In my adult life, I've abandoned a lot of things over the years that I once found extremely useful. Websites that used to be my 'home page' and checked daily, Digg, Facebook, Android(because...
In my adult life, I've abandoned a lot of things over the years that I once found extremely useful.
Websites that used to be my 'home page' and checked daily, Digg, Facebook, Android(because Google killed too many tools I used) soon to be Reddit . I can already see a world where the internet is broadly unusable. Filled by the dross of LLM gobbledygook that becomes more and more inauthentic as the LLM's eats itself and crowds everything else out.
I feel you. I spend 90% of my social internet time these days either in a game or on discord talking to friends. I used to spend a good amount of time on facebook, reddit, forums, etc., but so...
I feel you. I spend 90% of my social internet time these days either in a game or on discord talking to friends. I used to spend a good amount of time on facebook, reddit, forums, etc., but so many online spaces keep dying, become unusable, or just become unpleasant to engage in. It's a very weird feeling growing up during the .com bubble, when the internet was new, exciting, and expansive, and it just seems like background noise and a chore, now.
Maybe part of it is that I'm older and have less patience and don't really want to interact with communities like reddit anymore, but I really do feel like the internet is just not as exciting anymore as a social space. Communities have become more of a utility to me, rather than a place to actually have fun in. Really, I just mean communities, though, because of course things like youtube are still incredibly useful on a daily basis.
The dawn of engagement algorithms was the death knell of the social internet IMO. Platforms began dictating what content was presented to the user instead of the OG chronological sort / thread...
The dawn of engagement algorithms was the death knell of the social internet IMO. Platforms began dictating what content was presented to the user instead of the OG chronological sort / thread bumping. it made keeping up with friends a chore manually going to their page to find the latest post etc. just so you could be fed sponsored posts and rage bait news article and the alike to more effectively serve ads.
That algorithm is what led me to leaving Facebook. Back in 2016 or so, I started blocking every website or article that showed up in my feed, regardless of whether I agreed with it or not. Didn't...
That algorithm is what led me to leaving Facebook. Back in 2016 or so, I started blocking every website or article that showed up in my feed, regardless of whether I agreed with it or not. Didn't take me long to figure out I was barely getting any news from or meaningful interaction with my friends. It was all just rage-bait, so I left. I just thought it was me getting older and crankier, but now that I think about it, there is a fishy cloud outside I need to go yell at.
I’m with you on that, I left instagram and facebook and twitter for the same reasons. In the same vain, the official Reddit app doesn’t let you sort your feed at all. With the death of 3rd party...
I’m with you on that, I left instagram and facebook and twitter for the same reasons. In the same vain, the official Reddit app doesn’t let you sort your feed at all. With the death of 3rd party apps and in my prediction, soon, old.Reddit; Tildes is a breath of fresh air of and what the internet used to be.
I personally never understood the way people in the 90's/00's met and became lifelong friends via the internet. But I've seen numerous examples of it. Hell, I got a buddy marrying next month that...
I personally never understood the way people in the 90's/00's met and became lifelong friends via the internet. But I've seen numerous examples of it. Hell, I got a buddy marrying next month that met his wife through Final Fantasy 14, with some groomsmen being people he knew in the same clan for up to a decade.
I'm sure it's possible in the '10's, but it just seems so much harder now. Lot more stranger danger for younger kids, and a lot more virtoil in the modern social media. Would you really want to meet half the people you may or may not engage with in the YT or Reddit comment section? What about the inoffensive but ultimately fluff compliments given on Instagram/Tiktok focused more on a content creator than a topic of interest?
World's getting lonlier, and the Internet isn't excluded.
Nah, there are tonnnss of people still meeting thanks to online communities. It's just as prevalent now, I would say, than before. It's everywhere. Reddit has tons of subreddits where tightknit...
Nah, there are tonnnss of people still meeting thanks to online communities. It's just as prevalent now, I would say, than before. It's everywhere. Reddit has tons of subreddits where tightknit communities gather online and offline. Discord is full of servers for gaming communities, they mostly stay online, but they do meet up.
