6 ms·

I don't enjoy the Internet any more

135 points by g0xA52A2A 2mo ago

ColdStream 2mo ago
I with them on that. The internet is basically just infrastructure for email and some media like a podcast, otherwise the only reason I am here is because... well, I'm forced to be on a computer most of the week and not all of it is 'productive'. But after work, weekends, holidays I do not touch it.
King-Aaron 2mo ago
> Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge. It triggers our worst instincts in terms of tribalism and groupthink and makes us intellectually lazy. I can't agree more with this.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  Brevity is an art form, one that most do not have. Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right. 99.9999% of stuff nowadays is not sculpted it is just simplified for quick reactions.
  - NewJazz 2mo ago
    This is too simplistic. There are simply many many issues and topics that can't be adequately explained in a few minutes. E.g. complicated weather interactions like El nino / la nina, or economic concepts like externalities. And furthermore, even if you can compress your information into a short period, the audience might not beable to successfully absorb the information at that rate. There have been studies done on this finding short form content to be less effective for education.
    - ColdStream 2mo ago
      Sorry, my original comment may have some off as defending short form content in the context of social media, that wasn't the point I was trying to make. What I mean is, there are times where folks tend to over expand their premise to the point of tedium. Something that could have been an essay become a book. That can drive people away from good stuff through sheer scale that wasn't necessary.
  - King-Aaron 2mo ago
    While to some degree you are right, I disagree with your assertion that "Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right." When we are talking about distributing information, I agree more with the author that short hand content breeds tribalism and makes people lazy.
    - ColdStream 2mo ago
      I agree, I was talking more broadly. Unfortunately, on social media there is rarely time for people to sculpt well thought out takes. Those that shoot first generally win.
  - seydor 2mo ago
    you are correct, there is a difference between a hot take and a laconic statement. the issue is with attention-seeking. Platforms willingly turn their forums to competition for likes, instead of encouraging compromise, which is what drives interesting discussions.
akersten 2mo ago
I'm simultaneously hearing that the internet is more addicting than cigarettes to the point where multiple states are finding success levying gigantic fines on companies for having too good of a product, and also that the internet is boring and drab. Are we on two different internets? Is the author simply immune from the hypnosis of social media? Anyway, the real internet is and always has been/will be smaller forums brought together by a common interest. Think back to the MMORPG private server communities of the 00's/10's. Kind of hacker news fits into that bucket today but even still a lot of the brainrotted brigading and average takes from reddit I'm seeing more often here (not calling out this post in particular; referring to the comment sections mostly).
- rockskon 2mo ago
  "Too good of a product" is an odd way to put it when you could apply the same logic to slot machines.
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    Exactly the example I was going to use. People do not get addicted to things because those things are too enjoyable. Watching people who are addicted to slots is just depressing, they just sit there gloomily depositing every single penny they have - until they have nothing. They just have a compulsion to engage with the slots. Engage, engagement, the exact thing big tech has been trying to optimize for since day 1. It's always just been a euphemism for addiction, and they succeeded. People report spending obscene amounts of time on social media while also saying that social media makes them feel worse. So captain obvious says why not just quit? Well that's because they're addicted to it. This is probably also why you see overwhelming support for age restrictions of social media, even amongst demographics that would otherwise be quite reluctant to give the government yet more power - people don't want their children to end up being another one of these stats.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  Cigarettes is a good analogy. It is both addictive but broadly doesn't really help out the individual consuming them.
forgetfreeman 2mo ago
I am sick to death of the seemingly obligatory oh-but-im-all-in-on-ai disclaimer embedded in what is otherwise a (totally valid) critique of AI. Have the courage of your convictions already.
- marsten 2mo ago
  I think most people see AI as an economic inevitability, immune to what any of us thinks. Why spend the time and energy making a reasoned critique if nobody has a real choice in the end? It's like railing against the concept of money or the existence of the mosquito.
- sph 2mo ago
  The lengths a human being goes to remain part of the in-group is mindboggling. I guess it is probably required these days. Your opinions don’t matter, you will adapt to the new AI reality or might as well find another job.
- int_19h 2mo ago
  It's not an either-or. Some of us are genuinely excited about what AI can do (or has already done for specific personal projects etc), while also being dismayed about what it's used to do on the internet at large.
  - forgetfreeman 2mo ago
    The irony, or perhaps cognitive dissonance, inherent in this position is staggering to me.
bblb 2mo ago
Stop absorbing everything. Limit yourself.
- overtone1000 2mo ago
  There is a point beyond which the probability of finding meaningful content is too low to justify the work required to find it. Beyond this point, limiting yourself means never trying. The juice ain't worth the squeeze.
- agnishom 2mo ago
  Do you mean that they should [stop (absorbing everything)] and therefore absorb only _some_ things, or that they should [(stop absorbing) everything] and therefore absorb nothing?
  - bblb 2mo ago
    Absorb and consume only some of the things. Although now that I think of it, stopping absorbing everything, or, _absorbing nothing_, might be a good mindfulness practice.
teekert 2mo ago
I agree, but if we're being very honest I think the reason is just nostalgia. And I think that you can still find what you're looking for, but it's less in-your-face (as in; it's not a url on altavista.com). We're older now, being young was great, we had infinite time to roam and discover and have nice things (and our first real six-string, and trying different things and not thinking about tomorrow). The youth nowadays also has infinite time, and they fill it in their own way. They like how things are, even though we don't like it and yearn for the days of yore. It is the way of things.
- tayo42 2mo ago
  Pretty sure discord is the PHPbb of today. That seems to be the place where people's congregate and the communities are smaller.
  - ColdStream 2mo ago
    It does have that feeling still but one does get the sense that they are on the path toward aggressive monetization.
