When people say "the internet is dying" (and really, they mean "the web", not "the internet"), they don't mean it will cease to exist. They mean that it's changing in a way that makes it increasingly worse for them.
"Dying" is an appropriate analogy because if the decline gets far enough, it may as well not exist to those people who are affected.
At least, this is what I mean when I say the web is dying. Most of it is already nonsense of no value to me and comes with ever-increasing security exposures. There's not a lot further it can go before there is no reason for me to use it at all anymore.
"He's not dying, it's his body just rapidly decomposing and ceasing to support the so called homeostasis, yes, but calling it 'death' is a misnomer". No, sorry, if it looks like a rotten corpse, smells like a rotten corpse...
When people say the Internet is dying, they typically don't even mean the Web, they mean one site on the Web that matters to them.
The article us a rebuttal to [1] where someone is complaining that Reddit is going public. For some reason this strategy, or indeed the need for reddit to earn revenue, seems to be shocking to the author.
To anyone with half a brain, and has seen the internet since it was an infant in the 90s, its obvious the internet is not dying, it's "growing up". It's waaaay better now than it has ever been, and a pale shadow of examples it will become.
Yes we can pause to reminisce, yes we can fondly remember the yesteryears of carefree childhood, we can fondly really the lazy days of summer. All while forgetting the sound a modem makes when connecting.
> "Dying" is an appropriate analogy because if the decline gets far enough, it may as well not exist to those people who are affected.
We need to start saying it the way we feel reluctant to do:
The Internet is getting exponentially shittier.
SEO-prioritization and poorly-regulated access to AI content generation are some of the emerging methods that help it get worse.
"Dying" is the correct word, because living people are being replaced by bots, both on social networks, and as content creators. Live people are being replaced by dead computers.
Last presidential election, I'm convinced I wasted endless hours arguing with knuckleheads who were actually bots using weaponized early LLM tech. This presidential election the tech will be perfected.
Machines can spit out so much content/chats/post so quickly, anything written or created by living people will just be swamped out. Eventually web search engines will just be so swamped by the automatic machine-gun-like production of content, that the probability of you being able to find anything written by a living person will be indistinguishable from zero.
Life will have been squeezed out by lifelessness; the internet will be dead.
I think the internet, as in the ability for arbitrary attached hosts to communicate using global addresses and properly formatted layer 3 messages, has been under attack for quite some time - and reachability isn't getting any better
It’s Balkanizing. Every community ends up having a general other chat channel and we’ve made all these small tiny islands for that general chat channel to be in. That’s what we’re losing. The hacker Slack that I’m in the Lisp enthusiasts group, the factorial discord. All those general chats are in their own tiny little islands instead of being in a bigger, wider world. That’s what’s changing. We’ve got these small private secret tiny islands and that’s great. I love them and protect mine and nobody’s allowed in unless you know someone. Is that the way it’s supposed to be? Because there are marauders out there that are just going to come in as bots and mine it for content if it’s not protected. We’ve lost the earnest here I am, out in the world sort of feeling, to be replaced by like oh, there’s a wild world out there and we better protect and put up a wall to protect the world around us.
1) It’s impossible to distinguish between human and AI. Breaking a captcha is a resume building weekend project for any dedicated hacker.
2) The turing test has thoroughly been solved. There’s already a trend of accounts on reddit that reply with helpful but obviously ai generated content to farm reputation.
3) Spam and troll content is still an unsolved problem that requires a dedicated team to solve.
4) Communities themselves can be hostile, especially when the majority adopt black and white thinking.
5) Vetting new accounts is mostly done by verifying email or phone, and doesn’t filter out bad actors.
Some of these problems are solvable. The AI ones seem like a tall hurdle. There are some verification methods like video that AI struggles to replicate but it will soon be intractable to distinguish between human and AI online.
IRC is like that, the command line nature rather violently excludes all the noise from the signal such that those who still use it today are usually worth chatting with.
The internet is dying. All hail the new islandnet powered by AI.
In all seriousness, the open web is under siege too. Hosting choices dwindled. Cloud providers few. Dark web isn’t the answer. Decentralized isn’t either (the web is already decentralized). We need legislation that protects humans and not corporations. Common carrier. Fair privacy law. Following privacy laws. And ending the piracy of content for the sake of “greater good”.