I mean tinder is a thing. Bumble is a thing. Meet up is specifically designed to gather. If you're looking to meet people, it can certainly be done, you just have to basically live online posting constantly in the same communities and be willing to hop on some form of voice chat. It'll naturally happen after that.
MMOS have died a lot but some are still kicking and those communities are absolutely tight.
I'm not a community type of person but I do watch them happen in awe sometimes.
Well yes. there certainly are dating apps that can have people connect these days. But I'd say that's a bit different from meeting up with friends. There's a more immediate, intimate interest in...
Well yes. there certainly are dating apps that can have people connect these days. But I'd say that's a bit different from meeting up with friends. There's a more immediate, intimate interest in the dating scene when two people on Tinder/Bumble/Grindr connect.
Meetup is actually a great example; I went to dozens before the pandemic. But I still can't really say I made a friend from one. Lots of potential interests turned into one-offs, others just didn't click. It could be an area problem, but most meetups seem to barely meet once a month and I suppose that isn't enough time for that to click unless you really click. Yet to happen for me, though.
you just have to basically live online posting constantly in the same communities and be willing to hop on some form of voice chat
yes, those are indeed two big barriers I'm not sure I want to overcome. I have a career and further enrichment after work to do. And as I implied above, I don't exactly trust many people online to begin with.
I think forums were just different. I still have forum friends from the old days. You would see the same people in your hobby every day. You would argue with them, share gaming strategies. You...
I think forums were just different. I still have forum friends from the old days. You would see the same people in your hobby every day. You would argue with them, share gaming strategies. You would go to the off topic section and ask about their lives. This was the age of MSM, AIM and ICQ, and you would add them to your friend list and talk to them every day.
It was quite social. I honestly don't know how you can make friends these days. Discord is too ephemeral, which makes it difficult. Reddit is too big. Yeah, you have small subs, but you're probably dividing your attention across all of them, and that might make it hard to bond with anyone specific. With forums, you probably has 1-3, since forums weren't just about, say, Zelda. They had a Zelda section, and and other games section, a politics section. Again and again, you would see the same people.
Honestly, making friends in the forum days was trivial if you were active.
This is encapsulated by Cory Doctorow's essay on this. Platforms degrade, lose useful features, become bloated, and become less responsive to the wants of the users.
This is encapsulated by Cory Doctorow's essay on this. Platforms degrade, lose useful features, become bloated, and become less responsive to the wants of the users.
I remember easily being able to write into Google "randomcharacter analysis", and there'd be dozens if not hundreds of articles, of wildly varying quality. Hell, I probably wrote one in some...
I remember easily being able to write into Google "randomcharacter analysis", and there'd be dozens if not hundreds of articles, of wildly varying quality. Hell, I probably wrote one in some geocities site.
I tried the same thing a week ago. Two pages of Reddit and GameFaqs, and then it just... completely devolves into utter nonsense. Like the search engine isn't even trying. I know for a fact they're there, or they were there before. Either it's part of the dark web or the search engine doesn't even try, or something.
You're not crazy for thinking that, the internet changed. Google and the early search engines used to simply index content into a database and allow you to find said content without really...
You're not crazy for thinking that, the internet changed. Google and the early search engines used to simply index content into a database and allow you to find said content without really interfering. It was as smart or dumb as your query. There were techniques to make it more accessible for the none technical user, but the ambivalence of the early search engines is what made the internet wild. The first page was a wild wild ride and hitting the "I'm feeling lucky" button lead you to some crazy places. Of course, that's just Google. Google succeeded because of its indexing ability serving you the most content where other websites failed.
Google and other reasons brought many people to the internet and that foot traffic equals money. Why let people stumble onto random websites they didn't want to be in when really they wanted to just shop half the time? Technology developed and the beginning of the end happened when your results began to be curated. It was a good intention that quickly got out of control.
Curated content means you only see what Google thinks you want to see. You're now fighting an algorithm that serves to the lowest common denominator. You may be an advanced user that wants niche content but are you sure you don't want the latest Amazon prime direct to tv series? You sure you didn't mean ebay?
