18 ms·

The internet is already over (2022)

237 points by thinkingemote 2y ago

shoubidouwah 2y ago
If Sam Kriss spent two years to write any of his blog posts into a book, he'd be Nietzsche. Still makes for a sparkling bit of thought, easily reread.
- mrkramer 2y ago
  What makes you think if Nietzsche lived today, he wouldn't be a blogger?
  - shoubidouwah 2y ago
    temporal commutativity of thought in the media vector space?
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Nietzsche wouldn't survive five minutes in a world in which Twitter exists. Gaze too long into the abyss indeed.
- samastur 2y ago
  No, he wouldn't. The whole thing is all blitz and little substance of someone who seems to be over-read and under-thought. It's best described in his own words: a handful of sugar instead of a meal.
  - shoubidouwah 2y ago
    It also was how N. saw his thoughts at times. An evidence, disgraced for being explained. And stylistic flamboyance around a theme is hardly foreign to philosophers, this one in particular (any chapter of Zarathustra can be read as a blog post in the same way). I still advocate that style - and being drunk with style - can lead the writer to singularly original and contemporaneous ideas. Language is a dynamic object, filled with the spirit of the age, and very high sensitivity to it within a philosophical context can act as a catalyst.
    - samastur 2y ago
      As someone with sweet-tooth I don't mind the style, but I do think it masks how empty his arguments are and how unsubstantiated. Explanations that aren't really. I guess our main disagreement is if he has original ideas. I've only read a couple of things he wrote so I'm certainly not in position to have the definitive opinion, but neither of his articles impressed me.
      - shoubidouwah 2y ago
        I think you're right on the crux, with a qualification: every argument has already been made in one form or another - the underlying universal concepts are not that complex. the talent of a writer is to present it in a manner congruent with the geography/times. Isn't vacuity when speaking in pure style, but in a style that itself acts as a mirror to the zeitgeist, a valuable tool for thinkers? A frame, a kind of meta-thought?
    - chipsrafferty 2y ago
      Agreed, and for me, the main thesis of the article was that we should create things that we want to create, without concerning ourselves about how much engagement, reach, impact etc. they will have.
  - luzojeda 2y ago
    Delight us with your arguments against what the author states in his posts instead of just ad-homineing.
    - samastur 2y ago
      I'm not going to deconstruct the whole thing to appease a stranger, but let's just take the first point of the argument: That it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet. Setting aside what does "end of the world" actually mean, who's making this statement? Almost nobody is, since practically every instance is someone referencing somebody else with little commitment. Essentially this is arguing against a person instead of some wide-spread view. Even if it was wide spread, does it even matter? It obviously can't be true since end of the world in any reasonable understanding contains end of the internet. So what exactly is this point and argument against it trying to show? I have no idea since believing or not in something dying generally matters little to it being (or not) in such process. Let's say it is important. What are the arguments that it is incorrect beyond being obviously so? Well, some unrelated people before you were incorrect about unrelated shape of future so you, but not the author, probably are too. Then he follows this by putting words in mouth of the people he disagrees with, before he swerves into his own experiencing of internet consumption and resulting numbness. I guess based on his expectations of near future there's an expectation of universality of his experience, but even if it was universal (and huge amounts of emotions exhibited online create at least some doubt that it is), why would it contribute to internet's death? It obviously doesn't stop him from scrolling, or writing and otherwise engaging on internet. Again, I have no idea. So all of it does not really add up to much, but I admit it is entertainingly written which is more than most of us manage.
      - chipsrafferty 2y ago
        > It obviously can't be true since end of the world in any reasonable understanding contains end of the internet. No, it obviously can be true. I can imagine many ways "the end of the world" could occur. Also, maybe it's not crystal clear what "the end of the world" means to you, but for me, and likely other people, it means the collapse of human civilization, which could happen from nuclear war, climate change, etc. Just because "the end of the world" would include "the death of the internet" doesn't imply that by imagining the end of the world you're also imagining the ways in which every aspect of the world get destroyed. When I imagine the end of the world I don't focus on what happens to say, Paris, specifically, but I do know, implicitly, that the end of the world would include the end of Paris.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    As contrasted to what? Chapter 4 of On Good and Evil? <http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-pub/bge/bge4.htm http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-pub/bge/bge4.htm> (It's ... nothing but a compilation of epigrams. Fediverse Toots, if you will.)
  - Animats 2y ago
    The dramatic claim in the title is not well supported by the content. What seems to be happening is churn. Geocities was supplanted by Myspace, which was crushed by Facebook, which was marginalized by Tiktok... Does this ever settle, or what? The real breakthrough would be if someone came up with something like Craigslist that won on price. Operate at a low enough cost that just charging for ads in areas where people purposefully look at ads, such as apartment rentals, is enough to keep the the thing going. Make social so cheap that the big players go bust.
  - chipsrafferty 2y ago
    Someone has never read Nietzsche lol
im3w1l 2y ago
Long but enjoyable read. I was surprised it didn't mention AI.
- dillydogg 2y ago
  I guess it was published in 2022. It hadn't become as ubiquitous yet. I would look forward to a follow up that includes some commentary on AI accelerating these issues
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Here’s the AI version: https://youtu.be/UShsgCOzER4?si=BNezapA1D5pz4dnW https://youtu.be/UShsgCOzER4?si=BNezapA1D5pz4dnW HN: “well, this was bound to happen anyway without AI, it’s just fearmongering, dont pay any attention to the man behind the curtain” hehe
  - rda2 2y ago
    Sam Kriss has at least two posts that came later about AI: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/a-users-guide-to-the-zairja-of-the https://samkriss.substack.com/p/a-users-guide-to-the-zairja-... https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-cacophony https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-cacophony The second one is a bit closer to touching on the same themes, but both are a little more allegorical than TFA.
_7acn 2y ago
I've been using the Internet since the days of Netscape Navigator and 14.4 kbit/s dial-up modems. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older, but I really miss the old Internet. Ironically, it felt less "anonymous" back then, and it was easier to be part of a community — users knew each other. Now, everyone is here, and the quality of content has significantly declined.
- reddalo 2y ago
  > everyone is here I think this is the answer. Once upon a time we were way fewer people, and many interests were shared among those people (because we pretty much were all "geeks"). We've always had trolls, spammers, etc. but it still felt like we were part of a big community. Now everybody is here, and that feeling is no more. It's like moving from a small village or town (where everybody knows each other) to a huge city. It doesn't feel like "belonging" anymore.
  - peterleiser 2y ago
    And nobody makes Monty Python or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy references anymore. I had a boss 15 years ago who had watched all things Star Trek, just like me; Knew all the things. But at one point he mentioned he wasn't really a fan, it was just "required reading, part of the literature". This is an interesting one. There used to be certain things that all nerds knew, and could talk about, use as analogies and metaphors. Something to talk about just like sales people (stereotypically, used to) talk about sports. I realized early in my career that's why some people in business follow sports, so they didn't get cut out of conversations. I always had nothing to say when that topic came up. But it's tricky because geeks and nerds shouldn't be gatekeepers about what the entertainment is, or the literature, because that cuts out a lot of people who should feel included. But at the same time most people think it's generally nice to have some common things to reference, talk about, and normalize on. I think social media, politics, streaming services, etc. have totally blown away these shared frameworks in society, and it's kind of a bummer, even though it's great to have lots of choices. People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day. I guess sports is basically the last thing that's shared. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk...
stuartjohnson12 2y ago
Powerful contender for favourite thing I've read in the last 30 days.
- munificent 2y ago
  Agreed. I love everything about this, the message, the style. Writing like this is why I fell in love with blogs.
- Daneel_ 2y ago
  To each their own. This rapidly lost my attention due to the meandering, abstract writing style. I ended up skim reading down to the conclusion, deciding it was a nihilistic take on things, and moving on. Variety is the spice of life though, I’m glad it was enjoyed by others.
  - stuartjohnson12 2y ago
    This is by far the most common complaint I see directed towards the writings and media that I enjoy the most, both in fiction and in non-fiction. Oblique narratives where nothing happens, nobody is happy, everyone dies, and no message is taught or learned are my favourite. Interstellar. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Full Metal Jacket. Most recently, the latest instalment of EPIC: The Musical. I can't really explain why I like them so much. They scratch a cosmic itch I don't fully understand, and the answer isn't simply validating negative sentiment toward the world or other trivial possibilities that immediately spring to mind.
the_gipsy 2y ago
Really good read, through and through on the hook.
Finnucane 2y ago
I’m going to go practice my banjo now.
adra 2y ago
I dunno, maybe I didn't look deep enough, but skimming through, it feels like more a symptom of infinite growth. I think we're def. starting to plateau in many things that have had basically no growth for a long time. Anything that's gotten the attention like crypto and AI feel like "let's dump unbridled enthusiasm into this" while waiting for some real epiphany to arrive. The internet was imho the last real step forward in mankind (and a bunch of life saving drugs/vaccinations), though mass cellphone usage certainly helped to democratize it.
mrkramer 2y ago
My take on declining online social engagement is; a lot of people like to consume online content passively e.g. just reading Facebook posts or watching a YouTube video without actually liking or commenting. Another thing is; increasing number of people came to realize that privacy does matter and they refuse to participate in online dramas that can damage their reputation or harm their mental health.
- wruza 2y ago
  What’s the point of commenting a youtube video, have you ever seen the comments there? Liking a video makes your feed piled up with a semi-relevant crap for a week. Sometimes (increasingly often) I have to dislike an otherwise good video because I don’t want to screw up my recommendations.
  - daelon 2y ago
    Removing it from your watch history might be more effective than disliking.
    - wruza 2y ago
      Agreed, I do both actually. Also “don’t recommend channel” for truly obnoxious ones. I follow through 3-4 of their videos so that they start to appear in the side column and then kill it from there, removing all traces afterwards. In my experience, - Don’t recommend channel - strong flag, but doesn’t modify “interests”. - Not interested - removes this exact video with a very low key tuning of recommendations, if at all. - Dislike - a slightly pronounced signal for recommendations. But still clueless cause no info on why. - Like - you’ll drown in content similar to this, but not the same quality. Get ready to shovel it and miss your previous interests completely. - Comment - similar to like. The default careless youtube experience without all that stopped working around 5 years ago (at least). Can’t imagine using it as is and not degenerating into something inhuman.
      - lolc 2y ago
