5 ms·

I think I hate the internet

185 points by saikatsg 23d ago

nephihaha 23d ago
[flagged]
- lexicality 23d ago
  most actors have never even visited Thespia
  - pluc 23d ago
    them state thespians are the worst
grebc 23d ago
The internet isn’t the web/social media. People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame. Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.
- jrimbault 23d ago
  > People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on that drive. We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.
- tomgp 23d ago
  I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.
- TFNA 23d ago
  The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections. That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel). I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.
- t43562 23d ago
  I have to insert a quick joke: "guns don't kill people - people kill people."
gbromios 23d ago
well said
roenxi 23d ago
> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to... There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can. Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0]. Getting off most social media does seem like a win though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
- pjc50 23d ago
  > cars Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
  - raincole 23d ago
    Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)
    - hypfer 23d ago
      I hate to say it, but I do not see how else a nation state could act. The goal of a state is stability. The free, open, anonymous global internet otoh is a force of change. The west really liked that, back when it was useful to its geopolitical goals, but now, not only does it have outlived its usefulness, but also, it's suddenly being pointed at the west itself. At least I do not see how it could be any other way. You cannot simultaneously have high-trust and low-filtering in a space. I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that this was actually always kinda the case. It was just not enforced by law, but by the fact that computers were weird, expensive and complex. As the technology matured, these core assumptions started holding true less, until, eventually, we've ended up where we are now. ___ This doesn't necessarily mean that we will have no more anonymous networks though. But they will be less global and less accessible. Thanks to open weights LLMs, we will have more capabilities within them than we did in the 90s and earlier, but, we will lack the leverage of tidal proportions that social media held. This, to me, sounds like the compromise to be found with the powers that keep the states we live in running.
michael0church 23d ago
[dead]
- boesboes 23d ago
  please end the suffering XD
  - zip77 23d ago
    seconded -- end it here and now :)
  - NoGravitas 23d ago
    I yearn for the urn.
utopiah 23d ago
I think they hate the commercialized Internet, and I do too.
- 59nadir 23d ago
  It's becoming an increasingly bad time to be hosting anything on your own, having to worry about whichever 0-day the clankers are going to find and/or exploit within minutes of it being patched. I'm not sure even nginx is safe in all of this. I used to think there was software that should be basically safe but I'm not sure hosting anything (open-source) yourself anymore (i.e. directly participating in the Internet on a personal level) is a good idea. Having to go through 3rd party services (and rely on them to stay on top of things) to participate is not fun.
  - pona-a 23d ago
    Is this actually grounded in real experiences and not headlines? Have real projects / people actually experienced this hyperbolic insta-hack you describe? People are getting DDoSed regularly sure, but no, you don't get hacked the instant you forward a port, in my experience hosting a few public services in my community.
  - utopiah 23d ago
    Been doing it for years, decades even now, and IMHO it's like visiting a touristic place or any place public with strangers really : you have to keep your wits about you otherwise you will get mugged. If you setup your Website you will inexorably attract spammers at least. Yes they are using new tools and new techniques... but so can you. There are plenty of tools to keep track of abusive usage, individually or collectively, and ways to both backup your data or containerize your services. As long as you keep up then I don't feel it's getting more challenging.
- nephihaha 23d ago
  Government control, more. Continually restricting things that go against their viewpoint. Pushing digital ID online despite obvious security risks.
alansaber 23d ago
I'm not a doomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.
- pembrook 23d ago
  [flagged]
  - the_af 23d ago
    Are you implying the same people that are pessimistic about the internet are also AI hypers or tech entrepreneurs? Because HN isn't monolithic, it's entirely possible -- in fact, likely -- that these are two distinct sets of people who both read HN. I know I'm pessimistic about much of what the hype people like. Edit: or if you meant the grandparent claims not to be a doomer but is pessimistic about something, I don't see the contradiction. It's more like "I don't generally like sweet things, but this cake is nice". Where's the contradiction?
    - pembrook 23d ago
      [flagged]
      - thfuran 23d ago
        Are you saying that nothing has ever gotten worse or just nothing in the last twenty years?
        alansaber 23d ago
        Obviously, any pullback in technology or society comes secondary to our psychologically rooted need to whinge.
        pembrook 23d ago
        Some things have objectively gotten worse. Not EVERYTHING as this site would lead you to believe.
hkpack 23d ago
Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself? I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.
- probably_wrong 23d ago
  I couldn't finish the book because my Kindle died halfway, but based on the opening chapters I agree with you. I admire her for the stance she's taking today and the personal sacrifice it's costing her to this day, but I won't deny that her own account sounds like someone who thought "this will be big" and decided to help without thinking "should this be big?" first.