If I go to jail for pirating movies. So too should authors of bots that scrape content for training their $29.99/mo Alpaca. Or the click farmers driving up engagement for $9.99/mo.
The Pirate Bay is illegal yet OpenAI can pirate the world and get $1b investment.
Humans were made second class netizens when ISPs made self hosting very difficult for individuals. While self-hosting doesn’t solve everything (and introduces its own problems) it does place control of content in the hands of people hosting it.
Facebook, reddit, and the rest should be protocols that your server can speak. You can allow/deny access on your terms.
But instead we ended up putting our stuff on other people’s computers and they went and blabbed it all over the internet.
>Decentralized isn’t either (the web is already decentralized).
Cloudflare.
EDIT: To those downvoting, you do realize how much of the internet relies on Cloudflare to connect server and client, right? Cloudflare is a bigger gatekeeper than Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook combined.
The 'open web' I think is genuinely dying, but it has been for a while. Generic/Garbage AI content is just automation and commodification taken to its conclusion, spam and SEO content have been driving the signal to noise ratio down for a long time.
There's no genuine defense against it and people are increasingly moving to private spaces be that Discord servers, Telegram groups, decentralized networks etc. that are more human in scale. Patreon funded creators and streamers are gaining against public broadcasters etc.
Unless someone has a really new idea how you can make a defensible, healthy 'public townsquare' (which Twitter in its newest iteration is definitely not) that kind of accessible web is wasting away rather than changing.
> Unless someone has a really new idea how you can make a defensible, healthy 'public townsquare' ...
I think this change is that idea. The thing about a 'public townsquare' is that it's a square for a _town_, not the whole world. Social media today is trying to be a global square and has shown it doesn't work on multiple levels, so the pendulum's swinging back to human-scale communities and I'm here for it.
> "Dying" is an appropriate analogy because if the decline gets far enough, it may as well not exist to those people who are affected.
For how many people does the web actually cease to exist? Many people have seen social media as a dim light for many years now, yet most of the companies involved still exist. They may not be growing any more (or they may not be growing at the same pace), but that had to happen anyway. The world's population is finite. Only a certain percentage will be interested in a particular service. New competitors emerge. These companies had to plateau eventually and will likely decline eventually (as many have before them). No individual company, or even a generation of companies, can be regarded as representative of an overall trend.
This is an honest question and something I happen to have been thinking about recently.
Recently I questioned my assertion that the internet isn’t all that great anymore, but I couldn’t really come up with reasons beyond the shitty bloated websites we are served.
It seems like we are lamenting the fact that the internet is providing exactly what was promised.
The only thing we didn’t anticipate was the amount of noise that would come with it.
But it’s easier now more than ever to tell your story online with very little expense.
With that said, I feel like I’m missing the mark and would love to hear other opinions.
Not entirely sure how to explain it, not just internet, but the internet culture itself has changed dramatically. 10-15 years ago, it didn’t feel like everyone on blogs, forums, social media was chasing clout and financial gains. And even if they did back then, it just didn’t “feel” like it.
Currently, reading a single comment or tweet in good faith is pretty hard. There are obviously countless exceptions, but still, it’s tiring if you keep wondering about “what are they actually trying to achieve with this message?”.
In summer of 2016 we had this wild Pokemon GO phenomena that felt surreal. I didn’t really play much after a couple of weeks, but you could see the energy of different cities around the world by watching people outside. Would be very cool to see other mixes of internet with real life, but for some reason best we have gotten in terms of engagement is TikTok and IG.
Definitely isn't dying. The internet is a lot like main street. Still exists but after being decimated by big corporate, it changes to cater to alternate groups - which itself is attractive. Hacker News is a good example of this.
You had to have something going on between your ears to contribute. The gate was kept by brains.
X, FB, Reddit... prime example of what happens when you let monkeys loose with typewriters.
There are plenty of good parts of the web. There are still forms and communities where smart people are doing their own thing. GO look at communities around Home Lab, Home automation/Home assistant... The Linux kernel is still getting built on the back of a mailing list, and there are plenty of rich communities around the whole eco system.