- GPerson 2mo ago
  Earlier today I saw that Tik Tok has 2 billion monthly active users and the average user uses it for 100 minutes a day. The app is so addictive that I feel it’s not right to say the user using it every day for 100 minutes at a time is enjoying themselves. To me this doesn’t look like an organic expression of the youth’s desire to explore and create in ways different from precious generations. 1/4th of the humans in the world (many of them youth) are mindlessly scrolling short form content for almost 2 hours a day (and this is just Tik Tok). That’s a problem!
  - teekert 2mo ago
    That's indeed true, I share your concern, and I think most will call 2 hr/day rookie numbers. But there is also youth out there that do things differently. And (most) laws and understanding of the situation are changing for the better.
xvxvx 2mo ago
Last week I finally deleted my LinkedIn account, the last social account I had. This week, I'm close to deleting my YouTube account. There's less content I want to see and more slop than ever. Apple Music is on the chopping block. These days, I only use it to preview vinyl records that catch my eye. Once my iPhone dies, I'm done with smartphones. The internet had so much potential. Shame.
- sickophancy 2mo ago
  What's the rationale behind ditching musicapp? It just delivers files to you with some UI fluff on top.
  - ColdStream 2mo ago
    That is a fair take. Personally, I use my android basically an iPod. Only offline files via VLC. Never hopped on the streaming bandwagon for anything but the most throw away stuff. Yes, I kept all my DVD's from decades back.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  I will say this with ditching the smart phone. I have done it but also gone back to it. But it is merely used for specific tasks. SMS, a camera, weather report, the occasional podcast or audio book. And that's about it. Things that are difficult to do on a flip phone but alright on a 'smart' phone. I have said it many times. Look at the original iPhone presentation. It was a device that was very deliberate. It wasn't made to addict, it was made to be productive. Get in, do the thing you want and then move on. If only it stayed that way.
  - protocolture 2mo ago
    I really liked my Windows Phone, mostly because it didnt have apps on it. Although it did have facebook, it was facebook delivered by Microsoft engineers and was missing a lot of features.
    - 2mo ago
sickophancy 2mo ago
The problem isn't the internet but rather the sites that people use on it, and the monolithic nature of "social media". Social media will be viewed as a failed experiment in the future.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  Social media is a race to the bottom. Who can make the most addictive platform possible while also preventing others from getting too much of a foot hold. Also, the scale of the media they must process means 'the algorithm' is a feature not a bug. It was always going to devolve into echo chambers. It is funny seeing writers from the 1950's through to the 2000's all figure out the horrors this would unleash even if they didn't have a clue on the specifics of the technology. I agree it will be seen as a failure but I suspect it is only once it has a point of absolute devastation that it cannot be ignored any more. I don't know what that will look like or when but it will be horrible.
S3verin 2mo ago
I always appreciate a good Disco Elysium reference.
__MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
The internet is fine. It's the web that sucks now. It matters, because we can build a different web without throwing out the internet. We'll have to walk away from the attention economy, that'll be a journey that each has to take singly, but we don't have to walk back to the 1980's. We can build something that works for communication, but that doesn't work for advertising: something structurally enshittificationproof. It will not attract investors, because there will be nothing to leverage. We'll have to build it because we want it, which has never been easier. We can steganographically hide it in AI slop which no human has to actually ever see, and we can trick our enemies into hosting it for us for free. It might even be fun.
- hotcrossbunny 2mo ago
  How?
  - ColdStream 2mo ago
    Funnily enough this is what both Medium and Substack were trying to do but both have ended up being sucked into the system. Seems to be a universal thing, in a society that values capital as one of the highest achievements, it will co-opt anything that ends up trying to work against it and sell it back to you.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
      I don't think it's universal. People have been using sound waves to communicate for millena and so far nobody has capitalized on it. Medium and Substack aren't mediums, not like spoken word or watercolor or dance. They're platforms with admins who can be compelled to make changes with no regard to the consent of the users. Things with that property do always fall to corruption. But we can build software that doesn't do that. It won't be worth investing in, because what investors are buying is the ability to compel that admin, but we can make it for ourselves of we want to.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
    Well, at the base layer I think we need a CRDT of some kind. For my prototype I'm using a GSet of tuples, union for merge. Overtop that, an API which ensures that applications conform to the CALM theorem. This is a major restriction, but it buys us a lot. CALM violations are nucleation sites for enshittification. They're the points where platform owners exert their influence. Going without them means going without DNS, for instance, because which bits which name resolves to is the kind of coordination problem that, in our previous attempts, we allowed centralized control to solve for us. And centralized control means presenting a target to corrupting forces. So I figure we go content addressed. And we gossip tuples of hashes around which we will use to decide which content is which, which is trustworthy, which is malicious, etc. We'll get these from humans that we've met in real life, shook hands with, etc. We won't have to use a globally unique human friendly name to communicate about content because we won't be blindly trusting content on the basis of it having come from a server with a trustworthy name in the first place. Instead, the act of sharing will be part of the protocol: an attestation about a hash. Instead of "go to Netflix and search for foo" we'll say "here, I've recommended a movie to you" and then you can find it under the list of movies I've recommended to you. It'll have a name for humans, but its the hash that the protocol will operate on. The lack of a need for a name resolver means we can be partition tolerant. Apps will get smaller if they're just on a LAN with two peers and no internet, but they won't break. We can gossip this peer to peer over Bluetooth or WiFi, or we can treat Twitter or whatever as our transport protocol: just a dumb wire full of ads nobody sees. It might never support video calls, because you're gossiping messages opportunistically and there are no service providers involved: nobody to demand that their hardware stays online and conforms to some SLA. Latency to the other side of the planet might measure in weeks, might require the right person who happens to be taking the right flight to have gossipped the right tuple. But these are constraints I can live with. Mostly I want to know about local goings on anyway. If it takes my peers a few days to get distant news to me, so be it.