arjie 23d ago
Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff: > I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that. But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers. But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s. I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card. This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
- derbOac 23d ago
  I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires. Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me. A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it. Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses. Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
susjejnsnznzz 23d ago
[dead]
sixtyj 23d ago
It is quite sad, isn’t it. Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy. High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet. Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable. Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.
- georgebcrawford 22d ago
  In Australia the most commonly scammed demographic is under 25s.
Gareth321 23d ago
I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store. On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users. Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically. I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational. I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
- lolakutty 23d ago
  Internet and 24x7 connectivity is like humanity collectively having a seizure.
- JKCalhoun 23d ago
  I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)
  - amanaplanacanal 23d ago
TacticalCoder 23d ago
> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances. The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor). Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me. But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that. > Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone? It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time. I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is. Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept. But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction. I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones. And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls. P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
hypfer 23d ago
The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that. Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape. It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
- JKCalhoun 23d ago
  And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up). It's perhaps why I loathe it so much. For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
  - monomial 23d ago
    > I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years This sounds great. What magazines do you recommend?
    - JKCalhoun 23d ago
      You could do a lot worse than starting with Popular Electronics. Unless you have a lot of antiquated components on hand, probably a good idea to work in reverse, chronologically.
    - j4k3 23d ago
      Nuts and Volts
jiraiyasarutobi 23d ago
Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.
- JKCalhoun 23d ago
  Sure. But it didn't used to be as pervasive or hateful.
  - 72deluxe 23d ago
    It did. The Internet has always had awful views on it, because it was used by humanity, who also had awful views on things. What is a hatred of the Internet seems to be a hatred of humanity or at least its ability to freely express itself. The solution is to reduce the noise, in much a way someone 100 years ago would only visit clubs or establishments they enjoyed.
    - herunan 23d ago
      So true. I think the problem is not that there's more or less hate. I remember forums and chats with awful stuff. The problem are the algorithms that put us into buckets and benefit from divisions.
- sakjur 23d ago
  You're affected by the choices others make too.
  - macintux 23d ago
    This is the part that I feel the “just turn it off” crowd don’t think enough about. The algorithms helped give us the single most dysfunctional and corrupt US administration since the 1800s.
thefz 23d ago
Nope, you hate what capitalism has done with it, not the internet itself.
andrethegiant 23d ago
Social media is a subset of the web, and the web is a subset of the internet. Don’t lump the entire internet into your hatred of social media.
throwawayffffas 23d ago
> He was a good coder ... Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.
- doublerabbit 23d ago
  Which two files were leaked in 2007. https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406 https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406
- ramesh31 23d ago
  >"Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php." ...Which was a perfectly valid choice in 2005. It was that or Ruby, more or less. Java, ASP, and ColdFusion were a thing for enterprise, otherwise it was Perl CGI, Python, or some crazy custom C++ stuff.
  - throwawayffffas 19d ago
    PHP was never a good choice for anything. Paul Graham and company made Viaweb in lisp. Good programmers find good tools to use. Ruby and python were the obvious choices in 2004. Even though the ecosystem was not what it is today.
alexgieg 23d ago
Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it. Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
- alex1138 23d ago
  You know why? Because Acton and Koum arranged the carrier deals prior to the acquisition. That's what Zuckerberg bought, to enlargen his war chest. It's not his product, it's something he effectively stole
  - alexgieg 23d ago