The web is still great you just have to look for your corner of it.
TL;DR Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.
We should certainly be asking what on earth has happened to the undoubtedly millions of pages of content that people have created over the years about the various aspects of, dangers, and sentiments around climate change. Are they actually there somewhere, in the background, but for some reason inaccessible through Google search? Are they really just gone? We should also be asking: why would Google want everyone to think there are hundreds of millions more results out there than there actually are? In both politics and economics, a Potemkin village is any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better. Is Google Search - the foundational product for a company worth $1682 billion in July 2021 - really just a Potemkin village for either the US as a country, the Internet, or Google itself?
I see AI as a tool to express creative intent in ways not practical before it came about. It could be naivite full of unintended consequences. But it's hard to not focus on the benefits of the latest tech.
The current crop of tools are improving productivity in developing better software. Which makes me happy.
This is sort of what Gemini was supposed to solve, but as someone who is has medium level technical skills, I found no easy way into it, and the format was too ascetic for my taste and I only ever got a text-only version working as a consumer.
Yes it is, and bootlickers -- the kinds of jerks who shadowban people -- cheer it on because they're bitter when they see others being creative or thinking originally.
I'm looking forward to the AI-generated content, which was modeled from mostly AI-generated content, which was modeled from mostly AI-generated content...
It's going to be shit trees dropping shit apples exposing the next generation of shit seeds into the soil to generate more shit trees. And every reddit or HN or etc account that does not require actual ID verification will actually be AI bots.
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
"Dying" is an appropriate analogy because if the decline gets far enough, it may as well not exist to those people who are affected.
At least, this is what I mean when I say the web is dying. Most of it is already nonsense of no value to me and comes with ever-increasing security exposures. There's not a lot further it can go before there is no reason for me to use it at all anymore.
[+] [-] Joker_vD|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bruce511|2 years ago|reply
The article us a rebuttal to [1] where someone is complaining that Reddit is going public. For some reason this strategy, or indeed the need for reddit to earn revenue, seems to be shocking to the author.
To anyone with half a brain, and has seen the internet since it was an infant in the 90s, its obvious the internet is not dying, it's "growing up". It's waaaay better now than it has ever been, and a pale shadow of examples it will become.
Yes we can pause to reminisce, yes we can fondly remember the yesteryears of carefree childhood, we can fondly really the lazy days of summer. All while forgetting the sound a modem makes when connecting.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die...
[+] [-] antegamisou|2 years ago|reply
We need to start saying it the way we feel reluctant to do:
[+] [-] rhelz|2 years ago|reply
Last presidential election, I'm convinced I wasted endless hours arguing with knuckleheads who were actually bots using weaponized early LLM tech. This presidential election the tech will be perfected.
Machines can spit out so much content/chats/post so quickly, anything written or created by living people will just be swamped out. Eventually web search engines will just be so swamped by the automatic machine-gun-like production of content, that the probability of you being able to find anything written by a living person will be indistinguishable from zero.
Life will have been squeezed out by lifelessness; the internet will be dead.
[+] [-] convolvatron|2 years ago|reply
but yes, that's not what people normally mean.
[+] [-] fragmede|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swagasaurus-rex|2 years ago|reply
1) It’s impossible to distinguish between human and AI. Breaking a captcha is a resume building weekend project for any dedicated hacker.
2) The turing test has thoroughly been solved. There’s already a trend of accounts on reddit that reply with helpful but obviously ai generated content to farm reputation.
3) Spam and troll content is still an unsolved problem that requires a dedicated team to solve.
4) Communities themselves can be hostile, especially when the majority adopt black and white thinking.
5) Vetting new accounts is mostly done by verifying email or phone, and doesn’t filter out bad actors.
Some of these problems are solvable. The AI ones seem like a tall hurdle. There are some verification methods like video that AI struggles to replicate but it will soon be intractable to distinguish between human and AI online.
[+] [-] Forgeties79|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reactordev|2 years ago|reply
In all seriousness, the open web is under siege too. Hosting choices dwindled. Cloud providers few. Dark web isn’t the answer. Decentralized isn’t either (the web is already decentralized). We need legislation that protects humans and not corporations. Common carrier. Fair privacy law. Following privacy laws. And ending the piracy of content for the sake of “greater good”.