        I'm just glad there are browser extensions that remove all that Youtube dross no questions asked. It's interesting to me that somebody would try and curate their experience in this shitshoveling assault on the nerves that is Youtube recommendations.
Sparkyte 2y ago
It isn't novelty, it is dependency. Because we are dependent on a connection we stop using it for novel reasons. The internet age is over is correct. The age of being connected has started. More and more people connected to the internet but not actually using it the way we saw it in the 90s and 2000s. Mid-2010s we started to see the paradigm take place.
- deleted 2y ago
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api 2y ago
This person is just, like many others, mistaking the death of public social media and the open web for the death of being online. All the interesting activity has retreated to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Mastodon, Signal, private and niche boards, game chats, etc. This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably on the endangered list. TikTok is probably the last big social and has an increasingly negative reputation, meaning it'll probably be "out" pretty soon. The public Internet is probably dying, a victim of spam and over-commoditization.
- lmm 2y ago
  Yep. This is someone who's too old to be invited to the cool parties any more and thinks that means Manhattan is over.
  - api 2y ago
    I’ve found that ageism is kind of not even a thing. The problem is that the cool parties are not where they used to be but as people age they usually don’t update their priors. Same goes for the internet.
- chipsrafferty 2y ago
  The public internet IS the internet
  - api 2y ago
    The Internet is TCP/IP, BGP, and other core protocols and the physical wires that carry them. Public wide open free for all space are a major use case but they aren't a necessity and they may not survive the spam tsunami of LLMs and troll farms.
breck 2y ago
I agree with a lot of this, but think the future of the Internet will be u-shaped: - People will use it drastically less. I got rid of my smart phone ~2 years ago and it's been a huge life improvement. Still on the computer a lot, but when I leave the room I'm in the real world again. - When they do use it it will be drastically higher quality. I'm working on building the World Wide Scroll as a successor to the web (https://wws.scroll.pub/ https://wws.scroll.pub/), an idea I first had 12 years ago (https://breckyunits.com/spacenet.html https://breckyunits.com/spacenet.html), but took a while to figure out all the infra.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  There are always stories of people who "quit" normal tech things, buying obscure eink phones and other pretentious minimalist crap, claiming it does this or that to their sleep or attention span. Always devs or at least tech-adjecent people. A lone outlier is what you are. Meanwhile most of the population remains completely (happily?) addicted to scrolling <social app of the year> every free waking moment of every day with no sign of stopping. Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    > Always devs or at least tech-adjecent people. A lone outlier is what you are. We were the first to come, and we're the first to leave. We're trendsetters, while most of the society just do what everyone else does. It's just that those things don't happen overnight, it's a process. > Meanwhile most of the population have been peasants and slaves in most societies through most of history. The fact that there exist a handful of countries where average Joe doesn't need to worry about biological survival doesn't suddenly remove the truth that most people do and will belong to lower classes and "everyone is equal" is a meme that came to existence very recently so can't be taken seriously. > Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it. Most people want cheap entertainment and nothing more. That's how things have always been, whether it's gladiators fighting or cute puppy pictures on Facebook. Modern tech industry is just a reflection of this, and things will stay this way. Obviously nothing stops you from seeking better ways to pass time, or at least building some healthy habits if you're not ready to give up on slop completely. Just like Newton chose to think about falling apples instead of drinking wine. My comment might come across as snobbish, but I also recognize the fact that there are lots and lots of people above me, and I will never achieve their level no matter how much work I put into myself.
interroboink 2y ago
This article feels like a window into the mind of someone who drank too deeply of being perpetually online, and now feels the pendulum swing the other way. Like the verbal equivalent of that one time I drank far too much Gin and my stomach finally said "no" all over the bathroom floor (missed the toilet — oops). I'm glad to never have gone down that particular path. Stuck with my flip phone for ages, etc. But for people who did, just know that there's room for moderation. There is plenty of space between "all day online" and "the internet is over." I like this quote from "Mutant Message Down Under": My suggestion is that you taste the message, savor what is right for you, and spit out the rest; after all, that is the law of the universe. You don't have to swallow the internet whole (or let it swallow you).
- 650 2y ago
  >for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you. - Nietzsche Because these apps are designed to be targeted and specific with some of the brightest minds in the world working on them, it's easy to overdose and become addicted. t. recovering addict
  - interroboink 2y ago
    Agreed with you there (: I'm not sure where the healing process begins, on the larger scale. Parents with their children, I suppose? I grew up without TV; probably that twisted my mind a bit, so I recoil from that stuff somewhat automatically. It's something I wish upon others.
- dang_it_man 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- pxoe 2y ago
  maybe it could help those doomer "internet is over!" types to even try to look at internet in a positive way - or at least it'd give us a tell through what they'd come up with, if anything at all
thinkingemote 2y ago
Past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907473 2002 69 Comments
- HPsquared 2y ago
  I was about to make a snarky comment about 2002, but looking back that really was the early days. A lot of the early stuff (with a few exceptions) basically extinct now.
  - thinkingemote 2y ago
    Hah! Totally missed that typo
FpUser 2y ago
What a bunch of drivel. Do not even know what to say. "predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate." To me it fucking wildly accurate. It did revolutonize a lot for me. Yes I know some people would get a heart attack if they could not show to the rest of the world what did they have for breakfast. Not my problem. I only had good from the Internet so far.
- deleted 2y ago
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- TibbityFlanders 2y ago
  [dead]
- big-green-man 2y ago
  I've had mostly good, but I will be the first to admit that the internet sucked up a lot more of my time than would have been ideal. Most of the benefits I get from the internet are not how I use the internet in my day to day life. Like you said, not your problem, but when talking about this in the context of the masses using it as they do now, you get 2 outcomes: people withering and dying while staring at a screen, or this entire industry collapsing catastrophically.
alx_the_new_guy 2y ago
Again, returning to the "it's not the internet itself, but the content on it" thing. Facebook and microblogs use the same infra and can be accessed via the same means (web browser, etc). At least from anecdotal experience, the really good stuff has been getting easier to find through IRL-ish means, like asking a colleague for the invite link. I haven't really seen behind the invite veil much, since I'm about as far as it gets from someone cool you'd want in your group chat, but from what I've seen, "good" things are happening and thoughts are thought. It's just happening in private. There were comments or an article somewhere about someone being sad about "very deep technical discussions being held on discord servers and that knowledge being ultimately lost". I don't think it's that bad of a thing though since that knowledge was never intended for the public and being ultimately lost and forgotten is what the people writing said messages are expecting of it. Certainly, as a person, I care more about myself having less of a digital papertrail than someone in the indefinite future not being able to solve their nieche non-essential problem. I could elaborate more on the "onlyfans has replaced sex" and the such, which are, IMO, while somewhat true, are conclusions to which the author arrived to from a wrong place, thus continuing to think in that direcion would get them further from the truth, not closer to it. In the end, just as human brain is a sort of general purpose multimodal input-output machine, the internet can be used for all sorts of purposes. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will fall out of fashion, without getting a solid cultutal foothold. The test of time works as well as ever.
- zeta0134 2y ago
  By far, the majority of my time "online" these days is spent in a Discord server for enthusiasts that are also interested in my hobby. Due to the server's small size and narrow niche, moderation is straightforward and we rarely have any issues with trolling. We don't allow political discussion, which mostly allows members of diverse backgrounds to interact safely, since triggering discussions don't come up very often. It's not even a particularly novel idea, right? Chatrooms have been a thing just about since packet switching was a thing, this one is just a polished implementation of that idea. Trouble is, the one metric that matters to Google (inter-linking, engagement, etc) can't happen when the content can't be crawled in the first place. So our pleasant, intellectually simulating content stays hidden where the rest of the internet never notices it.
tonymet 2y ago
The internet is over , if you want it . All the doomerism is gone if you avoid it. You can take back your life if you just go for it
- wruza 2y ago
  Is there a specific url to go?
  - kibwen 2y ago
    There is! See the following website, which has endured for about 30 years now: https://hmpg.net/ https://hmpg.net/
    - bitwize 2y ago
      I think I need to download more memory to handle the whole internet
      - samplatt 2y ago
        It's thought of that already; you just keep inserting new disks into drive A:\
        account42 2y ago
        Seems feasible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40702546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40702546
  - Dr_Incelheimer 2y ago
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zw123456 2y ago
I am old enough to remember when people said TV was a passing fad. And the radio. And the printing press. And the telegraph. And the written word. I mean come on you lazy shlubs, memorize Beowulf like we had to back in my day. OK, I am not actually that old. My point is, that with every technology that has been invented to improve, or expand the ability of humans to communicate, there have been the detractors and naysayers predicting the inevitable doom of said technology. I am still waiting for that whole writing things down instead of memorizing them thing to finally go out of style.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  And bad for kids. Go back and you can read about how dreadful it is that some people are letting their children read novels. What sort of person would do that? But the article isn't really about that, to the extent it's really about anything except the author's need to feel very, very smart. It's a vague gesture at how "over" it they are, for any value of "it". Best to pat them on the head condescendingly and then move on.
  - zw123456 2y ago
    The person who wrote the article used the internet for all the sub-references. Had it not been for the internet, this person most likely would not have known all the things they mentioned. I don't know if they are listening, but it would be an interesting question.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  I'm not sure if the examples you bring make the point you're trying to make. For most practical intents and purposes, printed press is but a small shadow of its former self. Pretty much all outlets focus on the digital and many have stopped printing altogether. Radio is the same, as a fraction of the population, the numbers are hitting record lows. Most people listen to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, podcasts, etc, not radio. I doubt I need to even mention classical TV. Point being, all of these technologies exist and people do consume them, yes, but compared to their former glory they're all practically dead.
phendrenad2 2y ago