Now the internet is curated, naturally, lots of things get lost. Not because they ceased to exist, but because it's not immediately visible to you without great effort. No foot traffic to already niche communities means death.
Now we're stuck in this capitalistic bubble. How difficult was it to find this site? How hard is it to Google a tech question? Why is Microsoft incorporating AI into their search engine and why is that producing seemingly better search results for certain things like tech and porn?
The internet is still wild and crazy but we're in dire need of an open source search engine that doesn't have a motive.
Until then, humans are still weird and still need spaces. The need for subculture still exists and digital communities to serve its members are still a thing, provided you know where to look.
This makes it sound like the big problem is that Google is curating good websites out of the results. The big problem is that there are tons of low-quality SEO-ed nonsense sites flooding the...
This makes it sound like the big problem is that Google is curating good websites out of the results. The big problem is that there are tons of low-quality SEO-ed nonsense sites flooding the results for many search terms and crowding out the good results. If curation is a problem then it exists to try to contain the damage of that flood.
Yeah I guess I should clarify. Google is flooding our results with a brain dead algorithm which works for most users. These results are skewed, and bought, and promoted and are there to generate...
Yeah I guess I should clarify. Google is flooding our results with a brain dead algorithm which works for most users. These results are skewed, and bought, and promoted and are there to generate money. Google serves the larger companies that want their results on the first page.
These results aren't there for accuracies sake or for discoveries sake. This algorithm was developed to solve the "problem" of unrelated search results. As in, you wanted to search for baywatch the show or a place to watch things at the bay and instead got flooded with porn and other things. Now it's curated so the algorithm gives you what it think most people want to see when they type in baywatch. The show. But now there's an inverse problem, if I used that term to not mean the show but something else, I'm gonna get just the show.
the idea of an open source search engine is intriguing and almost seems like too obvious of a solution. could anyone chime in on the technical challenges a project like this would face ? the first...
the idea of an open source search engine is intriguing and almost seems like too obvious of a solution. could anyone chime in on the technical challenges a project like this would face ? the first thing that comes to mind is the cost of hosting?
You're right. It's too easy a solution. One problem is Google et all just buy the project out if you get off the ground and do a better job. Another issue is the hosting and processing power...
You're right. It's too easy a solution. One problem is Google et all just buy the project out if you get off the ground and do a better job. Another issue is the hosting and processing power required to index the internet, something Google does very very well. Also the term "indexing the internet" is thrown around but the technicality behind it is protected by copyright laws as well. So how are you going to outdo Google legally?
Like yahoo and Microsoft haven't already tried? Microsoft's Bing at least exists and they're flailing around a little. There's some life there. Yahoo is alive because of elder magic passed down from one gifted child to the next every hundred years or so.
But like, how are you going to invent a new way to scrub the net these two behemoths haven't already thought of?
you're right, reinventing the wheel is not a workable solution due to the technical limitations. one other solution that comes to mind is an open source browser extension that acts as a filter of...
you're right, reinventing the wheel is not a workable solution due to the technical limitations.
one other solution that comes to mind is an open source browser extension that acts as a filter of sorts ? The community flags websites littered with affiliate sponsored content and they get added to a block list while aggregating and promoting useful / niche / independently hosted sites. this would still require processing power, but no where near the amount of indexing the entire web at once. make it Peer to peer and crowd sourced.
I like it. Nodes ran on the clients machine all linked together sharing data and fighting the algorithm. Very neat idea! I'd sign up. I'd help clean the net.
I like it. Nodes ran on the clients machine all linked together sharing data and fighting the algorithm. Very neat idea! I'd sign up. I'd help clean the net.
I've been thinking lately about how cool it would be to have some sort of open source distributed crawler, kind of like how some of us nerds used to have client software installed on our local...
I've been thinking lately about how cool it would be to have some sort of open source distributed crawler, kind of like how some of us nerds used to have client software installed on our local machines to process data from radio telescopes, trying to find signals worth looking into more deeply.