    True, but here things went a little differently. Carriers here charged per SMS sent, and had plans with things like "includes 100 messages per month for free!!!" and extra SMS packages sold at a discount compared to the standard price, even years after they had began providing Internet (2G at the time). People sought cheaper alternatives, and for a while several messaging apps were used, but WhatsApp was so convenient compared to everyone else (using the phone number as username, no password required, was a genius move), that it was already becoming the standard before Facebook came and acquired it. Carriers noticed their error eventually, and stopped charging for SMS, but by then it was too late. They even tried using the tribunals to block WhatsApp, without success, and technical measures to degrade WhatsApp's protocol and block audio and video calls on it, which also failed legally. So they eventually relented, and now offer packages like "n GB/month plus free WhatsApp!!!" (and in small letters: "audio and video calls not included").
    - pjc50 23d ago
      Yeah, I think people forget that before the internet there was the telcos. They had a "microtransaction" infrastructure, and they were determined to use it by gatekeeping everything. The power of the internet making almost everything almost free has been hugely net positive, although not without a few downsides.
t43562 23d ago
There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet. It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people. Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t. https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_Byte_Magazine_Vol_13-12_Parallel_Processing_-_NeXT_-_Project_Management/ https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_By... There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself. One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope. We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them. What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything? But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.
tannhaeuser 23d ago
Yes it's bad and it'll only get worse but how about thinking positive and towards ways out of the crisis? If your problem is with social media specifically, you could join the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed/Lemmy and co.) which while not perfect by any means is a bit more resilient and can be used to continue participating in niche interests while avoiding tribalism, doom, and propaganda.
BirAdam 23d ago
I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was. There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier. In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.
- stonogo 23d ago
  > There has been a massive disintermediation of information, How do you figure? Information is gatekept differently, but editorialized harder than ever before. I also question whether "better optimized supply chains" is in fact a benefit. Optimizing a supply chain has meant just-in-time inventory etc; I'd argue an optimized supply chain is a fragile supply chain.
- mplanchard 23d ago
  Is the implication here that it’s cheaper to build a house with lead, asbestos, and radium? I cannot see how those have any causal link to home prices, which seem to be much more heavily influenced by broader socioeconomic factors (area desirability, gentrification, housing supply, etc.)
  - BirAdam 19d ago
    It isn't so much that lead, asbestos, and radium were cheaper, but more that the risk assessment from lenders and insurers made it nearly impossible to use any known hazardous material in any way whatever within a residential building.
amelius 23d ago
They forgot to mention SaaS, and that everything is a subscription now. Also, automatic updates that are forced on the user. And of course that the internet is breaking down our democracies.
willtemperley 23d ago
You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web. The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this. An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible. I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.
- seanclayton 23d ago
  What seems more likely: There are literally zero people working on a web alternative, or all existing alternatives and forks are so unpopular that you have never heard of any of them?
  - deleted 23d ago
    [deleted]
  - whstl 23d ago
    I think the more likely reason is that there's nothing wrong with the web per se, but rather with the way people use it. Even the argument against the Javascript/CSS/APIs explosion and browser complexity... all that can be "avoided" if you make a JS-less document-centric webpage, for example.
    - wikiiiisksklhll 23d ago
      The issue is not that the web is bad for content producers, the issue is that it’s bad for content consumers. Consumers doesn’t do create the content (like js) that they are consuming.
      - whstl 22d ago
        I don't disagree at all, I'm just mentioning why I don't think people are gung-ho on a web alternative.
  - fsflover 23d ago
jan_m_savage 23d ago
It will take the thinking persons a while to realize that like the utility curve for wealth, the utility curve for modernity also has decreasing marginal returns: A basic bit of modernity is very useful, but as we become more modern, it becomes more nuisance, less comfort.
herunan 23d ago
I think we're reaching a level of maturity in tech that makes us question it for the same reasons it's great. I think it's healthy for a society to question everything, as long as it doesn't get us stuck, but rather helps us conciously choose our path. We have more options than ever. I used to be on social media all the time and always want the next shiny thing in tech. And I enjoyed that. But now I can choose to not be on social media and be on a basic iPhone mini. And I'm enjoying that now. All is to reiterate: we can choose our path, and that applies to many verticals.
donatj 23d ago