What we've had so far was not "the internet" it was "the internet, gatekept by socioeconomic and educational criteria". The number of internet users appears to be flattening off at around 75% of the world population. So far people have been happy to jump right into that mass of 6 billion people. But I think that this plateauing will allow sub-ecosystems to flourish. HN is one of them.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
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  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    Poverty is not an indicator of intelligence, wit, or thought. However, it feels like you are experiencing a profound poverty of all of those exact things. You elitist little shit.
    - anal_reactor 2y ago
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/ Children from poor families perform worse on intelligence tests. https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/39/5/820/7008955?login=false https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/39/5/820/7008955?login=... Lack of cognitive abilities correlates with low income. Your move.
      - MrVandemar 2y ago
        You can't use those studies to say "poor people" = "stupid". That kind of blanket statement is the kind of fairy tale elites tell each other to make them feel good about being selfish rich pricks ("oh, I worked hard for what I have. They just don't work hard enough" kind of bullshit). Some children from poor families perform worse on intelligence tests. Lack of cognitive abilities correlates with low income in some cases that we studied. Poverty is not an indicator of intelligence, or courage, or character. Poverty is an indicator that something in our society is profoundly broken and needs fixing. I work in a medical practice. I see all kinds. I see dumb rich people and I see smart poor people. And here's some poor people, or people who grew up poor: Stephen King. Aristotle. Jennifer Lopez. Oprah. Ghandi. Jim Carey. Shania Twain. JK Rowling. Jesus of Nazareth. Charles Dickens (who wrote stories about grinding poverty). I'm not a fan of some of those people, but I'd love to speak to any and all of them, because I'm sure I'd learn something!
parl_match 2y ago
> It’s already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all our pop music sounds like a tribute act. This whole article reads as "i expected things to stay the same and they are" There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways - netflix, apple tv, etc. So they're not in theaters? Miniseries are the new movies. Your streaming box is the new theater. Bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style? Stop reading best-sellers, and focus on more curated and genre lists, such as Goodreads. Again, you expected the new york times bestseller list to be the arbiter of "good" and that is no longer true. And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap Broaden your horizons or slide beneath the static.
- bsder 2y ago
  > There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways Are there? People parrot this over and over but rarely provide any reliable evidence. Even if there is interesting stuff being done, if it has no impact past three people then it is by definition not "great". By most measures I can think of, there are NOT lots of "great" things being made.
  - krapp 2y ago
    Provide reliable evidence of your own, then. What objective measures are you using, other than your own personal taste? What quantifiable data can you provide to back up your claim that great films are no longer being made? And how does your definition of greatness apparently presuppose widespread impact, but somehow presumably exclude any modern films that have demonstrably widespread impact?
    - bsder 2y ago
      Money--overall monetary takes are down across the board. It was never easy for artists to make a living, but now it's ferociously miserable. Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down. Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so. I'm reminded of the punk documentary where the original punks were horrified that the people who came after and idolized them missed the whole point.
PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0 2y ago
The internet is now just Real Life, with all of the same rules, regulations, and ideologies.
c22 2y ago
Sounds about like how I felt during my early thirties as well. But whether it's AOL and MSN, Orkut and Myspace, or Facebook and Tiktok, platforms come and go yet the internet persists.
deleted 2y ago
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tammer 2y ago
This had my attention at first but I’m not sure it led me anywhere. For discussion of the fundamental contradictions with the current structure of the Internet (that lead to the problems described herein & more), I highly recommend The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Platform It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.
lmm 2y ago
Meh. No, the internet isn't going away. Yes, it's not the countercultural thing it once was. Counterculture is still happening, just not on the first page you go to on the internet any more. No, manufacturing going from 20% to 14% of the economy does not mean the world is ending. And no, the random coincidence of who has a bunch of oil money right now doesn't mean anything. The internet will outlast Islam, culturally if not physically. The new generation doesn't know how boring a world without a phone in your pocket actually was. They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back. Who's "we"? There's billions of people today who really do believe in religion the way that medieval Europeans did. The middle east is full of them, and there are multiple countries where the religion and government are inextricably joined together (such as Iran and Afghanistan). Sure, a large portion of the people in liberalized Western nations no longer believe that stuff the way medieval Europeans did, but there are many others who still do. The US has many of them too, trying to control government policy according to their beliefs.
- goatlover 2y ago
  The world wasn't that boring without a phone in your pocket. That's just a symptom of being addicted to online engagement. People got along just fine for most of human history with the internet to entertain them.
nickdothutton 2y ago
We got the Internet that advertising built. This was not how we (well some of us early 90s and before) users assumed it would pan out. It has been my experience that private Internet communities (groups, forums, messaging chats) are where the quality discussion happens these days. Away from the advertising and the controversy seeking (and anti-tech) mainstream media reporters.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- suzzer99 2y ago
  Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.
  - pyrolistical 2y ago
    There are plenty of incentives to game this to distribute your whatever. It’s just that the moderation is pretty good
    - lazide 2y ago
      Also the crowd is brutally cynical, which tends to discourage a lot of it.
      - DocTomoe 2y ago
        To the contrary, this crowd is one of the most pleasant on the internet in 2024. A prime example of why gatekeeping is necessary and working.
        PhilipRoman 2y ago
        Do you consider pleasant and cynical as mutually exclusive? I had a chat with a former politician and he was definitely pleasant, but extremely cynical, he pointed out instances of corruption everywhere. Although to be fair he was probably just being realistic not cynical. Cynicism is a good filter against dumb trends, hustler types and "emperor's clothes" situations.
Havoc 2y ago
> Where you go, what you buy; a perfect snapshot of millions of ordinary lives. They were betting that this would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff that rules the world.8 >They were wrong, The fact that both Google and Facebook are based on precisely this suggests to me that it is not the theory that is wrong but the execution of the other examples. Uber - where you drive - just isn’t all that interesting to advertisers I’d say the more important perspective is one of walled garden. The companies with tight walled gardens seem to succeed the best at hijacking these personal behavioural exhausts of data aka surveillance capitalism etc
- asdff 2y ago
  I think a big part of it is also the data are poor and people don't know how to take advantage of their walled garden. For example, uber recently added advertisements into their app. You may not know this, because they are only seen when you are riding in your ride already, but you get an ad for Tim Hortons because the car is within a half mile of one. On paper this looks good for the marketer. Why yes, we can take our captured population and send them ads to local partners who now get these customers patronizing their business. Seems like it would be a great lucrative deal for both parties, right? Of course logic says it doesn't work like that. Like I said, no one sits there looking at uber ads the entire ride. No one tells the uber driver "hey wait, I know I was trying to get where I was going but all the sudden I am surprisingly hungry, lets divert a half mile and potentially 20 minutes so I could get a $4 bacon egg and cheese." It just doesn't happen. But the dance must continue of course. Maybe the uber people responsible for this feature don't even care at all that it works, only that their shareholders think it works and their advertising partners also think it works. That is incentive enough to keep up the farce even with no supporting data because the money, in the end, is very real. After all, everyone on earth knows about coke thats sold in every store on earth, but the ads still need to be purchased because the purchase itself is a more important metric than the end result.
CM30 2y ago
I sometimes suspect the pandemic and lockdowns probably killed a lot of social engagement and internet activity too. Yes, it seems counterproductive, since those times were boom periods for many social media platforms... But then once it ended, it feels like being stuck online with nothing else to do all day burnt a lot of people out on the internet and online activities. Perhaps they decided it was best to make up for lost time once real life 'reopened'. Or perhaps they took one look at the online panopticon, and realised it wasn't adding as much to their lives as they thought. Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.
- Swizec 2y ago
  > Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore. Important to note that this happens every summer. Especially a pre-us-election summer. People are out there living their lives, having fun, and avoiding the constant barrage of politics online. Things will be back in the fall. Sauce: My email open rates observed over the past 10 years. Summers always see a lull in online activity Also you may be experiencing your age cohort growing up. I’m mid 30’s and have noticed a significant decline in online activity as people my age juggle kids and career and increasingly have zero time to spend online. The younger folk without these encumbrances don’t hang out where I’m used to looking. Whenever I hang out (irl) with younger coworkers it’s obvious that people 10 years younger still spend just as much if not more time online than we did at that age.
- asynchronous 2y ago
  Statistically we actually know this is false, the pre-Covid 6pm internet surge window has actually stuck around as the new baseline normal internet traffic post-covid.
asdff 2y ago
A big issue with the internet is the commercialization aspect of it. Any time you get an organic community of actual users, that's just chumming the water. That's a good quality population of users for the marketer unlike a lot of others out there. They are going to try all they can to get into that community and use it for advertising, to make some use out of it versus to leave it be on the table. Entropy favors enshittification. The race to the bottom never ends, the bottom just keeps moving as low as it possibly can be. Individual incentives have also shifted substantially. Having a post go viral or be of some help to someone else used to be enough of an incentive to post on the internet. Now people want to make a job out of it, which shifts the nature of the posts due to different incentives requiring different optimizations. Also people aren't hosting their own websites that they support out of their own pocket that often anymore. People would rather post their content on other people's websites that are ad supported and therefore have incentives that bias what is posted there or gets traction on that platform.
- DocTomoe 2y ago
  A big part in that was ISPs who often enough deliberately killed self-hosting with dynamic IP allocation and asynchronous upload/download rates, necessitating hosting somewhere else, which came with an extra cost, either in ads or in money.
  - account42 2y ago
    Dynamic IPs for residential connections where already the norm in the early 2000s (remember dyndns.org and freedns.afraid.org?) yet self-hosted content was much more prominent than it is now. So where asymmetric lines.