There are so many tinkerers that have a VPS or two sitting around with a bunch of extra CPU being paid for and not used, or some sort of home server that often ends up being an overpowered media player.
How cool would it be if we got together and built a half decent distributed platform to find the deep web stuff that people have been missing? Some kind of stumbleupon meets askjeeves kinda thing.
That's an awesome idea! That would be awesome to see a project like that come to fruition. I, like many others, crave something like stumble upon. If we can use cpu power to help map the sky, I'm...
That's an awesome idea! That would be awesome to see a project like that come to fruition. I, like many others, crave something like stumble upon. If we can use cpu power to help map the sky, I'm sure we can use cpu power to remap the internet away from the curated mess that exists today.
Though to be fair, Microsoft has always sucked at search. Yahoo is dead. It's a Bing frontend, just like most of the others. Gigablast was still going, but apparently went poof with no warning a...
Though to be fair, Microsoft has always sucked at search.
Yahoo is dead. It's a Bing frontend, just like most of the others. Gigablast was still going, but apparently went poof with no warning a few months ago.
But like, how are you going to invent a new way to scrub the net these two behemoths haven't already thought of?
Its more in the implementation I think. The big players won't implement anything that won't make them money.
I did not know yahoo was just a front end for Bing. Damn. Microsoft is business savy enough to stay afloat. They certainly have the financial resources to withstand Google.
I did not know yahoo was just a front end for Bing. Damn. Microsoft is business savy enough to stay afloat. They certainly have the financial resources to withstand Google.
I came across this which might be relevant-- I'm not technically proficient enough to be able to discern how useful it actually is. But it claims to be a "user-side image search engine": "CLEAR...
I came across this which might be relevant-- I'm not technically proficient enough to be able to discern how useful it actually is. But it claims to be a "user-side image search engine":
"CLEAR does not use a backend server at all nor store any images or build search indices. It is in contrast to traditional search algorithms that require preparing a backend server and building a search index. Therefore, each user can easily deploy their own CLEAR engine, and the resulting service is custom-made and privacy-preserving"
I think the search engine is trying... the problem is that the top say, 5% of sites seen on search engines are SEO'd to all hell to gain visibility. They've been gaming the system for well over a...
I think the search engine is trying... the problem is that the top say, 5% of sites seen on search engines are SEO'd to all hell to gain visibility. They've been gaming the system for well over a decade and we see the results (heh) here.
You're not going to stumble upon (heh) a random blog page these days without very specifically telling google to look for those.
Yeah, I heard a lot 10-20 years ago that "what you put on the internet is there forever" and while there's a kernel of truth to be found in that, a lot of online stuff absolutely decays. Link rot...
Yeah, I heard a lot 10-20 years ago that "what you put on the internet is there forever" and while there's a kernel of truth to be found in that, a lot of online stuff absolutely decays. Link rot has been a recognized thing forever and lots of websites close shop and go dead without necessarily being archived.
It kind of goes both ways. If you put something on the internet it could be out there forever, even if you deleted it right away someone could have archived it and you can't get it back, at least...
It kind of goes both ways.
If you put something on the internet it could be out there forever, even if you deleted it right away someone could have archived it and you can't get it back, at least not without an extensive legal battle.
But on the other hand if you don't archive something and then it gets deleted, well you better hope someone else did, and that you can locate them, and that they're willing to share it with you, because otherwise you aren't ever going to see it again.
You two are probably right on some level, but the implication is that people are just writing and prodicing less original material and merely consuming, which is such a sad indictment on modern...
You two are probably right on some level, but the implication is that people are just writing and prodicing less original material and merely consuming, which is such a sad indictment on modern internet culture.
I'm being a bit melodramatic, but it does feel like the internet is a less interesting place. Less of the wild west and more like an archipelago, with some safe populated islands surrounded by robots and ads.
The current version of the web definitely feels like an archipelago, and you hardly ever find websites run by like some dude with a server in his garage. Tildes is, to my understanding, an...