Bob_bo 2mo ago
You should try chatting with a large language model—it's incredibly useful! The only thing is, I'm not sure if the answers it gives are actually correct.
jdw64 2mo ago
I think it's time for people to have their own homepages. Building and customizing a homepage is more fun than you'd think. What's the main reason the internet feels less fun these days? I think it's because there are fewer people actually communicating. But wouldn't it be more fun if we communicated through homepages? Maybe someday there will be a community—a hub for people who have their own homepages—where only those with homepages can participate
sibeliuss 2mo ago
This is how I feel completely, having also grown up online all the way from BBSs onwards. I literally don't even have websites to visit any more. I get on my computer, scan hacker news for a bit, check twitter for a few minutes, scan some world news site, and thats it. I still spend a lot of time programming (and thus a lot of time on the computer) but other than that, absolutely nothing appeals. Its a wasteland in my mind.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  I have said it for a while, Hacker news is the last place that still feels like the old internet, but even then I'm not a huge fan of it. Some days I open it up to see just 30 stories about LLM's, something I have little to no interest in. While sites like Neocities are trying to keep the old web ideals alive, even there it can be difficult to find much of value.
  - sixtyj 2mo ago
    HN sans AI/LLM https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
  - krapp 2mo ago
    The fediverse still has a sense of community to me, and there are alt-webs like geminispace. All of it is anti-capitalist and anti-AI which should at least delay their eventual consumption by the rot, although holding it back entirely is impossible. As tired as I am seeing the constant stream of LLM stories (and even worse, vibe-coded projects) on HN i'm getting just as tired of the regular posts complaining about how much the internet sucks as well. HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") but lately it seems like nothing left but vitriol and bitterness. I feel like I need to limit my exposure to this place the way I do other social media platforms because it's just too toxic. Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.
    - dualvariable 2mo ago
      > HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") Reddit is full of the same hundred jokes being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with a good pun to make their life complete.
Ouman 2mo ago
[dead]
rswail 2mo ago
I've been on the "internet" since before there was one, back in 1984-6 when bang paths were email addresses and DNS hadn't been invented yet. I was on one of the earliest BBSs (pre-FIDO) in Melbourne run by Peter Jetson and "Bear's Bull" running on a CDC-6000 at RMIT. It's been an "eternal September" since Prodigy & Compuserve and then AOL joined the net, Usenet started degrading, people had more then 4-line sigs without a "-- " at the start of the sig, people top-quoted messages etc. So the internet has been dying all that time. Lived through the dotcom boom/crash, growth/death of Yahoo Groups/Geocities/stumbleupon/slashdot/fark/etc. I'm not sure whether AI/LLMs are really killing it more than the advent of social media and the endless slop that is time descending blogs. I'm not sure whether the internet is just becoming yet another broadcast media, where small voices are drowned out by media conglomerates and the endless suck of advertising, or whether it really is "dying". Either way, it will evolve, but whether it will evolve "well" is a very open question.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  I guess it might be a good example of evolution in action. Evolution benefits those that can adapt the best, not those with the most abilities.
  - rswail 2mo ago
    Yes and no, evolution by natural selection is essentially relying on random mutations. Our media environment is "intelligently designed" and can be modified by concerted action. We don't need to "evolve" to meet the monopolist social media ecosphere, we can modify it to remove the monopolies/oligarchies. There is absolutely no reason why X, Google, Facebook, Oracle etc can't be "trust busted" and broken up. The SpaceX IPO, conflating a space company with an AI and social media company to defraud people of the losses of Musk from his xAI and Twitter. It's actually a "conservative" move to break these companies up and democratize ownership via IPOs of spun-off companies. It worked when Standard Oil was broken up into Esso, Mobil etc.
- obruchez 2mo ago
  What is the problem with time descending blogs?
jdw64 2mo ago
[dead]
asmnzxklopqw 2mo ago
What I have seen is that the Internet doesn’t attract interesting people anymore and such, the time they spend creating “content” is drastically reduced compared to, let’s say 20-25 years ago. And by “content” I don’t mean tiktok or youtube shorts, but code, blogs, demos or contributing to larger projects. The dynamic is different now, people are working disconnected and from time to time they might release ready projects that previously were seeing their development cycle happening online. Otherwise, there are many projects that don’t make it on the Internet anymore.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  I get the point you are trying to make but I will push back on one little part. I think lots of people are putting in more time and effort than ever BUT they have become victims of 'Audience capture'. They are out to do what others want rather than what they want, and that is the death bell of a creative person. It is no big secret, but it is said quietly, that the most popular creators online are generally fairly anxious people as they are always afraid that they could bomb their entire house of cards in a single day.
  - karmakurtisaani 2mo ago
    Use a bit of AI somewhere without thinking too much and now the whole younger generation thinks you're Hitler.
    - ColdStream 2mo ago
      Pretty much. While I get the general vibe against using too much AI, many are over correcting.
      - krapp 2mo ago