I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community. The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre. I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit because I linger on them because my brain can't help but stare. I open X and it's all engagement bait from major creators I don't give a damn about. I can switch to the Following tab and it's a lot of political opinions I'd just rather not hear about. Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I was having old internet fun. And then it just died, I don't know. All the energy left the room. Hacker News and my very curated Reddit are about all I even use the internet for these days, and Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable. There was a very popular thread on here the other day basically talking about how these modern algorithms are the product, and how they're actually great and everyone loves them despite denying it... I'm just like is my brain so alien? I actively want and desire these services to be interesting or fun to use and they're just... not. They're boring. There's nothing I want to see, so I don't use them anymore. It's not a leave Meta/X/etc in a huff like some of my more reactionary friends. It's just I don't even think to open them anymore because there's nothing worth my time.
- ryandvm 23d ago
  We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation. Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.
  - beanjuiceII 23d ago
    please no more legislation, especially for 'thing i dont like'
    - 23d ago
larodi 23d ago
Facebook IS NOT the internet. Meta is NOT the internet. Neither is Google or Tiktok. And everyone who knows tis not these folks, laughs at people who think world starts and ends with social media. Besides, yes, one can live without all this shit, and live well.
rayiner 23d ago
Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.
- sneak 23d ago
  That internet and almost all the people from it still exists.
  - rayiner 23d ago
    Yes, the problem is the 99% of the other people and stuff that got added.
  - zanellato19 23d ago
    They are hidden behind the enormous mass of bullshit, so its much harder to find. I keep trying to find new blogs to follow and I find it very hard to do so. HN is basically the last place I can find it.
    - sneak 20d ago
      I think this a problem for which the solution would be extremely valuable.
homeonthemtn 23d ago
I think we're finally realizing that the Internet is just one thing in an infinite universe of things. You, at any point, can go outside and do something else. Or don't go outside and still do something else You don't have to "hate" the Internet. You can just choose not to participate in it.
8by3 23d ago
Its the not internet, its bad incentives (profit) making once ok platforms shitty. But there are alternatives Whatsapp - https://signal.org https://signal.org / http://element.io http://element.io Instagram - https://fotoapp.co/ https://fotoapp.co/ / https://glass.photo https://glass.photo Twitter - https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ Substack - https://tuhat.net https://tuhat.net Facebook - maybe replace it with a mix of the others
tanseydavid 23d ago
Could not have said it better. I feel like the author is a mind-reader and somehow read my mind.
bodash 23d ago
Like how Maduro kidnapped from Venezuela affected RuneScapes[1], maybe our dislikes of internet today is just a reflection of the reality itself. [1]: https://youtube.com/shorts/3D6LRLwraLg https://youtube.com/shorts/3D6LRLwraLg
- anal_reactor 23d ago
  Can you summary the video? I cannot change the audio track and the AI dubbing makes my gut bacteria cry.
mancerayder 23d ago
This Internet experience has convinced me that intelligent people need a safe place separate from everyone else. I grew up on BBSes as a kid, a sort of hateful misfit, and learned to write, code and made friends I still know today. Local message forums and meetups, and FIDOnet and other distributed message forums for the wider reach. It took effort to even learn what these were, much less use them. As a kid computer nerds weren't running billion-dollar companies yet (Gates being the first obvious one in the late 90s), were made fun of at school, and were even the butt of jokes (if you remember from those 80s American movies). The early commercialisation of the Internet killed BBSes but there were web forums. But more people could access it, so more problems. More stupidity, noise. The dumbing down has fully transpired. Violence, anger and salaciousness are not only the noise in the noise to signal ratio, they're the investor's friend - the engagement hook that we pattern everything after. Instead of nerds we have plastic faces with big fake lips posing for pictures or recording selfie videos in public. I have painful nostalgia when I see an old VGA screen with an old operating system or Sierra game on it, and I wish I could find through the slop where the nerds went.
- anal_reactor 23d ago
  HN is for me the last bastion. And I wholeheartedly agree that intelligent people should have their own separate space from the rest. I used to be a very progressive guy "everyone deserves equal chances" but the older I get, the more elitist I become.
karmakaze 23d ago
Seems like a random rant to me. > What is the internet now to me? In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances. It's so much more annoying to do any of these things without/before internet. I don't do half of the other things in the rest of that paragraph. Like for phones I just get a used CAD$400 Android phone with good audio output.
- classictraffic 23d ago
  > Seems like a random rant to me I think this applies to all personal blog posts
beej71 23d ago
I still find the old Internet in a few ways. Mastodon, Signal group chats, quiet local (geographically) or private Discord servers, RSS, email, XMPP or IRC if I feel like it. Definitely use uBO. I sometimes even surf Neocities. Stay away from "algorithmic" social media and all 24-hour news—if something important happens, it'll show up on the HN RSS feed. If you want to stay politically active and informed, subscribe to political activist newsletters and write your congresspeople.
VortexLain 23d ago
> For racists to find other racists and amplify their unsavoury views. For paedophiles for groom children with anonymity. Sounds like yet another call for government overreach to amplify mass censorship even more (which is also used against things like abortion information), and ban anonymity to "protect the children".
- krapp 23d ago
  Except for the part where the author never actually calls for government censorship to "protect the children" or anything of the sort, sure.