The current version of the web definitely feels like an archipelago, and you hardly ever find websites run by like some dude with a server in his garage. Tildes is, to my understanding, an intentional throwback to this. Websites aren't themselves the most important things either (it looks like apps are taking that mantle) and much of the web seems centralized into a few tech giants. I don't know what a solution to this is either -- and I haven't wrapped my head around the federated/decentralized stuff.
I wouldn't say less. On the contrary, we have more creators than ever. They are simply centralized these days (or hidden from the public eyes otherwise). You can now make good money as a content...
I wouldn't say less. On the contrary, we have more creators than ever.
They are simply centralized these days (or hidden from the public eyes otherwise). You can now make good money as a content creator, so you probably want to be on Youtube or tiktok. If you don't care about that, you probably still want visibility. So you'll either think of posting on (or to) reddit, Facebook, or even 4chan. If you want a true blogging platform, you may choose something like Medium which has started to paywall off access. Or Wordpress which may work but isn't as visible to search engines these days.
So if you have any problems with any of those platforms or their format or their decisions, you cut out a lot of content creators in the process.
99% Invisible had an interesting episode recently about the fall.of Geocities and the concept of pieces of the internet eroding away and being lost forever (or archived by a volunteer effort if lucky)
99% Invisible had an interesting episode recently about the fall.of Geocities and the concept of pieces of the internet eroding away and being lost forever (or archived by a volunteer effort if lucky)
It's funny because I do have one site that shares paid porn that I honestly can't find through any search engines, it's accessed by a static IP but has been around for close to 5 years and is very...
It's funny because I do have one site that shares paid porn that I honestly can't find through any search engines, it's accessed by a static IP but has been around for close to 5 years and is very active.
To this day I don't remember how I found it, I have a feeling a link was shared somewhere that got deleted quickly.
I remember even with Altavista or Yahoo, there wasn't a guarantee people were going to see your site, so the best thing to do was join a portal or other sort of link sharing group. Users were...
I remember even with Altavista or Yahoo, there wasn't a guarantee people were going to see your site, so the best thing to do was join a portal or other sort of link sharing group. Users were encouraged to put tiny banners in their forum signatures to help drive traffic. Like there was a legitimate reason to get people to essentially help market your site.
Now you can just buy ad space all over the internet, and in a month you'll have a bunch of traffic.
This is a fascinating and somewhat unsettling analysis of the prevalence of bots in the online sphere. I suggest everyone who has an interest in social media give it a watch, it's food for thought.
This is a fascinating and somewhat unsettling analysis of the prevalence of bots in the online sphere. I suggest everyone who has an interest in social media give it a watch, it's food for thought.
When people leave a website, whether because it's not fun anymore or because of something worse, sometimes they want to believe that everyone else will leave it too and it will die. Sometimes that...
When people leave a website, whether because it's not fun anymore or because of something worse, sometimes they want to believe that everyone else will leave it too and it will die. Sometimes that happens.
But Eternal September is still eternal, so maybe it isn't so? Maybe there will be a new crowd that doesn't remember how it used to be. There are likely people new to Reddit who find it fun. For example, kids who are old enough to try it out now. The question is how many, and whether they prefer it to some other website. Or maybe they decide to do something offline? (How likely is that?)
Similarly for Twitter. I wonder what people new to it think?
(Also, Burning Man was better the first time you went, no matter when that was.)
A great thread to start the morning to. I count four hypotheses about the future of the internet and one prediction. The internet is dead As the theory suggests, more and more content is created...
A great thread to start the morning to. I count four hypotheses about the future of the internet and one prediction.
The internet is dead
As the theory suggests, more and more content is created by bots and amplified by algorithms. These bots are (unconsciously [lol]) creating feedback loops, so that there are instances in which bots interact with each other, but because they generate traffic, their interactions are then suggested to real users to engage with.
Quality of bot-content
Adjacently, the quality of content that these AIs generate is most likely decreasing at some future point instead of increasing, because the training data becomes contaminated: AI-inbreeding. Also, in order to be economically viable, bot-content needs only to break even. It doesn’t need to be good or helpful, it just needs to be good enough to keep people watching.