        I saw a story recently about a school in Kentucky that published student agendas with AI and apparently no human supervision, and it had hallucinated states and elements on the periodic table and the like[0]. This shouldn't happen, even with the most optimistic estimates of AI's capabilities being true, yet there is a cultlike mentality around it that leads people to lose their minds and throw even basic common sense out the window. It's being used to publish garbage scientific papers [1] and rewrite the historical narrative [2]. AI is being used everywhere, with abandon, and seemingly little to no oversight or plan to manage the inevitable consequences of the flood of slop and bullshit that it creates. And then on top of that there is the environmental and economic impact of data centers, the social alienation, deskilling and intellectual rot its use creates, and the fact that the big AI companies all seem to be run by a cult of technofascist psychopaths. And the cherry on the dystopian sundae being that we're told we have no choice, that it's inevitable regardless of the consequences and we just have to adapt to whatever future these psychopaths create for us and whatever role they decide we have in it. I don't think it's overcorrection so much as a proportional backlash against society losing its mind over this thing. [0] https://www.fox5vegas.com/2026/08/14/middle-school-student-agendas-contain-misspelled-states-science-errors-raising-ai-questions/ https://www.fox5vegas.com/2026/08/14/middle-school-student-a... [1] https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2024/02/15/the-rat-with-the-big-balls-and-enormous-penis-how-frontiers-published-a-paper-with-botched-ai-generated-images/ https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2024/02/15/the-rat-with-t... [2] https://marinaamaral.substack.com/p/ai-is-creating-fake-historical-photos https://marinaamaral.substack.com/p/ai-is-creating-fake-hist...
BLKNSLVR 2mo ago
A bottle of cool, hydrating water has been spilt onto dry dirt and soaked in, becoming mud, where the dirt and the water are not able to be separated back into their original forms. The water is the internet and the dirt is the real world. It was inevitable that the real world would absorb the internet into it. I remember drinking the cool water and being greatly refreshed by it, but what I think is easy to overlook is what, in the modern real world, has been improved by its absorption of the internet into the combined normality. The things that have been improved we take for granted. Music, Movie, and TV streaming, instant messaging, working from home, online shopping, podcasts, webcams, smartphones. Not all of it is positive (but that's a tool usage choice conversation, which is a bit different). The nostalgia, I think, is the "what could have been", with this new thing, and now we're living in it, it's a bit disappointing, but only in a way that anything that's 'normalised' is a bit disappointing. We're stupid, demanding, impossible to please humans; our imagined utopia will never be manifest. I'm sitting here watching a webcam of a flock of pigeons drinking from a waterhole in the Namibian desert. That's cool! But I've still got to work, and work is still hard thinking and forcing myself out of bed in the morning and ignoring distractions of things I'd rather be doing - but I can have this extra screen showing me pigeons on the other side of the world. We can still have this conversation.
mavensum 2mo ago
[flagged]
radar1310 2mo ago
Greed ruins everything.It’s all about greed and cost keep going up & up. Hell you can even binge watch anymore unless it’s something old. I don’t even subscribe to Netflix anymore. It’s all garbage, nothing but garbage.
tim333 2mo ago
As a counter position I enjoy the internet these days maybe more than before. Back in 1999 there was almost no good content. These days there's huge amounts of content from experts in any field you can think of, often in direct video form from top people in the field. There's also more crap - you have to be selective. Even AI/LLMs I'm kind of fascinated by although I dislike their writing as much as anyone. But the singularity type stuff is a unique moment in history and interesting to watch.
rbtms 2mo ago
I think what made the internet in the 90s and early 2000s more enjoyable is that it was way smaller than now and (mostly) free of bots, and trying to find that in social media and mainstream sites is counterproductive, since they are just the opposite. In comparison, I've found small net places such as Mastodon or smolnets much more enjoyable even though the population is much smaller (which is nice since they also don't generate more information than I have time for). As a rule of thumb: The less interesting a place is for companies, the more pleasant it probably is.
hagbard_c 2mo ago
That's like saying "I don't enjoy the roads any more" and the solution is the same: go "off the beaten tracks" to find solace. The internet is the thing which binds many networks together, both the commercial drivel-pushing "AI"-generated haunts of sleezebags, propagandists, the-current-thing activists, influencer-ridden shitholes and more as well as the odd interesting thing which piques your interest. 99.999% of street addresses on the road network aren't of interest either but the 0.001% which are make it worth taking to the road to reach them.
- hagbard_c 2mo ago
  Hey, anonymous down-voter, why not tell us where you disagree instead of pressing that annoying get_this_thing_which_I_do_not_agree_with_greyed_off_the_page button? Inquiring minds want to know what triggered you, where you think my reasoning went wrong.
negura 2mo ago
i realized for me the convenience just isn't there anymore. the ads, surveillance, toxicity, misinformation, slop. it's just not worth being online anymore. read a book, meet with people, attend talks, go to a museum...
maplethorpe 2mo ago
> I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I think it could happen. When everyone first started tagging each other's face and location, I immediately hated it. It felt like an incredible violation of privacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would do it. Now, finally, the zeitgeist is starting to catch up, and it's common to hear even "normies" worry about who is snooping on their data. This process took about 20 years. I suspect LLM etiquette will take roughly the same.
newsomix9xl 2mo ago
This happened when AOL came online and destroyed early BBS and Usenet culture too.
- DamnInteresting 2mo ago
  Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
beej71 2mo ago
Small Web, Gemini (protocol), RSS, and even Usenet. I have to make an effort to find the good stuff these days. But it is out there. Oh, and uBO is mandatory. But to TFA's point, yeah, it's screwed.
JKCalhoun 2mo ago
Confessions of a Data Hoarder I've been slurping parts of the internet that I think are interesting—the parts I would miss if the internet died. So many electronics magazines and books (as PDFs) from worldradiohistory.com. Ditto for magazines and such from archive.org. TV series, music videos, concerts, films from YouTube… I suppose if the internet did go away (or I left it) I'd discover more things that I would miss (drawing a blank right now though). I expect though I would also rediscover a lot of the things that I enjoyed before the internet. (You see, I'm old enough that the internet was not a part of my life until my mid-to-late 20's. We had fun before the internet, BTW: I made and flew kites, model rockets, did a lot more artwork…)
aboardRat4 2mo ago
I don't blame LLMs for the enshittification. The real reason for the enshittification is "the smartphone". We had all of the modern internet advantages with very few issues when internet was limited to desktops. But wearable electronics is the cancer that is destroying humans.
juancn 2mo ago
There are some nooks I still enjoy. Hacker News is one, I like Reddit, there's still some fun discussion going on. What I dislike is all the posturing and all the low effort crap.