    - DocTomoe 2y ago
      That 'self-hosting' you are referring to was actually 'hosting your own stuff on other people's computers in a data center somewhere, most likely the ISP that originally took away your static IP so you can't do it yourself'. True self-hosting is from your own basement. I'm honestly in the 'old guy from the 1990s' camp. ... once there was a fleeting glimpse of beauty, called 'Internet'.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
worstspotgain 2y ago
Here's some contrarian optimism. Assume google doesn't lead anywhere anymore. SEO won. Enshittification factor 0.999. Just train a LLM, your new search engine. Like-minded folks making the enshittified portions transparent. E-mail spam used to be a thing, until one day it wasn't. AI just generalizes the process.
jackcosgrove 2y ago
There's a curmudgeon strain in this essay that reminds me a lot of all the criticisms of television when it became popular. Oh wait :\
phoe-krk 2y ago
> "You will not survive" is not only a frightening idea. This article has a tone of a giant, unacknowledged fear of passing that is using some notion of "the Internet" as a demonstratory puppet. "The Internet" too shall pass[0], and it should be the most obvious and neutral thing in the world; the overdramatizing part of this article does makes no sense. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass
Dr_Incelheimer 2y ago
[flagged]
imiric 2y ago
This is an overly wordy article, that I think misses the mark. The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either. A few things affect this: - Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The internet experience is getting gradually worse. - Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s. - Artificial intelligence. The situation will only be exacerbated by letting AI loose on the internet. Whatever humans can do online, AI can do much, much better—or worse, depending on your perspective. The outcome of these things will be that countries will have a more restricted and censored version of the current internet. We'll follow China's example, and have a European internet, US internet, etc. The internet will survive. It will just be very different.
- Galatians4_16 2y ago
  > The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s. This only applies in media that allows censorship, and controls visibility. If it doesn't, the bigots are easy to identify and weed themselves out. If it foes, the bigots can form bubbles, and foster tribalism.
  - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    Information wants to be free - the ideology - downvoted into disappearance and death.. the irony..
  - chpatrick 2y ago
    I think you'll find bigotry is actually quite popular worldwide.
    - 2y ago
surfingdino 2y ago
The internet is fine. The bullshit layer (layer 8) in the OSI model will be turned into compost by another layer. Such is life.
renegat0x0 2y ago
First thing - what was fun? I think fan pages with a lots of interesting content, forums with interesting topics, IIRC channels with interesting groups. All had one thing in common: interesting creators. Previously Google connected you with interesting pages, now Google is answering machine. Now you are not connected with people, but with Google algorithm. You are connected with amazon deals, news outlets. You will not find XYZ blog on it that easily. Previously Facebook was designed to connect you with people, now you are connected with memes, ads, bots, and companies, news outlets. Previously YouTube connected users with creators, now it is full of corporations, big media. You cannot down vote, you cannot easily browse subscriptions. YouTube does not care about users, comment section has limited amount of moderation tools. Dead internet theory. Bots create your feeds through algorithms. Bots comment threads through malicious accounts. Now Bots will also create content. Manual labor is often more precise, more artsy. Moving to automation, to factories killed some of that. I think this is what happens with the Internet. We are living in a factory now. There is a limit to enshittification, before users are tired and go elsewhere.
- account42 2y ago
  I think a big change is also cultural. Fewer people seem to be interested in their focus of choice remaining just a hobby. It's just too tempting to turn your audience into a profit generator when that's just a few clicks away (or so it seems) and you are getting companies offering to throw money at you for promotional deals. It also doesn't help that all the big platforms like to promote those who have succeeded in making being online their job, and in return that job includes gaming the algorithms to make sure they are seen.
winternewt 2y ago
I think what is ending is not the Internet, but eternal September. Because soon every person in the world is online and there will be no more new people to continually corrupt the netiquette that we've built. Eventually we as a society will learn and form habits and social rules (or even laws) that create more harmony than chaos online. It's chaos right now because we're overwhelmed not just by people, but by corporations who do not have any framework for behavior that is conducive to a sustainable, functional Internet. Even corporations will eventually understand that this is destructive to their business in the long run. Perhaps, just like with civilization IRL, it will start with pockets of societies that have specific ideals for collaboration. And then the successful pockets grow to include more and more.
lincon127 2y ago
Reading this kind of hurts. The observations are correct, it's just most of the conclusions the author comes to are deranged. And how they're written? It all just sounds like it was written by a tinfoil hat wearing english major desperate to stay relevant. First of all, the internet isn't on the verge of imploding, it's just in flux, as per usual. It also isn't stagnating, at least not on such a grand scale. Though it does feel as though it's lost a bit of steam in the last few years. That could be due to the homegeneitiy of the current investment landscape. The author tries to sell us a doom spiral by comparing the state of services. They attempt to connect different services as if they're representative of a pulse for the internet as a whole. But the differences between Facebook and Tik Tok are vast, between Twitter and MySpace, between forums and Discord. Declining numbers in any of these does not indicate decline in any other service, nor the internet as a whole. Not to mention most of these are controlled by monolithic entities who also don't contribute to the web outside their bloated bubbles, the performance of these services are largely based on the performance of these companies and their investments. If one dies, it's a largely isolated event. All the most recent, negative changes were made by spurious investments into anything that even seemed remotely profitable by eager investors. These bubbles will burst, and when they do, some people won't even notice the change. Some, of course, will be forced to adapt, or to leave the internet entirely. That'll likely mean the www will lose a lot of its traffic, but that doesn't sound bad for the internet as a whole... in fact it sounds good. Companies are only making the internet worse because they believe there's money to be made. That, as the author points out, is not really going to be true for much longer, at least not for the current wave of companies. And when that happens, new companies will have to step in and pick up the pieces if they want to profit off the internet. Unfortunately for them, there's just not enough lubrication to keep an aging population of users relearning all their old habits in new environments. I believe the internet, as it is now, will not survive for the individual. However, every individual must make that journey on their own terms. The author clearly made their journey ages ago, or perhaps was always skeptical. Others, however still have to make that trek. I have a few younger friends still in the beginning of their internet obsession where they (somehow) can still find regular content that interests them on the www. This group is likely to be the last large wave for advertisers. So, when they're done, that's it; The internet won't be worth investing in, and everyone who only ever used it kill time will go along side the companies. Those that made the journey will stay if they have use for a post-corporate internet. The article, of course, assumes that the internet is just for fapping and killing time, when in reality it's used for a lot more than just that. Fapping and killing time is just what's being subsidized by the numerous companies invested in the internet. The article doesn't consider this, it doesn't consider that there were points before the current one, or that there are even corners of the internet where people share software and ideas. No, it just assumes that once this fad dies, the internet dies. I personally believe the internet has uses outside what companies invest in, and it's not hard to use it for just those purposes. That's enough of a reason to keep coming back. All that being said, I do agree with the author regarding causes on the internet. One essentially does nothing when they try to devote their time to a cause online. Unless one explicitly uses the internet to organize action with others in meatspace, the internet is essentially worthless as a medium for revolution. Actually, it's worse than worthless, it's detrimental as it encourages non-action. In most cases even supporting forces who would ostracize those that would push for more forceful and aggressive action against the status quo. The corporate internet has largely made revolutionaries into pacifists, a trait which makes them non-threatening to those in power. Even calmly explaining all this is a bit mastubatory and counter-productive. What I should be doing is running in local elections, organizing meetups, or sabotaging power structures in a variety of ways. I should be speaking in plain language about all of this, and freely expressing myself. Instead I'm here, explaining the obvious flaws of an article, while simultaneously not-so-subtly advertising my views regarding the web like it matters.
nubinetwork 2y ago
> In 1977, Ken Olsen declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.’ To be fair, he was talking about big iron mainframes. He envisioned everyone having a dumb terminal in their home rather than a microcomputer (which we effectively call "the pc").
acureau 2y ago
I don't disagree with many of his points, but to call him over-dramatic would be an understatement. The article doesn't seem to make any attempt at justifying the hook besides "the internet is already over because all things will end". And it's presented as some sort of revelation, written in the most pretentious possible way, and ends with a statement of how different his writing is from "the internet". Some kind of boogeyman compilation of everything wrong with life in a digital world.
stg24 2y ago
The invention of the printing press enabled people of relatively modest means to mass distribute their message through pamphlets. Over the following centuries, that gave us all kinds of innovations and revolutions, like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Some said things that needed to be said, but in many cases, successful pamphleteers didn't feel a need to be fair or accurate. As the centuries went on, many people decided that the time it took to read a pamphlet was almost always worth more than what they were getting out of it. So, we got book publishers and newspaper proprietors whose key value added was their guarantee that what they were publishing met a minimum standard of value, and people were willing to pay for that because it was better value than reading self-published books or pamphlets, even when free. If the mainstream Internet follows the same path, it might come to have more in common with MSN of 1996 than with Facebook of twenty years later.
big-green-man 2y ago
What a wonderful article. It really helped me to understand what I've been feeling as of late. The companies that built what we think of as the modern internet, they tried to build perpetual motion machines. They've built unsustainable businesses chasing investor money, based on the idea that they can sell people things better, give them more of what they want, entire environments built around interaction and engagement. And then, like the foresight lacking Rube Goldberg engineers they are, they created a thing that can do all the engagement for them and unleashed it. I have no doubt in my mind that when the last user deletes their Facebook app from their phone, engagement will be at an all time high. I remember reading something about how most internet bandwidth usage is not people sending things to each other, but machines mindlessly sending nonsense, and what we see is a fraction of the total. It appears that that is the fate of the visible internet as well, and coming very soon.
martin82 2y ago
Nostr or something like it is going to give us back the awesome internet.