The internet ist curated
For about 15 years now we have witnessed extreme SEO and astroturfing practices all around the web. Websites have given up on nuance for visibility. At the same time, search engines have increasingly 1) commercialised their services so that search results are weighted according to commercial premises and 2) search results are geared towards the median user, despite individual tracking. This is because nudging „outliers“ to commercial websites is lucrative.
The collective memory of the internet „before“ is failing
As more websites and online services become colonised and every new user (regardless of age) is presented the status quo as a given, the public collectively looses the memory of the internet „before“ these tendencies. By extension, it becomes unable to question the status quo and imagine alternatives. As eternal September continues, we collectively forget what is possible. Just as some people equate Google or Facebook with „the internet as such“, people will become unaware of how the infrastructure could be independent from Big Tech.
Prediction: In about five to ten years, we will see some reappearance of internet-phonebooks that some might remember from 25 years ago.
As search engines become less and less useful, users who want more than what is on immediate offer will need recommendations validated by humans. Most of it will be mouth to mouth, but there will be some form of aggregation. We will potentially see link repositories like in those old internet books pre-google, just to have humanly verified websites/content
I am really looking forward to where this broader discussion goes here in the coming months and years.
In my adult life, I've abandoned a lot of things over the years that I once found extremely useful.
Websites that used to be my 'home page' and checked daily, Digg, Facebook, Android(because Google killed too many tools I used) soon to be Reddit . I can already see a world where the internet is broadly unusable. Filled by the dross of LLM gobbledygook that becomes more and more inauthentic as the LLM's eats itself and crowds everything else out.
I feel you. I spend 90% of my social internet time these days either in a game or on discord talking to friends. I used to spend a good amount of time on facebook, reddit, forums, etc., but so many online spaces keep dying, become unusable, or just become unpleasant to engage in. It's a very weird feeling growing up during the .com bubble, when the internet was new, exciting, and expansive, and it just seems like background noise and a chore, now.
Maybe part of it is that I'm older and have less patience and don't really want to interact with communities like reddit anymore, but I really do feel like the internet is just not as exciting anymore as a social space. Communities have become more of a utility to me, rather than a place to actually have fun in. Really, I just mean communities, though, because of course things like youtube are still incredibly useful on a daily basis.
The dawn of engagement algorithms was the death knell of the social internet IMO. Platforms began dictating what content was presented to the user instead of the OG chronological sort / thread bumping. it made keeping up with friends a chore manually going to their page to find the latest post etc. just so you could be fed sponsored posts and rage bait news article and the alike to more effectively serve ads.
That algorithm is what led me to leaving Facebook. Back in 2016 or so, I started blocking every website or article that showed up in my feed, regardless of whether I agreed with it or not. Didn't take me long to figure out I was barely getting any news from or meaningful interaction with my friends. It was all just rage-bait, so I left. I just thought it was me getting older and crankier, but now that I think about it, there is a fishy cloud outside I need to go yell at.
I’m with you on that, I left instagram and facebook and twitter for the same reasons. In the same vain, the official Reddit app doesn’t let you sort your feed at all. With the death of 3rd party apps and in my prediction, soon, old.Reddit; Tildes is a breath of fresh air of and what the internet used to be.
I personally never understood the way people in the 90's/00's met and became lifelong friends via the internet. But I've seen numerous examples of it. Hell, I got a buddy marrying next month that met his wife through Final Fantasy 14, with some groomsmen being people he knew in the same clan for up to a decade.
I'm sure it's possible in the '10's, but it just seems so much harder now. Lot more stranger danger for younger kids, and a lot more virtoil in the modern social media. Would you really want to meet half the people you may or may not engage with in the YT or Reddit comment section? What about the inoffensive but ultimately fluff compliments given on Instagram/Tiktok focused more on a content creator than a topic of interest?
World's getting lonlier, and the Internet isn't excluded.