135 points by g0xA52A2A 2mo ago

I with them on that. The internet is basically just infrastructure for email and some media like a podcast, otherwise the only reason I am here is because... well, I'm forced to be on a computer most of the week and not all of it is 'productive'. But after work, weekends, holidays I do not touch it.

King-Aaron 2mo ago

> Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge. It triggers our worst instincts in terms of tribalism and groupthink and makes us intellectually lazy. I can't agree more with this.

ColdStream 2mo ago
Brevity is an art form, one that most do not have. Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right. 99.9999% of stuff nowadays is not sculpted it is just simplified for quick reactions.
- NewJazz 2mo ago
  This is too simplistic. There are simply many many issues and topics that can't be adequately explained in a few minutes. E.g. complicated weather interactions like El nino / la nina, or economic concepts like externalities. And furthermore, even if you can compress your information into a short period, the audience might not beable to successfully absorb the information at that rate. There have been studies done on this finding short form content to be less effective for education.
  - ColdStream 2mo ago
    Sorry, my original comment may have some off as defending short form content in the context of social media, that wasn't the point I was trying to make. What I mean is, there are times where folks tend to over expand their premise to the point of tedium. Something that could have been an essay become a book. That can drive people away from good stuff through sheer scale that wasn't necessary.
- King-Aaron 2mo ago
  While to some degree you are right, I disagree with your assertion that "Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right." When we are talking about distributing information, I agree more with the author that short hand content breeds tribalism and makes people lazy.
  - ColdStream 2mo ago
    I agree, I was talking more broadly. Unfortunately, on social media there is rarely time for people to sculpt well thought out takes. Those that shoot first generally win.
- seydor 2mo ago
  you are correct, there is a difference between a hot take and a laconic statement. the issue is with attention-seeking. Platforms willingly turn their forums to competition for likes, instead of encouraging compromise, which is what drives interesting discussions.

akersten 2mo ago

I'm simultaneously hearing that the internet is more addicting than cigarettes to the point where multiple states are finding success levying gigantic fines on companies for having too good of a product, and also that the internet is boring and drab. Are we on two different internets? Is the author simply immune from the hypnosis of social media? Anyway, the real internet is and always has been/will be smaller forums brought together by a common interest. Think back to the MMORPG private server communities of the 00's/10's. Kind of hacker news fits into that bucket today but even still a lot of the brainrotted brigading and average takes from reddit I'm seeing more often here (not calling out this post in particular; referring to the comment sections mostly).

rockskon 2mo ago
"Too good of a product" is an odd way to put it when you could apply the same logic to slot machines.
- somenameforme 2mo ago
  Exactly the example I was going to use. People do not get addicted to things because those things are too enjoyable. Watching people who are addicted to slots is just depressing, they just sit there gloomily depositing every single penny they have - until they have nothing. They just have a compulsion to engage with the slots. Engage, engagement, the exact thing big tech has been trying to optimize for since day 1. It's always just been a euphemism for addiction, and they succeeded. People report spending obscene amounts of time on social media while also saying that social media makes them feel worse. So captain obvious says why not just quit? Well that's because they're addicted to it. This is probably also why you see overwhelming support for age restrictions of social media, even amongst demographics that would otherwise be quite reluctant to give the government yet more power - people don't want their children to end up being another one of these stats.
ColdStream 2mo ago
Cigarettes is a good analogy. It is both addictive but broadly doesn't really help out the individual consuming them.

forgetfreeman 2mo ago

I am sick to death of the seemingly obligatory oh-but-im-all-in-on-ai disclaimer embedded in what is otherwise a (totally valid) critique of AI. Have the courage of your convictions already.

marsten 2mo ago
I think most people see AI as an economic inevitability, immune to what any of us thinks. Why spend the time and energy making a reasoned critique if nobody has a real choice in the end? It's like railing against the concept of money or the existence of the mosquito.
sph 2mo ago
The lengths a human being goes to remain part of the in-group is mindboggling. I guess it is probably required these days. Your opinions don’t matter, you will adapt to the new AI reality or might as well find another job.
int_19h 2mo ago
It's not an either-or. Some of us are genuinely excited about what AI can do (or has already done for specific personal projects etc), while also being dismayed about what it's used to do on the internet at large.
- forgetfreeman 2mo ago
  The irony, or perhaps cognitive dissonance, inherent in this position is staggering to me.

bblb 2mo ago

Stop absorbing everything. Limit yourself.

overtone1000 2mo ago
There is a point beyond which the probability of finding meaningful content is too low to justify the work required to find it. Beyond this point, limiting yourself means never trying. The juice ain't worth the squeeze.
agnishom 2mo ago
Do you mean that they should [stop (absorbing everything)] and therefore absorb only _some_ things, or that they should [(stop absorbing) everything] and therefore absorb nothing?
- bblb 2mo ago
  Absorb and consume only some of the things. Although now that I think of it, stopping absorbing everything, or, _absorbing nothing_, might be a good mindfulness practice.

teekert 2mo ago

I agree, but if we're being very honest I think the reason is just nostalgia. And I think that you can still find what you're looking for, but it's less in-your-face (as in; it's not a url on altavista.com). We're older now, being young was great, we had infinite time to roam and discover and have nice things (and our first real six-string, and trying different things and not thinking about tomorrow). The youth nowadays also has infinite time, and they fill it in their own way. They like how things are, even though we don't like it and yearn for the days of yore. It is the way of things.