185 points by saikatsg 23d ago

nephihaha 23d ago

[flagged]

lexicality 23d ago
most actors have never even visited Thespia
- pluc 23d ago
  them state thespians are the worst

grebc 23d ago

The internet isn’t the web/social media. People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame. Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.

jrimbault 23d ago
> People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on that drive. We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.
tomgp 23d ago
I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.
TFNA 23d ago
The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections. That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel). I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.
t43562 23d ago
I have to insert a quick joke: "guns don't kill people - people kill people."

gbromios 23d ago

well said

roenxi 23d ago

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to... There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can. Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0]. Getting off most social media does seem like a win though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.

pjc50 23d ago
> cars Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
- raincole 23d ago
  Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)
  - hypfer 23d ago
    I hate to say it, but I do not see how else a nation state could act. The goal of a state is stability. The free, open, anonymous global internet otoh is a force of change. The west really liked that, back when it was useful to its geopolitical goals, but now, not only does it have outlived its usefulness, but also, it's suddenly being pointed at the west itself. At least I do not see how it could be any other way. You cannot simultaneously have high-trust and low-filtering in a space. I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that this was actually always kinda the case. It was just not enforced by law, but by the fact that computers were weird, expensive and complex. As the technology matured, these core assumptions started holding true less, until, eventually, we've ended up where we are now. ___ This doesn't necessarily mean that we will have no more anonymous networks though. But they will be less global and less accessible. Thanks to open weights LLMs, we will have more capabilities within them than we did in the 90s and earlier, but, we will lack the leverage of tidal proportions that social media held. This, to me, sounds like the compromise to be found with the powers that keep the states we live in running.

michael0church 23d ago

[dead]

boesboes 23d ago
please end the suffering XD
- zip77 23d ago
  seconded -- end it here and now :)
- NoGravitas 23d ago
  I yearn for the urn.

utopiah 23d ago

I think they hate the commercialized Internet, and I do too.

59nadir 23d ago
It's becoming an increasingly bad time to be hosting anything on your own, having to worry about whichever 0-day the clankers are going to find and/or exploit within minutes of it being patched. I'm not sure even nginx is safe in all of this. I used to think there was software that should be basically safe but I'm not sure hosting anything (open-source) yourself anymore (i.e. directly participating in the Internet on a personal level) is a good idea. Having to go through 3rd party services (and rely on them to stay on top of things) to participate is not fun.
- pona-a 23d ago
  Is this actually grounded in real experiences and not headlines? Have real projects / people actually experienced this hyperbolic insta-hack you describe? People are getting DDoSed regularly sure, but no, you don't get hacked the instant you forward a port, in my experience hosting a few public services in my community.
- utopiah 23d ago
  Been doing it for years, decades even now, and IMHO it's like visiting a touristic place or any place public with strangers really : you have to keep your wits about you otherwise you will get mugged. If you setup your Website you will inexorably attract spammers at least. Yes they are using new tools and new techniques... but so can you. There are plenty of tools to keep track of abusive usage, individually or collectively, and ways to both backup your data or containerize your services. As long as you keep up then I don't feel it's getting more challenging.
nephihaha 23d ago
Government control, more. Continually restricting things that go against their viewpoint. Pushing digital ID online despite obvious security risks.

alansaber 23d ago

I'm not a doomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.

pembrook 23d ago
[flagged]
- the_af 23d ago
  Are you implying the same people that are pessimistic about the internet are also AI hypers or tech entrepreneurs? Because HN isn't monolithic, it's entirely possible -- in fact, likely -- that these are two distinct sets of people who both read HN. I know I'm pessimistic about much of what the hype people like. Edit: or if you meant the grandparent claims not to be a doomer but is pessimistic about something, I don't see the contradiction. It's more like "I don't generally like sweet things, but this cake is nice". Where's the contradiction?
  - pembrook 23d ago
    [flagged]
    - thfuran 23d ago
      Are you saying that nothing has ever gotten worse or just nothing in the last twenty years?
      - alansaber 23d ago
        Obviously, any pullback in technology or society comes secondary to our psychologically rooted need to whinge.
      - pembrook 23d ago
        Some things have objectively gotten worse. Not EVERYTHING as this site would lead you to believe.

hkpack 23d ago

Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself? I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.