237 points by thinkingemote 2y ago

If Sam Kriss spent two years to write any of his blog posts into a book, he'd be Nietzsche. Still makes for a sparkling bit of thought, easily reread.

mrkramer 2y ago
What makes you think if Nietzsche lived today, he wouldn't be a blogger?
- shoubidouwah 2y ago
  temporal commutativity of thought in the media vector space?
- kibwen 2y ago
  Nietzsche wouldn't survive five minutes in a world in which Twitter exists. Gaze too long into the abyss indeed.
samastur 2y ago
No, he wouldn't. The whole thing is all blitz and little substance of someone who seems to be over-read and under-thought. It's best described in his own words: a handful of sugar instead of a meal.
- shoubidouwah 2y ago
  It also was how N. saw his thoughts at times. An evidence, disgraced for being explained. And stylistic flamboyance around a theme is hardly foreign to philosophers, this one in particular (any chapter of Zarathustra can be read as a blog post in the same way). I still advocate that style - and being drunk with style - can lead the writer to singularly original and contemporaneous ideas. Language is a dynamic object, filled with the spirit of the age, and very high sensitivity to it within a philosophical context can act as a catalyst.
  - samastur 2y ago
    As someone with sweet-tooth I don't mind the style, but I do think it masks how empty his arguments are and how unsubstantiated. Explanations that aren't really. I guess our main disagreement is if he has original ideas. I've only read a couple of things he wrote so I'm certainly not in position to have the definitive opinion, but neither of his articles impressed me.
    - shoubidouwah 2y ago
      I think you're right on the crux, with a qualification: every argument has already been made in one form or another - the underlying universal concepts are not that complex. the talent of a writer is to present it in a manner congruent with the geography/times. Isn't vacuity when speaking in pure style, but in a style that itself acts as a mirror to the zeitgeist, a valuable tool for thinkers? A frame, a kind of meta-thought?
  - chipsrafferty 2y ago
    Agreed, and for me, the main thesis of the article was that we should create things that we want to create, without concerning ourselves about how much engagement, reach, impact etc. they will have.
- luzojeda 2y ago
  Delight us with your arguments against what the author states in his posts instead of just ad-homineing.
  - samastur 2y ago
    I'm not going to deconstruct the whole thing to appease a stranger, but let's just take the first point of the argument: That it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet. Setting aside what does "end of the world" actually mean, who's making this statement? Almost nobody is, since practically every instance is someone referencing somebody else with little commitment. Essentially this is arguing against a person instead of some wide-spread view. Even if it was wide spread, does it even matter? It obviously can't be true since end of the world in any reasonable understanding contains end of the internet. So what exactly is this point and argument against it trying to show? I have no idea since believing or not in something dying generally matters little to it being (or not) in such process. Let's say it is important. What are the arguments that it is incorrect beyond being obviously so? Well, some unrelated people before you were incorrect about unrelated shape of future so you, but not the author, probably are too. Then he follows this by putting words in mouth of the people he disagrees with, before he swerves into his own experiencing of internet consumption and resulting numbness. I guess based on his expectations of near future there's an expectation of universality of his experience, but even if it was universal (and huge amounts of emotions exhibited online create at least some doubt that it is), why would it contribute to internet's death? It obviously doesn't stop him from scrolling, or writing and otherwise engaging on internet. Again, I have no idea. So all of it does not really add up to much, but I admit it is entertainingly written which is more than most of us manage.
    - chipsrafferty 2y ago
      > It obviously can't be true since end of the world in any reasonable understanding contains end of the internet. No, it obviously can be true. I can imagine many ways "the end of the world" could occur. Also, maybe it's not crystal clear what "the end of the world" means to you, but for me, and likely other people, it means the collapse of human civilization, which could happen from nuclear war, climate change, etc. Just because "the end of the world" would include "the death of the internet" doesn't imply that by imagining the end of the world you're also imagining the ways in which every aspect of the world get destroyed. When I imagine the end of the world I don't focus on what happens to say, Paris, specifically, but I do know, implicitly, that the end of the world would include the end of Paris.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  As contrasted to what? Chapter 4 of On Good and Evil? <http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-pub/bge/bge4.htm http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-pub/bge/bge4.htm> (It's ... nothing but a compilation of epigrams. Fediverse Toots, if you will.)
- Animats 2y ago
  The dramatic claim in the title is not well supported by the content. What seems to be happening is churn. Geocities was supplanted by Myspace, which was crushed by Facebook, which was marginalized by Tiktok... Does this ever settle, or what? The real breakthrough would be if someone came up with something like Craigslist that won on price. Operate at a low enough cost that just charging for ads in areas where people purposefully look at ads, such as apartment rentals, is enough to keep the the thing going. Make social so cheap that the big players go bust.
- chipsrafferty 2y ago
  Someone has never read Nietzsche lol

im3w1l 2y ago

Long but enjoyable read. I was surprised it didn't mention AI.

dillydogg 2y ago
I guess it was published in 2022. It hadn't become as ubiquitous yet. I would look forward to a follow up that includes some commentary on AI accelerating these issues
- EGreg 2y ago
  Here’s the AI version: https://youtu.be/UShsgCOzER4?si=BNezapA1D5pz4dnW https://youtu.be/UShsgCOzER4?si=BNezapA1D5pz4dnW HN: “well, this was bound to happen anyway without AI, it’s just fearmongering, dont pay any attention to the man behind the curtain” hehe
- rda2 2y ago
  Sam Kriss has at least two posts that came later about AI: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/a-users-guide-to-the-zairja-of-the https://samkriss.substack.com/p/a-users-guide-to-the-zairja-... https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-cacophony https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-cacophony The second one is a bit closer to touching on the same themes, but both are a little more allegorical than TFA.

_7acn 2y ago

I've been using the Internet since the days of Netscape Navigator and 14.4 kbit/s dial-up modems. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older, but I really miss the old Internet. Ironically, it felt less "anonymous" back then, and it was easier to be part of a community — users knew each other. Now, everyone is here, and the quality of content has significantly declined.

reddalo 2y ago
> everyone is here I think this is the answer. Once upon a time we were way fewer people, and many interests were shared among those people (because we pretty much were all "geeks"). We've always had trolls, spammers, etc. but it still felt like we were part of a big community. Now everybody is here, and that feeling is no more. It's like moving from a small village or town (where everybody knows each other) to a huge city. It doesn't feel like "belonging" anymore.
- peterleiser 2y ago
  And nobody makes Monty Python or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy references anymore. I had a boss 15 years ago who had watched all things Star Trek, just like me; Knew all the things. But at one point he mentioned he wasn't really a fan, it was just "required reading, part of the literature". This is an interesting one. There used to be certain things that all nerds knew, and could talk about, use as analogies and metaphors. Something to talk about just like sales people (stereotypically, used to) talk about sports. I realized early in my career that's why some people in business follow sports, so they didn't get cut out of conversations. I always had nothing to say when that topic came up. But it's tricky because geeks and nerds shouldn't be gatekeepers about what the entertainment is, or the literature, because that cuts out a lot of people who should feel included. But at the same time most people think it's generally nice to have some common things to reference, talk about, and normalize on. I think social media, politics, streaming services, etc. have totally blown away these shared frameworks in society, and it's kind of a bummer, even though it's great to have lots of choices. People used to watch the same TV shows and talk about it the next day. I guess sports is basically the last thing that's shared. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk...

stuartjohnson12 2y ago

Powerful contender for favourite thing I've read in the last 30 days.

munificent 2y ago
Agreed. I love everything about this, the message, the style. Writing like this is why I fell in love with blogs.
Daneel_ 2y ago
To each their own. This rapidly lost my attention due to the meandering, abstract writing style. I ended up skim reading down to the conclusion, deciding it was a nihilistic take on things, and moving on. Variety is the spice of life though, I’m glad it was enjoyed by others.
- stuartjohnson12 2y ago
  This is by far the most common complaint I see directed towards the writings and media that I enjoy the most, both in fiction and in non-fiction. Oblique narratives where nothing happens, nobody is happy, everyone dies, and no message is taught or learned are my favourite. Interstellar. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Full Metal Jacket. Most recently, the latest instalment of EPIC: The Musical. I can't really explain why I like them so much. They scratch a cosmic itch I don't fully understand, and the answer isn't simply validating negative sentiment toward the world or other trivial possibilities that immediately spring to mind.

the_gipsy 2y ago

Really good read, through and through on the hook.

Finnucane 2y ago

I’m going to go practice my banjo now.

adra 2y ago

I dunno, maybe I didn't look deep enough, but skimming through, it feels like more a symptom of infinite growth. I think we're def. starting to plateau in many things that have had basically no growth for a long time. Anything that's gotten the attention like crypto and AI feel like "let's dump unbridled enthusiasm into this" while waiting for some real epiphany to arrive. The internet was imho the last real step forward in mankind (and a bunch of life saving drugs/vaccinations), though mass cellphone usage certainly helped to democratize it.

mrkramer 2y ago

My take on declining online social engagement is; a lot of people like to consume online content passively e.g. just reading Facebook posts or watching a YouTube video without actually liking or commenting. Another thing is; increasing number of people came to realize that privacy does matter and they refuse to participate in online dramas that can damage their reputation or harm their mental health.

wruza 2y ago
What’s the point of commenting a youtube video, have you ever seen the comments there? Liking a video makes your feed piled up with a semi-relevant crap for a week. Sometimes (increasingly often) I have to dislike an otherwise good video because I don’t want to screw up my recommendations.
- daelon 2y ago
  Removing it from your watch history might be more effective than disliking.
  - wruza 2y ago
    Agreed, I do both actually. Also “don’t recommend channel” for truly obnoxious ones. I follow through 3-4 of their videos so that they start to appear in the side column and then kill it from there, removing all traces afterwards. In my experience, - Don’t recommend channel - strong flag, but doesn’t modify “interests”. - Not interested - removes this exact video with a very low key tuning of recommendations, if at all. - Dislike - a slightly pronounced signal for recommendations. But still clueless cause no info on why. - Like - you’ll drown in content similar to this, but not the same quality. Get ready to shovel it and miss your previous interests completely. - Comment - similar to like. The default careless youtube experience without all that stopped working around 5 years ago (at least). Can’t imagine using it as is and not degenerating into something inhuman.
    - lolc 2y ago
      I'm just glad there are browser extensions that remove all that Youtube dross no questions asked. It's interesting to me that somebody would try and curate their experience in this shitshoveling assault on the nerves that is Youtube recommendations.