tayo42 2mo ago
Pretty sure discord is the PHPbb of today. That seems to be the place where people's congregate and the communities are smaller.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  It does have that feeling still but one does get the sense that they are on the path toward aggressive monetization.
GPerson 2mo ago
Earlier today I saw that Tik Tok has 2 billion monthly active users and the average user uses it for 100 minutes a day. The app is so addictive that I feel it’s not right to say the user using it every day for 100 minutes at a time is enjoying themselves. To me this doesn’t look like an organic expression of the youth’s desire to explore and create in ways different from precious generations. 1/4th of the humans in the world (many of them youth) are mindlessly scrolling short form content for almost 2 hours a day (and this is just Tik Tok). That’s a problem!
- teekert 2mo ago
  That's indeed true, I share your concern, and I think most will call 2 hr/day rookie numbers. But there is also youth out there that do things differently. And (most) laws and understanding of the situation are changing for the better.

xvxvx 2mo ago

Last week I finally deleted my LinkedIn account, the last social account I had. This week, I'm close to deleting my YouTube account. There's less content I want to see and more slop than ever. Apple Music is on the chopping block. These days, I only use it to preview vinyl records that catch my eye. Once my iPhone dies, I'm done with smartphones. The internet had so much potential. Shame.

sickophancy 2mo ago
What's the rationale behind ditching musicapp? It just delivers files to you with some UI fluff on top.
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  That is a fair take. Personally, I use my android basically an iPod. Only offline files via VLC. Never hopped on the streaming bandwagon for anything but the most throw away stuff. Yes, I kept all my DVD's from decades back.
ColdStream 2mo ago
I will say this with ditching the smart phone. I have done it but also gone back to it. But it is merely used for specific tasks. SMS, a camera, weather report, the occasional podcast or audio book. And that's about it. Things that are difficult to do on a flip phone but alright on a 'smart' phone. I have said it many times. Look at the original iPhone presentation. It was a device that was very deliberate. It wasn't made to addict, it was made to be productive. Get in, do the thing you want and then move on. If only it stayed that way.
- protocolture 2mo ago
  I really liked my Windows Phone, mostly because it didnt have apps on it. Although it did have facebook, it was facebook delivered by Microsoft engineers and was missing a lot of features.
  - 2mo ago

sickophancy 2mo ago

The problem isn't the internet but rather the sites that people use on it, and the monolithic nature of "social media". Social media will be viewed as a failed experiment in the future.

ColdStream 2mo ago
Social media is a race to the bottom. Who can make the most addictive platform possible while also preventing others from getting too much of a foot hold. Also, the scale of the media they must process means 'the algorithm' is a feature not a bug. It was always going to devolve into echo chambers. It is funny seeing writers from the 1950's through to the 2000's all figure out the horrors this would unleash even if they didn't have a clue on the specifics of the technology. I agree it will be seen as a failure but I suspect it is only once it has a point of absolute devastation that it cannot be ignored any more. I don't know what that will look like or when but it will be horrible.

S3verin 2mo ago

I always appreciate a good Disco Elysium reference.

__MatrixMan__ 2mo ago

The internet is fine. It's the web that sucks now. It matters, because we can build a different web without throwing out the internet. We'll have to walk away from the attention economy, that'll be a journey that each has to take singly, but we don't have to walk back to the 1980's. We can build something that works for communication, but that doesn't work for advertising: something structurally enshittificationproof. It will not attract investors, because there will be nothing to leverage. We'll have to build it because we want it, which has never been easier. We can steganographically hide it in AI slop which no human has to actually ever see, and we can trick our enemies into hosting it for us for free. It might even be fun.

hotcrossbunny 2mo ago
How?
- ColdStream 2mo ago
  Funnily enough this is what both Medium and Substack were trying to do but both have ended up being sucked into the system. Seems to be a universal thing, in a society that values capital as one of the highest achievements, it will co-opt anything that ends up trying to work against it and sell it back to you.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
    I don't think it's universal. People have been using sound waves to communicate for millena and so far nobody has capitalized on it. Medium and Substack aren't mediums, not like spoken word or watercolor or dance. They're platforms with admins who can be compelled to make changes with no regard to the consent of the users. Things with that property do always fall to corruption. But we can build software that doesn't do that. It won't be worth investing in, because what investors are buying is the ability to compel that admin, but we can make it for ourselves of we want to.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  Well, at the base layer I think we need a CRDT of some kind. For my prototype I'm using a GSet of tuples, union for merge. Overtop that, an API which ensures that applications conform to the CALM theorem. This is a major restriction, but it buys us a lot. CALM violations are nucleation sites for enshittification. They're the points where platform owners exert their influence. Going without them means going without DNS, for instance, because which bits which name resolves to is the kind of coordination problem that, in our previous attempts, we allowed centralized control to solve for us. And centralized control means presenting a target to corrupting forces. So I figure we go content addressed. And we gossip tuples of hashes around which we will use to decide which content is which, which is trustworthy, which is malicious, etc. We'll get these from humans that we've met in real life, shook hands with, etc. We won't have to use a globally unique human friendly name to communicate about content because we won't be blindly trusting content on the basis of it having come from a server with a trustworthy name in the first place. Instead, the act of sharing will be part of the protocol: an attestation about a hash. Instead of "go to Netflix and search for foo" we'll say "here, I've recommended a movie to you" and then you can find it under the list of movies I've recommended to you. It'll have a name for humans, but its the hash that the protocol will operate on. The lack of a need for a name resolver means we can be partition tolerant. Apps will get smaller if they're just on a LAN with two peers and no internet, but they won't break. We can gossip this peer to peer over Bluetooth or WiFi, or we can treat Twitter or whatever as our transport protocol: just a dumb wire full of ads nobody sees. It might never support video calls, because you're gossiping messages opportunistically and there are no service providers involved: nobody to demand that their hardware stays online and conforms to some SLA. Latency to the other side of the planet might measure in weeks, might require the right person who happens to be taking the right flight to have gossipped the right tuple. But these are constraints I can live with. Mostly I want to know about local goings on anyway. If it takes my peers a few days to get distant news to me, so be it.

