • StopTheMadness Pro (paid too) which can do two great things: 1. Show native video controls, and 2. Can skip YouTube ads (and the developer is quite responsive)
- sogen 2y ago
  Can't edit, but wanted to say _DNS_ instead of VPN in my original comment.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Enshittification isn't just when things turn crappy, it's a 3-step process. Corner the market by providing good service to business users and consumers. Abuse your users because there aren't many other choices. Abuse your business users.

pixl97 2y ago
Typically you'll need some form of monopoly, close monopoly, or collusion between competing entities. For websites this can be the 'network-effect' cost. You use that site because everyone else you know uses that site. The web itself is an environment ripe for abuse because, again typically, your end user doesn't pay directly for the services (they are the product). This is pretty much why every large social media site is an advertizer. About the only way to make money pushing web pages is by selling your users to advertisers.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

I don't know, I came to the internet (IRC/News) ~1990 and the WWW ~1993, when I wrote my first "homepage". I lived through the dotcom boom ~2000 with my own startup. Sure internet was great back then, but I find it great today too. I create my own content on the internet just like 10 or 20 years ago on my website. I talk to people who send me an email about content on my website. I meet great people on LinkedIn. I'm not on Facebook and practically left Twitter. I assume like in other contexts people imagine a past that never existe

j45 2y ago
It's great in a different way. Old ways are always dying and new ways are always emerging. Change just has to be good for the many, and not the few.
Xelynega 2y ago
I don't think the fact that communities like this still exist is a point against them. They state in the article that they are also involved in communities they would consider "old internet" using modern tools. I think their thesis was that as a whole the internet has become a more shit experience for the people using it. If you sampled 1000 random internet users decades ago they would have an experience closer to yours, if you did the same today I think it would be a lot "shittier"(to a lot of internet ysers, Facebook/twitter is "the internet")

godelski 2y ago

I'll tell you why the internet became shit: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. No, seriously. There's no one big thing or even a bunch of big things. Instead it is a ton of little things that accumulate over decades. While this video is about voting[0], it is better we recognize that voting is actually about social choice. The crazy thing is that we can continually attempt to maximize our own objectives and because we live in a many player system this strategy can lead to a worse setting than where we began. I want that to sink in. Because, we like to paint people to be evil (there's definitely clear cases) but most of the time there's no conspiracy and it is just the nature of a chaotic system and our strategies. Our world is complex enough that we can no longer employ strategies where we only consider the optimization objectives of us and our immediate allies. To optimize our objectives we need to actually consider those far from (i.e. people we disagree with) us and actually work with them in some capacity. The article brings up Reddit, so I'll use it as an example (and goes for HN too). Lots of people even try to be helpful and will write comments (maybe this is for themselves too), but you'll often see a long chain of nearly identical comments/replies that aren't done in a joke. They're simply done because people didn't read the other replies before replying themselves (sometimes there are collisions), and the more this happens the more likely people are not going to read all the replies. Momentum is one hell of a force. You'll also see naive and wrong comments float to the top while detailed correct comments are lost in the sea (I'm not saying my conjecture is correct, but you can see this phenomena on any subreddit in your domain expertise unless it is very niche). Just because people are trying to be helpful, might stroke their own ego because they presume correctness, and others reading can validate because it sounds reasonable. I mean how often do we hear for calls of debate? Debate isn't a means to get to objective truths, though it can be useful in matters that have no objective truths (e.g. this meta discussion itself). Truth has a lower bound in complexity, but we don't like complexity and we don't like chaos. We like conspiracies because we fear the chaos so much, because it is better to have evil men in charge than no one at the wheel. But I'm claiming a significant part of enshitification is due to the latter. That we can reduce it if we coordinate better by not just looking for our own/local gains. Yeah, you could say that I'm even doing it as I'm writing here. Hard to tell. But I'll also welcome disagreement to my comments and we can discuss. I think things will always be noisy but it's working through and with that noise that gets us further. There are no global optimas in large solution spaces like these, so there'll always be critiques and trade-offs. Which we could say is damning, or we can see as a blessing as it gives more spice to life and allow us to adapt to the dynamic state of things where the importance of those differences is ever changing. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw

pmarreck 2y ago

It's too bad that bearblog has no discussion of each article, but I suppose that's considered a feature, not a bug

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

banish-m4 2y ago

Documented here /s https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit

JohnMakin 2y ago

Honestly, the phase we're in right now reminds me a LOT of the dot-com bubble burst. Low interest rates, tons of venture capital, companies hemorhaging cash and still skyrocketing their valuation, and from what I recall (I know memory can be faulty) towards the end of the bubble as companies got desperate to generate revenue we started to see nigh-unusable ad-riddled pages that looked very much like what we see these days. Even though it'd be bad for me personally and for my career, I do hope the bubble bursts soon. There is no chance this is sustainable.

epalm 2y ago

> companies that offer a free service but start charging once they've locked in a client-base (I'm looking at you Heroku). I don’t know much about Heroku, or if it’s been enshittified (yet?), but a company that offers a free product and somewhere down the line starts charging for it sounds fine to me. And anyone who believed a product produced by real people working at a real company could be free forever was kidding themselves. (In general though I agree with the sentiment of the article.)

fsckboy 2y ago

I was surprised where that piece went, because I was thinking about enshittification from the other direction. Where he goes is "people now search reddit instead of google to get higher quality results because less monetizing." But what I had in mind in terms of the internet becoming shit is, how did reddit become so shitty compared to where reddit started? And my expected answer was going to be in the direction of "eternal september".