probably_wrong 23d ago
I couldn't finish the book because my Kindle died halfway, but based on the opening chapters I agree with you. I admire her for the stance she's taking today and the personal sacrifice it's costing her to this day, but I won't deny that her own account sounds like someone who thought "this will be big" and decided to help without thinking "should this be big?" first.

arjie 23d ago

Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff: > I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that. But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers. But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s. I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card. This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.

derbOac 23d ago
I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires. Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me. A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it. Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses. Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.

susjejnsnznzz 23d ago

[dead]

sixtyj 23d ago

It is quite sad, isn’t it. Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy. High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet. Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable. Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.

georgebcrawford 22d ago
In Australia the most commonly scammed demographic is under 25s.

Gareth321 23d ago

I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store. On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users. Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically. I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational. I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.

lolakutty 23d ago
Internet and 24x7 connectivity is like humanity collectively having a seizure.
JKCalhoun 23d ago
I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)
- amanaplanacanal 23d ago

TacticalCoder 23d ago

> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances. The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor). Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me. But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that. > Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone? It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time. I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is. Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept. But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction. I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones. And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls. P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.

hypfer 23d ago

The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that. Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape. It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.

JKCalhoun 23d ago
And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up). It's perhaps why I loathe it so much. For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
- monomial 23d ago
  > I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years This sounds great. What magazines do you recommend?
  - JKCalhoun 23d ago
    You could do a lot worse than starting with Popular Electronics. Unless you have a lot of antiquated components on hand, probably a good idea to work in reverse, chronologically.
  - j4k3 23d ago
    Nuts and Volts

jiraiyasarutobi 23d ago

Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.

JKCalhoun 23d ago
Sure. But it didn't used to be as pervasive or hateful.
- 72deluxe 23d ago
  It did. The Internet has always had awful views on it, because it was used by humanity, who also had awful views on things. What is a hatred of the Internet seems to be a hatred of humanity or at least its ability to freely express itself. The solution is to reduce the noise, in much a way someone 100 years ago would only visit clubs or establishments they enjoyed.
  - herunan 23d ago
    So true. I think the problem is not that there's more or less hate. I remember forums and chats with awful stuff. The problem are the algorithms that put us into buckets and benefit from divisions.
sakjur 23d ago
You're affected by the choices others make too.
- macintux 23d ago
  This is the part that I feel the “just turn it off” crowd don’t think enough about. The algorithms helped give us the single most dysfunctional and corrupt US administration since the 1800s.

thefz 23d ago

Nope, you hate what capitalism has done with it, not the internet itself.

andrethegiant 23d ago

Social media is a subset of the web, and the web is a subset of the internet. Don’t lump the entire internet into your hatred of social media.

throwawayffffas 23d ago

> He was a good coder ... Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.

doublerabbit 23d ago
Which two files were leaked in 2007. https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406 https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406
ramesh31 23d ago
>"Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php." ...Which was a perfectly valid choice in 2005. It was that or Ruby, more or less. Java, ASP, and ColdFusion were a thing for enterprise, otherwise it was Perl CGI, Python, or some crazy custom C++ stuff.
- throwawayffffas 19d ago
  PHP was never a good choice for anything. Paul Graham and company made Viaweb in lisp. Good programmers find good tools to use. Ruby and python were the obvious choices in 2004. Even though the ecosystem was not what it is today.

alexgieg 23d ago

Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it. Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.

alex1138 23d ago
You know why? Because Acton and Koum arranged the carrier deals prior to the acquisition. That's what Zuckerberg bought, to enlargen his war chest. It's not his product, it's something he effectively stole
- alexgieg 23d ago
  True, but here things went a little differently. Carriers here charged per SMS sent, and had plans with things like "includes 100 messages per month for free!!!" and extra SMS packages sold at a discount compared to the standard price, even years after they had began providing Internet (2G at the time). People sought cheaper alternatives, and for a while several messaging apps were used, but WhatsApp was so convenient compared to everyone else (using the phone number as username, no password required, was a genius move), that it was already becoming the standard before Facebook came and acquired it. Carriers noticed their error eventually, and stopped charging for SMS, but by then it was too late. They even tried using the tribunals to block WhatsApp, without success, and technical measures to degrade WhatsApp's protocol and block audio and video calls on it, which also failed legally. So they eventually relented, and now offer packages like "n GB/month plus free WhatsApp!!!" (and in small letters: "audio and video calls not included").
  - pjc50 23d ago
    Yeah, I think people forget that before the internet there was the telcos. They had a "microtransaction" infrastructure, and they were determined to use it by gatekeeping everything. The power of the internet making almost everything almost free has been hugely net positive, although not without a few downsides.