Bob_bo 2mo ago

You should try chatting with a large language model—it's incredibly useful! The only thing is, I'm not sure if the answers it gives are actually correct.

jdw64 2mo ago

I think it's time for people to have their own homepages. Building and customizing a homepage is more fun than you'd think. What's the main reason the internet feels less fun these days? I think it's because there are fewer people actually communicating. But wouldn't it be more fun if we communicated through homepages? Maybe someday there will be a community—a hub for people who have their own homepages—where only those with homepages can participate

sibeliuss 2mo ago

This is how I feel completely, having also grown up online all the way from BBSs onwards. I literally don't even have websites to visit any more. I get on my computer, scan hacker news for a bit, check twitter for a few minutes, scan some world news site, and thats it. I still spend a lot of time programming (and thus a lot of time on the computer) but other than that, absolutely nothing appeals. Its a wasteland in my mind.

ColdStream 2mo ago
I have said it for a while, Hacker news is the last place that still feels like the old internet, but even then I'm not a huge fan of it. Some days I open it up to see just 30 stories about LLM's, something I have little to no interest in. While sites like Neocities are trying to keep the old web ideals alive, even there it can be difficult to find much of value.
- sixtyj 2mo ago
  HN sans AI/LLM https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
- krapp 2mo ago
  The fediverse still has a sense of community to me, and there are alt-webs like geminispace. All of it is anti-capitalist and anti-AI which should at least delay their eventual consumption by the rot, although holding it back entirely is impossible. As tired as I am seeing the constant stream of LLM stories (and even worse, vibe-coded projects) on HN i'm getting just as tired of the regular posts complaining about how much the internet sucks as well. HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") but lately it seems like nothing left but vitriol and bitterness. I feel like I need to limit my exposure to this place the way I do other social media platforms because it's just too toxic. Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.
  - dualvariable 2mo ago
    > HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") Reddit is full of the same hundred jokes being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with a good pun to make their life complete.

Ouman 2mo ago

[dead]

rswail 2mo ago

I've been on the "internet" since before there was one, back in 1984-6 when bang paths were email addresses and DNS hadn't been invented yet. I was on one of the earliest BBSs (pre-FIDO) in Melbourne run by Peter Jetson and "Bear's Bull" running on a CDC-6000 at RMIT. It's been an "eternal September" since Prodigy & Compuserve and then AOL joined the net, Usenet started degrading, people had more then 4-line sigs without a "-- " at the start of the sig, people top-quoted messages etc. So the internet has been dying all that time. Lived through the dotcom boom/crash, growth/death of Yahoo Groups/Geocities/stumbleupon/slashdot/fark/etc. I'm not sure whether AI/LLMs are really killing it more than the advent of social media and the endless slop that is time descending blogs. I'm not sure whether the internet is just becoming yet another broadcast media, where small voices are drowned out by media conglomerates and the endless suck of advertising, or whether it really is "dying". Either way, it will evolve, but whether it will evolve "well" is a very open question.

ColdStream 2mo ago
I guess it might be a good example of evolution in action. Evolution benefits those that can adapt the best, not those with the most abilities.
- rswail 2mo ago
  Yes and no, evolution by natural selection is essentially relying on random mutations. Our media environment is "intelligently designed" and can be modified by concerted action. We don't need to "evolve" to meet the monopolist social media ecosphere, we can modify it to remove the monopolies/oligarchies. There is absolutely no reason why X, Google, Facebook, Oracle etc can't be "trust busted" and broken up. The SpaceX IPO, conflating a space company with an AI and social media company to defraud people of the losses of Musk from his xAI and Twitter. It's actually a "conservative" move to break these companies up and democratize ownership via IPOs of spun-off companies. It worked when Standard Oil was broken up into Esso, Mobil etc.
obruchez 2mo ago
What is the problem with time descending blogs?

jdw64 2mo ago

[dead]

asmnzxklopqw 2mo ago

What I have seen is that the Internet doesn’t attract interesting people anymore and such, the time they spend creating “content” is drastically reduced compared to, let’s say 20-25 years ago. And by “content” I don’t mean tiktok or youtube shorts, but code, blogs, demos or contributing to larger projects. The dynamic is different now, people are working disconnected and from time to time they might release ready projects that previously were seeing their development cycle happening online. Otherwise, there are many projects that don’t make it on the Internet anymore.

ColdStream 2mo ago
I get the point you are trying to make but I will push back on one little part. I think lots of people are putting in more time and effort than ever BUT they have become victims of 'Audience capture'. They are out to do what others want rather than what they want, and that is the death bell of a creative person. It is no big secret, but it is said quietly, that the most popular creators online are generally fairly anxious people as they are always afraid that they could bomb their entire house of cards in a single day.
- karmakurtisaani 2mo ago
  Use a bit of AI somewhere without thinking too much and now the whole younger generation thinks you're Hitler.
  - ColdStream 2mo ago
    Pretty much. While I get the general vibe against using too much AI, many are over correcting.
    - krapp 2mo ago
      I saw a story recently about a school in Kentucky that published student agendas with AI and apparently no human supervision, and it had hallucinated states and elements on the periodic table and the like[0]. This shouldn't happen, even with the most optimistic estimates of AI's capabilities being true, yet there is a cultlike mentality around it that leads people to lose their minds and throw even basic common sense out the window. It's being used to publish garbage scientific papers [1] and rewrite the historical narrative [2]. AI is being used everywhere, with abandon, and seemingly little to no oversight or plan to manage the inevitable consequences of the flood of slop and bullshit that it creates. And then on top of that there is the environmental and economic impact of data centers, the social alienation, deskilling and intellectual rot its use creates, and the fact that the big AI companies all seem to be run by a cult of technofascist psychopaths. And the cherry on the dystopian sundae being that we're told we have no choice, that it's inevitable regardless of the consequences and we just have to adapt to whatever future these psychopaths create for us and whatever role they decide we have in it. I don't think it's overcorrection so much as a proportional backlash against society losing its mind over this thing. [0] https://www.fox5vegas.com/2026/08/14/middle-school-student-agendas-contain-misspelled-states-science-errors-raising-ai-questions/ https://www.fox5vegas.com/2026/08/14/middle-school-student-a... [1] https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2024/02/15/the-rat-with-the-big-balls-and-enormous-penis-how-frontiers-published-a-paper-with-botched-ai-generated-images/ https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2024/02/15/the-rat-with-t... [2] https://marinaamaral.substack.com/p/ai-is-creating-fake-historical-photos https://marinaamaral.substack.com/p/ai-is-creating-fake-hist...