Nah, there are tonnnss of people still meeting thanks to online communities. It's just as prevalent now, I would say, than before. It's everywhere. Reddit has tons of subreddits where tightknit communities gather online and offline. Discord is full of servers for gaming communities, they mostly stay online, but they do meet up.
I mean tinder is a thing. Bumble is a thing. Meet up is specifically designed to gather. If you're looking to meet people, it can certainly be done, you just have to basically live online posting constantly in the same communities and be willing to hop on some form of voice chat. It'll naturally happen after that.
MMOS have died a lot but some are still kicking and those communities are absolutely tight.
I'm not a community type of person but I do watch them happen in awe sometimes.
Well yes. there certainly are dating apps that can have people connect these days. But I'd say that's a bit different from meeting up with friends. There's a more immediate, intimate interest in the dating scene when two people on Tinder/Bumble/Grindr connect.
Meetup is actually a great example; I went to dozens before the pandemic. But I still can't really say I made a friend from one. Lots of potential interests turned into one-offs, others just didn't click. It could be an area problem, but most meetups seem to barely meet once a month and I suppose that isn't enough time for that to click unless you really click. Yet to happen for me, though.
yes, those are indeed two big barriers I'm not sure I want to overcome. I have a career and further enrichment after work to do. And as I implied above, I don't exactly trust many people online to begin with.
I think forums were just different. I still have forum friends from the old days. You would see the same people in your hobby every day. You would argue with them, share gaming strategies. You would go to the off topic section and ask about their lives. This was the age of MSM, AIM and ICQ, and you would add them to your friend list and talk to them every day.
It was quite social. I honestly don't know how you can make friends these days. Discord is too ephemeral, which makes it difficult. Reddit is too big. Yeah, you have small subs, but you're probably dividing your attention across all of them, and that might make it hard to bond with anyone specific. With forums, you probably has 1-3, since forums weren't just about, say, Zelda. They had a Zelda section, and and other games section, a politics section. Again and again, you would see the same people.
Honestly, making friends in the forum days was trivial if you were active.
This is encapsulated by Cory Doctorow's essay on this. Platforms degrade, lose useful features, become bloated, and become less responsive to the wants of the users.
I remember easily being able to write into Google "randomcharacter analysis", and there'd be dozens if not hundreds of articles, of wildly varying quality. Hell, I probably wrote one in some geocities site.
I tried the same thing a week ago. Two pages of Reddit and GameFaqs, and then it just... completely devolves into utter nonsense. Like the search engine isn't even trying. I know for a fact they're there, or they were there before. Either it's part of the dark web or the search engine doesn't even try, or something.
You're not crazy for thinking that, the internet changed. Google and the early search engines used to simply index content into a database and allow you to find said content without really interfering. It was as smart or dumb as your query. There were techniques to make it more accessible for the none technical user, but the ambivalence of the early search engines is what made the internet wild. The first page was a wild wild ride and hitting the "I'm feeling lucky" button lead you to some crazy places. Of course, that's just Google. Google succeeded because of its indexing ability serving you the most content where other websites failed.
Google and other reasons brought many people to the internet and that foot traffic equals money. Why let people stumble onto random websites they didn't want to be in when really they wanted to just shop half the time? Technology developed and the beginning of the end happened when your results began to be curated. It was a good intention that quickly got out of control.
Curated content means you only see what Google thinks you want to see. You're now fighting an algorithm that serves to the lowest common denominator. You may be an advanced user that wants niche content but are you sure you don't want the latest Amazon prime direct to tv series? You sure you didn't mean ebay?
Now the internet is curated, naturally, lots of things get lost. Not because they ceased to exist, but because it's not immediately visible to you without great effort. No foot traffic to already niche communities means death.
Now we're stuck in this capitalistic bubble. How difficult was it to find this site? How hard is it to Google a tech question? Why is Microsoft incorporating AI into their search engine and why is that producing seemingly better search results for certain things like tech and porn?
The internet is still wild and crazy but we're in dire need of an open source search engine that doesn't have a motive.