t43562 23d ago

There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet. It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people. Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t. https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_Byte_Magazine_Vol_13-12_Parallel_Processing_-_NeXT_-_Project_Management/ https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_By... There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself. One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope. We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them. What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything? But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.

tannhaeuser 23d ago

Yes it's bad and it'll only get worse but how about thinking positive and towards ways out of the crisis? If your problem is with social media specifically, you could join the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed/Lemmy and co.) which while not perfect by any means is a bit more resilient and can be used to continue participating in niche interests while avoiding tribalism, doom, and propaganda.

BirAdam 23d ago

I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was. There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier. In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.

stonogo 23d ago
> There has been a massive disintermediation of information, How do you figure? Information is gatekept differently, but editorialized harder than ever before. I also question whether "better optimized supply chains" is in fact a benefit. Optimizing a supply chain has meant just-in-time inventory etc; I'd argue an optimized supply chain is a fragile supply chain.
mplanchard 23d ago
Is the implication here that it’s cheaper to build a house with lead, asbestos, and radium? I cannot see how those have any causal link to home prices, which seem to be much more heavily influenced by broader socioeconomic factors (area desirability, gentrification, housing supply, etc.)
- BirAdam 19d ago
  It isn't so much that lead, asbestos, and radium were cheaper, but more that the risk assessment from lenders and insurers made it nearly impossible to use any known hazardous material in any way whatever within a residential building.

amelius 23d ago

They forgot to mention SaaS, and that everything is a subscription now. Also, automatic updates that are forced on the user. And of course that the internet is breaking down our democracies.

willtemperley 23d ago

You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web. The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this. An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible. I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.

seanclayton 23d ago
What seems more likely: There are literally zero people working on a web alternative, or all existing alternatives and forks are so unpopular that you have never heard of any of them?
- deleted 23d ago
  [deleted]
- whstl 23d ago
  I think the more likely reason is that there's nothing wrong with the web per se, but rather with the way people use it. Even the argument against the Javascript/CSS/APIs explosion and browser complexity... all that can be "avoided" if you make a JS-less document-centric webpage, for example.
  - wikiiiisksklhll 23d ago
    The issue is not that the web is bad for content producers, the issue is that it’s bad for content consumers. Consumers doesn’t do create the content (like js) that they are consuming.
    - whstl 22d ago
      I don't disagree at all, I'm just mentioning why I don't think people are gung-ho on a web alternative.
- fsflover 23d ago

jan_m_savage 23d ago

It will take the thinking persons a while to realize that like the utility curve for wealth, the utility curve for modernity also has decreasing marginal returns: A basic bit of modernity is very useful, but as we become more modern, it becomes more nuisance, less comfort.

herunan 23d ago

I think we're reaching a level of maturity in tech that makes us question it for the same reasons it's great. I think it's healthy for a society to question everything, as long as it doesn't get us stuck, but rather helps us conciously choose our path. We have more options than ever. I used to be on social media all the time and always want the next shiny thing in tech. And I enjoyed that. But now I can choose to not be on social media and be on a basic iPhone mini. And I'm enjoying that now. All is to reiterate: we can choose our path, and that applies to many verticals.

donatj 23d ago

I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community. The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre. I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit because I linger on them because my brain can't help but stare. I open X and it's all engagement bait from major creators I don't give a damn about. I can switch to the Following tab and it's a lot of political opinions I'd just rather not hear about. Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I was having old internet fun. And then it just died, I don't know. All the energy left the room. Hacker News and my very curated Reddit are about all I even use the internet for these days, and Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable. There was a very popular thread on here the other day basically talking about how these modern algorithms are the product, and how they're actually great and everyone loves them despite denying it... I'm just like is my brain so alien? I actively want and desire these services to be interesting or fun to use and they're just... not. They're boring. There's nothing I want to see, so I don't use them anymore. It's not a leave Meta/X/etc in a huff like some of my more reactionary friends. It's just I don't even think to open them anymore because there's nothing worth my time.