If I go to jail for pirating movies. So too should authors of bots that scrape content for training their $29.99/mo Alpaca. Or the click farmers driving up engagement for $9.99/mo.
The Pirate Bay is illegal yet OpenAI can pirate the world and get $1b investment.
[+] [-] linkjuice4all|2 years ago|reply
Facebook, reddit, and the rest should be protocols that your server can speak. You can allow/deny access on your terms.
But instead we ended up putting our stuff on other people’s computers and they went and blabbed it all over the internet.
[+] [-] t0lo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbttdft|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|2 years ago|reply
Cloudflare.
EDIT: To those downvoting, you do realize how much of the internet relies on Cloudflare to connect server and client, right? Cloudflare is a bigger gatekeeper than Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook combined.
[+] [-] BriggyDwiggs42|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|2 years ago|reply
There's no genuine defense against it and people are increasingly moving to private spaces be that Discord servers, Telegram groups, decentralized networks etc. that are more human in scale. Patreon funded creators and streamers are gaining against public broadcasters etc.
Unless someone has a really new idea how you can make a defensible, healthy 'public townsquare' (which Twitter in its newest iteration is definitely not) that kind of accessible web is wasting away rather than changing.
[+] [-] indigochill|2 years ago|reply
I think this change is that idea. The thing about a 'public townsquare' is that it's a square for a _town_, not the whole world. Social media today is trying to be a global square and has shown it doesn't work on multiple levels, so the pendulum's swinging back to human-scale communities and I'm here for it.
[+] [-] II2II|2 years ago|reply
For how many people does the web actually cease to exist? Many people have seen social media as a dim light for many years now, yet most of the companies involved still exist. They may not be growing any more (or they may not be growing at the same pace), but that had to happen anyway. The world's population is finite. Only a certain percentage will be interested in a particular service. New competitors emerge. These companies had to plateau eventually and will likely decline eventually (as many have before them). No individual company, or even a generation of companies, can be regarded as representative of an overall trend.
[+] [-] bruce511|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gxs|2 years ago|reply
Recently I questioned my assertion that the internet isn’t all that great anymore, but I couldn’t really come up with reasons beyond the shitty bloated websites we are served.
It seems like we are lamenting the fact that the internet is providing exactly what was promised.
The only thing we didn’t anticipate was the amount of noise that would come with it.
But it’s easier now more than ever to tell your story online with very little expense.
With that said, I feel like I’m missing the mark and would love to hear other opinions.
[+] [-] kredd|2 years ago|reply
Currently, reading a single comment or tweet in good faith is pretty hard. There are obviously countless exceptions, but still, it’s tiring if you keep wondering about “what are they actually trying to achieve with this message?”.
In summer of 2016 we had this wild Pokemon GO phenomena that felt surreal. I didn’t really play much after a couple of weeks, but you could see the energy of different cities around the world by watching people outside. Would be very cool to see other mixes of internet with real life, but for some reason best we have gotten in terms of engagement is TikTok and IG.
[+] [-] UberFly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zer00eyz|2 years ago|reply
You had to have something going on between your ears to contribute. The gate was kept by brains.
X, FB, Reddit... prime example of what happens when you let monkeys loose with typewriters.
There are plenty of good parts of the web. There are still forms and communities where smart people are doing their own thing. GO look at communities around Home Lab, Home automation/Home assistant... The Linux kernel is still getting built on the back of a mailing list, and there are plenty of rich communities around the whole eco system.
The web is still great you just have to look for your corner of it.
[+] [-] greenavocado|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenavocado|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onthecanposting|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briantakita|2 years ago|reply
The current crop of tools are improving productivity in developing better software. Which makes me happy.
[+] [-] MrVandemar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ofslidingfeet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rnd0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jongjong|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OneLeggedCat|2 years ago|reply
It's going to be shit trees dropping shit apples exposing the next generation of shit seeds into the soil to generate more shit trees. And every reddit or HN or etc account that does not require actual ID verification will actually be AI bots.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] teh_infallible|2 years ago|reply