Sparkyte 2y ago

It isn't novelty, it is dependency. Because we are dependent on a connection we stop using it for novel reasons. The internet age is over is correct. The age of being connected has started. More and more people connected to the internet but not actually using it the way we saw it in the 90s and 2000s. Mid-2010s we started to see the paradigm take place.

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api 2y ago

This person is just, like many others, mistaking the death of public social media and the open web for the death of being online. All the interesting activity has retreated to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Mastodon, Signal, private and niche boards, game chats, etc. This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably on the endangered list. TikTok is probably the last big social and has an increasingly negative reputation, meaning it'll probably be "out" pretty soon. The public Internet is probably dying, a victim of spam and over-commoditization.

lmm 2y ago
Yep. This is someone who's too old to be invited to the cool parties any more and thinks that means Manhattan is over.
- api 2y ago
  I’ve found that ageism is kind of not even a thing. The problem is that the cool parties are not where they used to be but as people age they usually don’t update their priors. Same goes for the internet.
chipsrafferty 2y ago
The public internet IS the internet
- api 2y ago
  The Internet is TCP/IP, BGP, and other core protocols and the physical wires that carry them. Public wide open free for all space are a major use case but they aren't a necessity and they may not survive the spam tsunami of LLMs and troll farms.

breck 2y ago

I agree with a lot of this, but think the future of the Internet will be u-shaped: - People will use it drastically less. I got rid of my smart phone ~2 years ago and it's been a huge life improvement. Still on the computer a lot, but when I leave the room I'm in the real world again. - When they do use it it will be drastically higher quality. I'm working on building the World Wide Scroll as a successor to the web (https://wws.scroll.pub/ https://wws.scroll.pub/), an idea I first had 12 years ago (https://breckyunits.com/spacenet.html https://breckyunits.com/spacenet.html), but took a while to figure out all the infra.

moffkalast 2y ago
There are always stories of people who "quit" normal tech things, buying obscure eink phones and other pretentious minimalist crap, claiming it does this or that to their sleep or attention span. Always devs or at least tech-adjecent people. A lone outlier is what you are. Meanwhile most of the population remains completely (happily?) addicted to scrolling <social app of the year> every free waking moment of every day with no sign of stopping. Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  > Always devs or at least tech-adjecent people. A lone outlier is what you are. We were the first to come, and we're the first to leave. We're trendsetters, while most of the society just do what everyone else does. It's just that those things don't happen overnight, it's a process. > Meanwhile most of the population have been peasants and slaves in most societies through most of history. The fact that there exist a handful of countries where average Joe doesn't need to worry about biological survival doesn't suddenly remove the truth that most people do and will belong to lower classes and "everyone is equal" is a meme that came to existence very recently so can't be taken seriously. > Not really surprising when the entire tech industry is hellbent on keeping everyone there and making sure the engagement numbers continue to go up for the next quarterly report. Until that changes there won't be any major move away from it. Most people want cheap entertainment and nothing more. That's how things have always been, whether it's gladiators fighting or cute puppy pictures on Facebook. Modern tech industry is just a reflection of this, and things will stay this way. Obviously nothing stops you from seeking better ways to pass time, or at least building some healthy habits if you're not ready to give up on slop completely. Just like Newton chose to think about falling apples instead of drinking wine. My comment might come across as snobbish, but I also recognize the fact that there are lots and lots of people above me, and I will never achieve their level no matter how much work I put into myself.

interroboink 2y ago

This article feels like a window into the mind of someone who drank too deeply of being perpetually online, and now feels the pendulum swing the other way. Like the verbal equivalent of that one time I drank far too much Gin and my stomach finally said "no" all over the bathroom floor (missed the toilet — oops). I'm glad to never have gone down that particular path. Stuck with my flip phone for ages, etc. But for people who did, just know that there's room for moderation. There is plenty of space between "all day online" and "the internet is over." I like this quote from "Mutant Message Down Under": My suggestion is that you taste the message, savor what is right for you, and spit out the rest; after all, that is the law of the universe. You don't have to swallow the internet whole (or let it swallow you).

650 2y ago
>for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you. - Nietzsche Because these apps are designed to be targeted and specific with some of the brightest minds in the world working on them, it's easy to overdose and become addicted. t. recovering addict
- interroboink 2y ago
  Agreed with you there (: I'm not sure where the healing process begins, on the larger scale. Parents with their children, I suppose? I grew up without TV; probably that twisted my mind a bit, so I recoil from that stuff somewhat automatically. It's something I wish upon others.
dang_it_man 2y ago
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pxoe 2y ago
maybe it could help those doomer "internet is over!" types to even try to look at internet in a positive way - or at least it'd give us a tell through what they'd come up with, if anything at all

thinkingemote 2y ago

Past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907473 2002 69 Comments

HPsquared 2y ago
I was about to make a snarky comment about 2002, but looking back that really was the early days. A lot of the early stuff (with a few exceptions) basically extinct now.
- thinkingemote 2y ago
  Hah! Totally missed that typo

FpUser 2y ago

What a bunch of drivel. Do not even know what to say. "predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate." To me it fucking wildly accurate. It did revolutonize a lot for me. Yes I know some people would get a heart attack if they could not show to the rest of the world what did they have for breakfast. Not my problem. I only had good from the Internet so far.

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TibbityFlanders 2y ago
[dead]
big-green-man 2y ago
I've had mostly good, but I will be the first to admit that the internet sucked up a lot more of my time than would have been ideal. Most of the benefits I get from the internet are not how I use the internet in my day to day life. Like you said, not your problem, but when talking about this in the context of the masses using it as they do now, you get 2 outcomes: people withering and dying while staring at a screen, or this entire industry collapsing catastrophically.

alx_the_new_guy 2y ago

Again, returning to the "it's not the internet itself, but the content on it" thing. Facebook and microblogs use the same infra and can be accessed via the same means (web browser, etc). At least from anecdotal experience, the really good stuff has been getting easier to find through IRL-ish means, like asking a colleague for the invite link. I haven't really seen behind the invite veil much, since I'm about as far as it gets from someone cool you'd want in your group chat, but from what I've seen, "good" things are happening and thoughts are thought. It's just happening in private. There were comments or an article somewhere about someone being sad about "very deep technical discussions being held on discord servers and that knowledge being ultimately lost". I don't think it's that bad of a thing though since that knowledge was never intended for the public and being ultimately lost and forgotten is what the people writing said messages are expecting of it. Certainly, as a person, I care more about myself having less of a digital papertrail than someone in the indefinite future not being able to solve their nieche non-essential problem. I could elaborate more on the "onlyfans has replaced sex" and the such, which are, IMO, while somewhat true, are conclusions to which the author arrived to from a wrong place, thus continuing to think in that direcion would get them further from the truth, not closer to it. In the end, just as human brain is a sort of general purpose multimodal input-output machine, the internet can be used for all sorts of purposes. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will fall out of fashion, without getting a solid cultutal foothold. The test of time works as well as ever.

zeta0134 2y ago
By far, the majority of my time "online" these days is spent in a Discord server for enthusiasts that are also interested in my hobby. Due to the server's small size and narrow niche, moderation is straightforward and we rarely have any issues with trolling. We don't allow political discussion, which mostly allows members of diverse backgrounds to interact safely, since triggering discussions don't come up very often. It's not even a particularly novel idea, right? Chatrooms have been a thing just about since packet switching was a thing, this one is just a polished implementation of that idea. Trouble is, the one metric that matters to Google (inter-linking, engagement, etc) can't happen when the content can't be crawled in the first place. So our pleasant, intellectually simulating content stays hidden where the rest of the internet never notices it.

tonymet 2y ago

The internet is over , if you want it . All the doomerism is gone if you avoid it. You can take back your life if you just go for it

wruza 2y ago
Is there a specific url to go?
- kibwen 2y ago
  There is! See the following website, which has endured for about 30 years now: https://hmpg.net/ https://hmpg.net/
  - bitwize 2y ago
    I think I need to download more memory to handle the whole internet
    - samplatt 2y ago
      It's thought of that already; you just keep inserting new disks into drive A:\
      - account42 2y ago
        Seems feasible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40702546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40702546
- Dr_Incelheimer 2y ago
  [flagged]

zw123456 2y ago

I am old enough to remember when people said TV was a passing fad. And the radio. And the printing press. And the telegraph. And the written word. I mean come on you lazy shlubs, memorize Beowulf like we had to back in my day. OK, I am not actually that old. My point is, that with every technology that has been invented to improve, or expand the ability of humans to communicate, there have been the detractors and naysayers predicting the inevitable doom of said technology. I am still waiting for that whole writing things down instead of memorizing them thing to finally go out of style.

tialaramex 2y ago
And bad for kids. Go back and you can read about how dreadful it is that some people are letting their children read novels. What sort of person would do that? But the article isn't really about that, to the extent it's really about anything except the author's need to feel very, very smart. It's a vague gesture at how "over" it they are, for any value of "it". Best to pat them on the head condescendingly and then move on.
- zw123456 2y ago
  The person who wrote the article used the internet for all the sub-references. Had it not been for the internet, this person most likely would not have known all the things they mentioned. I don't know if they are listening, but it would be an interesting question.
Etheryte 2y ago
I'm not sure if the examples you bring make the point you're trying to make. For most practical intents and purposes, printed press is but a small shadow of its former self. Pretty much all outlets focus on the digital and many have stopped printing altogether. Radio is the same, as a fraction of the population, the numbers are hitting record lows. Most people listen to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, podcasts, etc, not radio. I doubt I need to even mention classical TV. Point being, all of these technologies exist and people do consume them, yes, but compared to their former glory they're all practically dead.