ryandvm 23d ago
We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation. Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.
- beanjuiceII 23d ago
  please no more legislation, especially for 'thing i dont like'
  - 23d ago

larodi 23d ago

Facebook IS NOT the internet. Meta is NOT the internet. Neither is Google or Tiktok. And everyone who knows tis not these folks, laughs at people who think world starts and ends with social media. Besides, yes, one can live without all this shit, and live well.

rayiner 23d ago

Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.

sneak 23d ago
That internet and almost all the people from it still exists.
- rayiner 23d ago
  Yes, the problem is the 99% of the other people and stuff that got added.
- zanellato19 23d ago
  They are hidden behind the enormous mass of bullshit, so its much harder to find. I keep trying to find new blogs to follow and I find it very hard to do so. HN is basically the last place I can find it.
  - sneak 20d ago
    I think this a problem for which the solution would be extremely valuable.

homeonthemtn 23d ago

I think we're finally realizing that the Internet is just one thing in an infinite universe of things. You, at any point, can go outside and do something else. Or don't go outside and still do something else You don't have to "hate" the Internet. You can just choose not to participate in it.

8by3 23d ago

Its the not internet, its bad incentives (profit) making once ok platforms shitty. But there are alternatives Whatsapp - https://signal.org https://signal.org / http://element.io http://element.io Instagram - https://fotoapp.co/ https://fotoapp.co/ / https://glass.photo https://glass.photo Twitter - https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ Substack - https://tuhat.net https://tuhat.net Facebook - maybe replace it with a mix of the others

tanseydavid 23d ago

Could not have said it better. I feel like the author is a mind-reader and somehow read my mind.

bodash 23d ago

Like how Maduro kidnapped from Venezuela affected RuneScapes[1], maybe our dislikes of internet today is just a reflection of the reality itself. [1]: https://youtube.com/shorts/3D6LRLwraLg https://youtube.com/shorts/3D6LRLwraLg

anal_reactor 23d ago
Can you summary the video? I cannot change the audio track and the AI dubbing makes my gut bacteria cry.

mancerayder 23d ago

This Internet experience has convinced me that intelligent people need a safe place separate from everyone else. I grew up on BBSes as a kid, a sort of hateful misfit, and learned to write, code and made friends I still know today. Local message forums and meetups, and FIDOnet and other distributed message forums for the wider reach. It took effort to even learn what these were, much less use them. As a kid computer nerds weren't running billion-dollar companies yet (Gates being the first obvious one in the late 90s), were made fun of at school, and were even the butt of jokes (if you remember from those 80s American movies). The early commercialisation of the Internet killed BBSes but there were web forums. But more people could access it, so more problems. More stupidity, noise. The dumbing down has fully transpired. Violence, anger and salaciousness are not only the noise in the noise to signal ratio, they're the investor's friend - the engagement hook that we pattern everything after. Instead of nerds we have plastic faces with big fake lips posing for pictures or recording selfie videos in public. I have painful nostalgia when I see an old VGA screen with an old operating system or Sierra game on it, and I wish I could find through the slop where the nerds went.

anal_reactor 23d ago
HN is for me the last bastion. And I wholeheartedly agree that intelligent people should have their own separate space from the rest. I used to be a very progressive guy "everyone deserves equal chances" but the older I get, the more elitist I become.

karmakaze 23d ago

Seems like a random rant to me. > What is the internet now to me? In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances. It's so much more annoying to do any of these things without/before internet. I don't do half of the other things in the rest of that paragraph. Like for phones I just get a used CAD$400 Android phone with good audio output.

classictraffic 23d ago
> Seems like a random rant to me I think this applies to all personal blog posts

beej71 23d ago

I still find the old Internet in a few ways. Mastodon, Signal group chats, quiet local (geographically) or private Discord servers, RSS, email, XMPP or IRC if I feel like it. Definitely use uBO. I sometimes even surf Neocities. Stay away from "algorithmic" social media and all 24-hour news—if something important happens, it'll show up on the HN RSS feed. If you want to stay politically active and informed, subscribe to political activist newsletters and write your congresspeople.

VortexLain 23d ago

> For racists to find other racists and amplify their unsavoury views. For paedophiles for groom children with anonymity. Sounds like yet another call for government overreach to amplify mass censorship even more (which is also used against things like abortion information), and ban anonymity to "protect the children".

krapp 23d ago
Except for the part where the author never actually calls for government censorship to "protect the children" or anything of the sort, sure.