BLKNSLVR 2mo ago

A bottle of cool, hydrating water has been spilt onto dry dirt and soaked in, becoming mud, where the dirt and the water are not able to be separated back into their original forms. The water is the internet and the dirt is the real world. It was inevitable that the real world would absorb the internet into it. I remember drinking the cool water and being greatly refreshed by it, but what I think is easy to overlook is what, in the modern real world, has been improved by its absorption of the internet into the combined normality. The things that have been improved we take for granted. Music, Movie, and TV streaming, instant messaging, working from home, online shopping, podcasts, webcams, smartphones. Not all of it is positive (but that's a tool usage choice conversation, which is a bit different). The nostalgia, I think, is the "what could have been", with this new thing, and now we're living in it, it's a bit disappointing, but only in a way that anything that's 'normalised' is a bit disappointing. We're stupid, demanding, impossible to please humans; our imagined utopia will never be manifest. I'm sitting here watching a webcam of a flock of pigeons drinking from a waterhole in the Namibian desert. That's cool! But I've still got to work, and work is still hard thinking and forcing myself out of bed in the morning and ignoring distractions of things I'd rather be doing - but I can have this extra screen showing me pigeons on the other side of the world. We can still have this conversation.

mavensum 2mo ago

[flagged]

radar1310 2mo ago

Greed ruins everything.It’s all about greed and cost keep going up & up. Hell you can even binge watch anymore unless it’s something old. I don’t even subscribe to Netflix anymore. It’s all garbage, nothing but garbage.

tim333 2mo ago

As a counter position I enjoy the internet these days maybe more than before. Back in 1999 there was almost no good content. These days there's huge amounts of content from experts in any field you can think of, often in direct video form from top people in the field. There's also more crap - you have to be selective. Even AI/LLMs I'm kind of fascinated by although I dislike their writing as much as anyone. But the singularity type stuff is a unique moment in history and interesting to watch.

rbtms 2mo ago

I think what made the internet in the 90s and early 2000s more enjoyable is that it was way smaller than now and (mostly) free of bots, and trying to find that in social media and mainstream sites is counterproductive, since they are just the opposite. In comparison, I've found small net places such as Mastodon or smolnets much more enjoyable even though the population is much smaller (which is nice since they also don't generate more information than I have time for). As a rule of thumb: The less interesting a place is for companies, the more pleasant it probably is.

hagbard_c 2mo ago

That's like saying "I don't enjoy the roads any more" and the solution is the same: go "off the beaten tracks" to find solace. The internet is the thing which binds many networks together, both the commercial drivel-pushing "AI"-generated haunts of sleezebags, propagandists, the-current-thing activists, influencer-ridden shitholes and more as well as the odd interesting thing which piques your interest. 99.999% of street addresses on the road network aren't of interest either but the 0.001% which are make it worth taking to the road to reach them.

hagbard_c 2mo ago
Hey, anonymous down-voter, why not tell us where you disagree instead of pressing that annoying get_this_thing_which_I_do_not_agree_with_greyed_off_the_page button? Inquiring minds want to know what triggered you, where you think my reasoning went wrong.

negura 2mo ago

i realized for me the convenience just isn't there anymore. the ads, surveillance, toxicity, misinformation, slop. it's just not worth being online anymore. read a book, meet with people, attend talks, go to a museum...

maplethorpe 2mo ago

> I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I think it could happen. When everyone first started tagging each other's face and location, I immediately hated it. It felt like an incredible violation of privacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would do it. Now, finally, the zeitgeist is starting to catch up, and it's common to hear even "normies" worry about who is snooping on their data. This process took about 20 years. I suspect LLM etiquette will take roughly the same.

newsomix9xl 2mo ago

This happened when AOL came online and destroyed early BBS and Usenet culture too.

DamnInteresting 2mo ago
Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

beej71 2mo ago

Small Web, Gemini (protocol), RSS, and even Usenet. I have to make an effort to find the good stuff these days. But it is out there. Oh, and uBO is mandatory. But to TFA's point, yeah, it's screwed.

JKCalhoun 2mo ago

Confessions of a Data Hoarder I've been slurping parts of the internet that I think are interesting—the parts I would miss if the internet died. So many electronics magazines and books (as PDFs) from worldradiohistory.com. Ditto for magazines and such from archive.org. TV series, music videos, concerts, films from YouTube… I suppose if the internet did go away (or I left it) I'd discover more things that I would miss (drawing a blank right now though). I expect though I would also rediscover a lot of the things that I enjoyed before the internet. (You see, I'm old enough that the internet was not a part of my life until my mid-to-late 20's. We had fun before the internet, BTW: I made and flew kites, model rockets, did a lot more artwork…)

aboardRat4 2mo ago

I don't blame LLMs for the enshittification. The real reason for the enshittification is "the smartphone". We had all of the modern internet advantages with very few issues when internet was limited to desktops. But wearable electronics is the cancer that is destroying humans.

juancn 2mo ago

There are some nooks I still enjoy. Hacker News is one, I like Reddit, there's still some fun discussion going on. What I dislike is all the posturing and all the low effort crap.