phendrenad2 2y ago

What we've had so far was not "the internet" it was "the internet, gatekept by socioeconomic and educational criteria". The number of internet users appears to be flattening off at around 75% of the world population. So far people have been happy to jump right into that mass of 6 billion people. But I think that this plateauing will allow sub-ecosystems to flourish. HN is one of them.

anal_reactor 2y ago
[flagged]
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  Poverty is not an indicator of intelligence, wit, or thought. However, it feels like you are experiencing a profound poverty of all of those exact things. You elitist little shit.
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/ Children from poor families perform worse on intelligence tests. https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/39/5/820/7008955?login=false https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/39/5/820/7008955?login=... Lack of cognitive abilities correlates with low income. Your move.
    - MrVandemar 2y ago
      You can't use those studies to say "poor people" = "stupid". That kind of blanket statement is the kind of fairy tale elites tell each other to make them feel good about being selfish rich pricks ("oh, I worked hard for what I have. They just don't work hard enough" kind of bullshit). Some children from poor families perform worse on intelligence tests. Lack of cognitive abilities correlates with low income in some cases that we studied. Poverty is not an indicator of intelligence, or courage, or character. Poverty is an indicator that something in our society is profoundly broken and needs fixing. I work in a medical practice. I see all kinds. I see dumb rich people and I see smart poor people. And here's some poor people, or people who grew up poor: Stephen King. Aristotle. Jennifer Lopez. Oprah. Ghandi. Jim Carey. Shania Twain. JK Rowling. Jesus of Nazareth. Charles Dickens (who wrote stories about grinding poverty). I'm not a fan of some of those people, but I'd love to speak to any and all of them, because I'm sure I'd learn something!

parl_match 2y ago

> It’s already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all our pop music sounds like a tribute act. This whole article reads as "i expected things to stay the same and they are" There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways - netflix, apple tv, etc. So they're not in theaters? Miniseries are the new movies. Your streaming box is the new theater. Bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style? Stop reading best-sellers, and focus on more curated and genre lists, such as Goodreads. Again, you expected the new york times bestseller list to be the arbiter of "good" and that is no longer true. And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap Broaden your horizons or slide beneath the static.

bsder 2y ago
> There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways Are there? People parrot this over and over but rarely provide any reliable evidence. Even if there is interesting stuff being done, if it has no impact past three people then it is by definition not "great". By most measures I can think of, there are NOT lots of "great" things being made.
- krapp 2y ago
  Provide reliable evidence of your own, then. What objective measures are you using, other than your own personal taste? What quantifiable data can you provide to back up your claim that great films are no longer being made? And how does your definition of greatness apparently presuppose widespread impact, but somehow presumably exclude any modern films that have demonstrably widespread impact?
  - bsder 2y ago
    Money--overall monetary takes are down across the board. It was never easy for artists to make a living, but now it's ferociously miserable. Innovation--its documented that everything is now IP sequels and the number of original things is way down. Impact--which artists and decades were playing at the last wedding you went to? Yeah, thought so. I'm reminded of the punk documentary where the original punks were horrified that the people who came after and idolized them missed the whole point.

PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0 2y ago

The internet is now just Real Life, with all of the same rules, regulations, and ideologies.

c22 2y ago

Sounds about like how I felt during my early thirties as well. But whether it's AOL and MSN, Orkut and Myspace, or Facebook and Tiktok, platforms come and go yet the internet persists.

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tammer 2y ago

This had my attention at first but I’m not sure it led me anywhere. For discussion of the fundamental contradictions with the current structure of the Internet (that lead to the problems described herein & more), I highly recommend The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Platform It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.

lmm 2y ago

Meh. No, the internet isn't going away. Yes, it's not the countercultural thing it once was. Counterculture is still happening, just not on the first page you go to on the internet any more. No, manufacturing going from 20% to 14% of the economy does not mean the world is ending. And no, the random coincidence of who has a bunch of oil money right now doesn't mean anything. The internet will outlast Islam, culturally if not physically. The new generation doesn't know how boring a world without a phone in your pocket actually was. They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back. Who's "we"? There's billions of people today who really do believe in religion the way that medieval Europeans did. The middle east is full of them, and there are multiple countries where the religion and government are inextricably joined together (such as Iran and Afghanistan). Sure, a large portion of the people in liberalized Western nations no longer believe that stuff the way medieval Europeans did, but there are many others who still do. The US has many of them too, trying to control government policy according to their beliefs.
goatlover 2y ago
The world wasn't that boring without a phone in your pocket. That's just a symptom of being addicted to online engagement. People got along just fine for most of human history with the internet to entertain them.

nickdothutton 2y ago

We got the Internet that advertising built. This was not how we (well some of us early 90s and before) users assumed it would pan out. It has been my experience that private Internet communities (groups, forums, messaging chats) are where the quality discussion happens these days. Away from the advertising and the controversy seeking (and anti-tech) mainstream media reporters.

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suzzer99 2y ago
Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.
- pyrolistical 2y ago
  There are plenty of incentives to game this to distribute your whatever. It’s just that the moderation is pretty good
  - lazide 2y ago
    Also the crowd is brutally cynical, which tends to discourage a lot of it.
    - DocTomoe 2y ago
      To the contrary, this crowd is one of the most pleasant on the internet in 2024. A prime example of why gatekeeping is necessary and working.
      - PhilipRoman 2y ago
        Do you consider pleasant and cynical as mutually exclusive? I had a chat with a former politician and he was definitely pleasant, but extremely cynical, he pointed out instances of corruption everywhere. Although to be fair he was probably just being realistic not cynical. Cynicism is a good filter against dumb trends, hustler types and "emperor's clothes" situations.

Havoc 2y ago

> Where you go, what you buy; a perfect snapshot of millions of ordinary lives. They were betting that this would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff that rules the world.8 >They were wrong, The fact that both Google and Facebook are based on precisely this suggests to me that it is not the theory that is wrong but the execution of the other examples. Uber - where you drive - just isn’t all that interesting to advertisers I’d say the more important perspective is one of walled garden. The companies with tight walled gardens seem to succeed the best at hijacking these personal behavioural exhausts of data aka surveillance capitalism etc

asdff 2y ago
I think a big part of it is also the data are poor and people don't know how to take advantage of their walled garden. For example, uber recently added advertisements into their app. You may not know this, because they are only seen when you are riding in your ride already, but you get an ad for Tim Hortons because the car is within a half mile of one. On paper this looks good for the marketer. Why yes, we can take our captured population and send them ads to local partners who now get these customers patronizing their business. Seems like it would be a great lucrative deal for both parties, right? Of course logic says it doesn't work like that. Like I said, no one sits there looking at uber ads the entire ride. No one tells the uber driver "hey wait, I know I was trying to get where I was going but all the sudden I am surprisingly hungry, lets divert a half mile and potentially 20 minutes so I could get a $4 bacon egg and cheese." It just doesn't happen. But the dance must continue of course. Maybe the uber people responsible for this feature don't even care at all that it works, only that their shareholders think it works and their advertising partners also think it works. That is incentive enough to keep up the farce even with no supporting data because the money, in the end, is very real. After all, everyone on earth knows about coke thats sold in every store on earth, but the ads still need to be purchased because the purchase itself is a more important metric than the end result.

CM30 2y ago

I sometimes suspect the pandemic and lockdowns probably killed a lot of social engagement and internet activity too. Yes, it seems counterproductive, since those times were boom periods for many social media platforms... But then once it ended, it feels like being stuck online with nothing else to do all day burnt a lot of people out on the internet and online activities. Perhaps they decided it was best to make up for lost time once real life 'reopened'. Or perhaps they took one look at the online panopticon, and realised it wasn't adding as much to their lives as they thought. Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.

Swizec 2y ago
> Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore. Important to note that this happens every summer. Especially a pre-us-election summer. People are out there living their lives, having fun, and avoiding the constant barrage of politics online. Things will be back in the fall. Sauce: My email open rates observed over the past 10 years. Summers always see a lull in online activity Also you may be experiencing your age cohort growing up. I’m mid 30’s and have noticed a significant decline in online activity as people my age juggle kids and career and increasingly have zero time to spend online. The younger folk without these encumbrances don’t hang out where I’m used to looking. Whenever I hang out (irl) with younger coworkers it’s obvious that people 10 years younger still spend just as much if not more time online than we did at that age.
asynchronous 2y ago
Statistically we actually know this is false, the pre-Covid 6pm internet surge window has actually stuck around as the new baseline normal internet traffic post-covid.

asdff 2y ago

A big issue with the internet is the commercialization aspect of it. Any time you get an organic community of actual users, that's just chumming the water. That's a good quality population of users for the marketer unlike a lot of others out there. They are going to try all they can to get into that community and use it for advertising, to make some use out of it versus to leave it be on the table. Entropy favors enshittification. The race to the bottom never ends, the bottom just keeps moving as low as it possibly can be. Individual incentives have also shifted substantially. Having a post go viral or be of some help to someone else used to be enough of an incentive to post on the internet. Now people want to make a job out of it, which shifts the nature of the posts due to different incentives requiring different optimizations. Also people aren't hosting their own websites that they support out of their own pocket that often anymore. People would rather post their content on other people's websites that are ad supported and therefore have incentives that bias what is posted there or gets traction on that platform.

DocTomoe 2y ago
A big part in that was ISPs who often enough deliberately killed self-hosting with dynamic IP allocation and asynchronous upload/download rates, necessitating hosting somewhere else, which came with an extra cost, either in ads or in money.
- account42 2y ago
  Dynamic IPs for residential connections where already the norm in the early 2000s (remember dyndns.org and freedns.afraid.org?) yet self-hosted content was much more prominent than it is now. So where asymmetric lines.
  - DocTomoe 2y ago
    That 'self-hosting' you are referring to was actually 'hosting your own stuff on other people's computers in a data center somewhere, most likely the ISP that originally took away your static IP so you can't do it yourself'. True self-hosting is from your own basement. I'm honestly in the 'old guy from the 1990s' camp. ... once there was a fleeting glimpse of beauty, called 'Internet'.

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worstspotgain 2y ago

Here's some contrarian optimism. Assume google doesn't lead anywhere anymore. SEO won. Enshittification factor 0.999. Just train a LLM, your new search engine. Like-minded folks making the enshittified portions transparent. E-mail spam used to be a thing, until one day it wasn't. AI just generalizes the process.

jackcosgrove 2y ago

There's a curmudgeon strain in this essay that reminds me a lot of all the criticisms of television when it became popular. Oh wait :\

phoe-krk 2y ago

> "You will not survive" is not only a frightening idea. This article has a tone of a giant, unacknowledged fear of passing that is using some notion of "the Internet" as a demonstratory puppet. "The Internet" too shall pass[0], and it should be the most obvious and neutral thing in the world; the overdramatizing part of this article does makes no sense. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass

Dr_Incelheimer 2y ago

[flagged]

imiric 2y ago

This is an overly wordy article, that I think misses the mark. The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either. A few things affect this: - Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The internet experience is getting gradually worse. - Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s. - Artificial intelligence. The situation will only be exacerbated by letting AI loose on the internet. Whatever humans can do online, AI can do much, much better—or worse, depending on your perspective. The outcome of these things will be that countries will have a more restricted and censored version of the current internet. We'll follow China's example, and have a European internet, US internet, etc. The internet will survive. It will just be very different.

Galatians4_16 2y ago
> The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s. This only applies in media that allows censorship, and controls visibility. If it doesn't, the bigots are easy to identify and weed themselves out. If it foes, the bigots can form bubbles, and foster tribalism.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  Information wants to be free - the ideology - downvoted into disappearance and death.. the irony..
- chpatrick 2y ago
  I think you'll find bigotry is actually quite popular worldwide.
  - 2y ago

surfingdino 2y ago

The internet is fine. The bullshit layer (layer 8) in the OSI model will be turned into compost by another layer. Such is life.

renegat0x0 2y ago

First thing - what was fun? I think fan pages with a lots of interesting content, forums with interesting topics, IIRC channels with interesting groups. All had one thing in common: interesting creators. Previously Google connected you with interesting pages, now Google is answering machine. Now you are not connected with people, but with Google algorithm. You are connected with amazon deals, news outlets. You will not find XYZ blog on it that easily. Previously Facebook was designed to connect you with people, now you are connected with memes, ads, bots, and companies, news outlets. Previously YouTube connected users with creators, now it is full of corporations, big media. You cannot down vote, you cannot easily browse subscriptions. YouTube does not care about users, comment section has limited amount of moderation tools. Dead internet theory. Bots create your feeds through algorithms. Bots comment threads through malicious accounts. Now Bots will also create content. Manual labor is often more precise, more artsy. Moving to automation, to factories killed some of that. I think this is what happens with the Internet. We are living in a factory now. There is a limit to enshittification, before users are tired and go elsewhere.

account42 2y ago
I think a big change is also cultural. Fewer people seem to be interested in their focus of choice remaining just a hobby. It's just too tempting to turn your audience into a profit generator when that's just a few clicks away (or so it seems) and you are getting companies offering to throw money at you for promotional deals. It also doesn't help that all the big platforms like to promote those who have succeeded in making being online their job, and in return that job includes gaming the algorithms to make sure they are seen.

winternewt 2y ago

I think what is ending is not the Internet, but eternal September. Because soon every person in the world is online and there will be no more new people to continually corrupt the netiquette that we've built. Eventually we as a society will learn and form habits and social rules (or even laws) that create more harmony than chaos online. It's chaos right now because we're overwhelmed not just by people, but by corporations who do not have any framework for behavior that is conducive to a sustainable, functional Internet. Even corporations will eventually understand that this is destructive to their business in the long run. Perhaps, just like with civilization IRL, it will start with pockets of societies that have specific ideals for collaboration. And then the successful pockets grow to include more and more.

lincon127 2y ago

Reading this kind of hurts. The observations are correct, it's just most of the conclusions the author comes to are deranged. And how they're written? It all just sounds like it was written by a tinfoil hat wearing english major desperate to stay relevant. First of all, the internet isn't on the verge of imploding, it's just in flux, as per usual. It also isn't stagnating, at least not on such a grand scale. Though it does feel as though it's lost a bit of steam in the last few years. That could be due to the homegeneitiy of the current investment landscape. The author tries to sell us a doom spiral by comparing the state of services. They attempt to connect different services as if they're representative of a pulse for the internet as a whole. But the differences between Facebook and Tik Tok are vast, between Twitter and MySpace, between forums and Discord. Declining numbers in any of these does not indicate decline in any other service, nor the internet as a whole. Not to mention most of these are controlled by monolithic entities who also don't contribute to the web outside their bloated bubbles, the performance of these services are largely based on the performance of these companies and their investments. If one dies, it's a largely isolated event. All the most recent, negative changes were made by spurious investments into anything that even seemed remotely profitable by eager investors. These bubbles will burst, and when they do, some people won't even notice the change. Some, of course, will be forced to adapt, or to leave the internet entirely. That'll likely mean the www will lose a lot of its traffic, but that doesn't sound bad for the internet as a whole... in fact it sounds good. Companies are only making the internet worse because they believe there's money to be made. That, as the author points out, is not really going to be true for much longer, at least not for the current wave of companies. And when that happens, new companies will have to step in and pick up the pieces if they want to profit off the internet. Unfortunately for them, there's just not enough lubrication to keep an aging population of users relearning all their old habits in new environments. I believe the internet, as it is now, will not survive for the individual. However, every individual must make that journey on their own terms. The author clearly made their journey ages ago, or perhaps was always skeptical. Others, however still have to make that trek. I have a few younger friends still in the beginning of their internet obsession where they (somehow) can still find regular content that interests them on the www. This group is likely to be the last large wave for advertisers. So, when they're done, that's it; The internet won't be worth investing in, and everyone who only ever used it kill time will go along side the companies. Those that made the journey will stay if they have use for a post-corporate internet. The article, of course, assumes that the internet is just for fapping and killing time, when in reality it's used for a lot more than just that. Fapping and killing time is just what's being subsidized by the numerous companies invested in the internet. The article doesn't consider this, it doesn't consider that there were points before the current one, or that there are even corners of the internet where people share software and ideas. No, it just assumes that once this fad dies, the internet dies. I personally believe the internet has uses outside what companies invest in, and it's not hard to use it for just those purposes. That's enough of a reason to keep coming back. All that being said, I do agree with the author regarding causes on the internet. One essentially does nothing when they try to devote their time to a cause online. Unless one explicitly uses the internet to organize action with others in meatspace, the internet is essentially worthless as a medium for revolution. Actually, it's worse than worthless, it's detrimental as it encourages non-action. In most cases even supporting forces who would ostracize those that would push for more forceful and aggressive action against the status quo. The corporate internet has largely made revolutionaries into pacifists, a trait which makes them non-threatening to those in power. Even calmly explaining all this is a bit mastubatory and counter-productive. What I should be doing is running in local elections, organizing meetups, or sabotaging power structures in a variety of ways. I should be speaking in plain language about all of this, and freely expressing myself. Instead I'm here, explaining the obvious flaws of an article, while simultaneously not-so-subtly advertising my views regarding the web like it matters.

nubinetwork 2y ago

> In 1977, Ken Olsen declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.’ To be fair, he was talking about big iron mainframes. He envisioned everyone having a dumb terminal in their home rather than a microcomputer (which we effectively call "the pc").

acureau 2y ago

I don't disagree with many of his points, but to call him over-dramatic would be an understatement. The article doesn't seem to make any attempt at justifying the hook besides "the internet is already over because all things will end". And it's presented as some sort of revelation, written in the most pretentious possible way, and ends with a statement of how different his writing is from "the internet". Some kind of boogeyman compilation of everything wrong with life in a digital world.

stg24 2y ago

The invention of the printing press enabled people of relatively modest means to mass distribute their message through pamphlets. Over the following centuries, that gave us all kinds of innovations and revolutions, like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Some said things that needed to be said, but in many cases, successful pamphleteers didn't feel a need to be fair or accurate. As the centuries went on, many people decided that the time it took to read a pamphlet was almost always worth more than what they were getting out of it. So, we got book publishers and newspaper proprietors whose key value added was their guarantee that what they were publishing met a minimum standard of value, and people were willing to pay for that because it was better value than reading self-published books or pamphlets, even when free. If the mainstream Internet follows the same path, it might come to have more in common with MSN of 1996 than with Facebook of twenty years later.

big-green-man 2y ago

What a wonderful article. It really helped me to understand what I've been feeling as of late. The companies that built what we think of as the modern internet, they tried to build perpetual motion machines. They've built unsustainable businesses chasing investor money, based on the idea that they can sell people things better, give them more of what they want, entire environments built around interaction and engagement. And then, like the foresight lacking Rube Goldberg engineers they are, they created a thing that can do all the engagement for them and unleashed it. I have no doubt in my mind that when the last user deletes their Facebook app from their phone, engagement will be at an all time high. I remember reading something about how most internet bandwidth usage is not people sending things to each other, but machines mindlessly sending nonsense, and what we see is a fraction of the total. It appears that that is the fate of the visible internet as well, and coming very soon.

martin82 2y ago

Nostr or something like it is going to give us back the awesome internet.