Until then, humans are still weird and still need spaces. The need for subculture still exists and digital communities to serve its members are still a thing, provided you know where to look.
This makes it sound like the big problem is that Google is curating good websites out of the results. The big problem is that there are tons of low-quality SEO-ed nonsense sites flooding the results for many search terms and crowding out the good results. If curation is a problem then it exists to try to contain the damage of that flood.
Yeah I guess I should clarify. Google is flooding our results with a brain dead algorithm which works for most users. These results are skewed, and bought, and promoted and are there to generate money. Google serves the larger companies that want their results on the first page.
These results aren't there for accuracies sake or for discoveries sake. This algorithm was developed to solve the "problem" of unrelated search results. As in, you wanted to search for baywatch the show or a place to watch things at the bay and instead got flooded with porn and other things. Now it's curated so the algorithm gives you what it think most people want to see when they type in baywatch. The show. But now there's an inverse problem, if I used that term to not mean the show but something else, I'm gonna get just the show.
the idea of an open source search engine is intriguing and almost seems like too obvious of a solution. could anyone chime in on the technical challenges a project like this would face ? the first thing that comes to mind is the cost of hosting?
You're right. It's too easy a solution. One problem is Google et all just buy the project out if you get off the ground and do a better job. Another issue is the hosting and processing power required to index the internet, something Google does very very well. Also the term "indexing the internet" is thrown around but the technicality behind it is protected by copyright laws as well. So how are you going to outdo Google legally?
Like yahoo and Microsoft haven't already tried? Microsoft's Bing at least exists and they're flailing around a little. There's some life there. Yahoo is alive because of elder magic passed down from one gifted child to the next every hundred years or so.
But like, how are you going to invent a new way to scrub the net these two behemoths haven't already thought of?
you're right, reinventing the wheel is not a workable solution due to the technical limitations.
one other solution that comes to mind is an open source browser extension that acts as a filter of sorts ? The community flags websites littered with affiliate sponsored content and they get added to a block list while aggregating and promoting useful / niche / independently hosted sites. this would still require processing power, but no where near the amount of indexing the entire web at once. make it Peer to peer and crowd sourced.
I like it. Nodes ran on the clients machine all linked together sharing data and fighting the algorithm. Very neat idea! I'd sign up. I'd help clean the net.
I've been thinking lately about how cool it would be to have some sort of open source distributed crawler, kind of like how some of us nerds used to have client software installed on our local machines to process data from radio telescopes, trying to find signals worth looking into more deeply.
There are so many tinkerers that have a VPS or two sitting around with a bunch of extra CPU being paid for and not used, or some sort of home server that often ends up being an overpowered media player.
How cool would it be if we got together and built a half decent distributed platform to find the deep web stuff that people have been missing? Some kind of stumbleupon meets askjeeves kinda thing.
That's an awesome idea! That would be awesome to see a project like that come to fruition. I, like many others, crave something like stumble upon. If we can use cpu power to help map the sky, I'm sure we can use cpu power to remap the internet away from the curated mess that exists today.
Though to be fair, Microsoft has always sucked at search.
Yahoo is dead. It's a Bing frontend, just like most of the others. Gigablast was still going, but apparently went poof with no warning a few months ago.
Its more in the implementation I think. The big players won't implement anything that won't make them money.
Edit: Mojeek is apparently still kicking too.
I did not know yahoo was just a front end for Bing. Damn. Microsoft is business savy enough to stay afloat. They certainly have the financial resources to withstand Google.
I came across this which might be relevant-- I'm not technically proficient enough to be able to discern how useful it actually is. But it claims to be a "user-side image search engine":
"CLEAR does not use a backend server at all nor store any images or build search indices. It is in contrast to traditional search algorithms that require preparing a backend server and building a search index. Therefore, each user can easily deploy their own CLEAR engine, and the resulting service is custom-made and privacy-preserving"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08521
And it seems to be open source. A link to the source code is provided there.
I think the search engine is trying... the problem is that the top say, 5% of sites seen on search engines are SEO'd to all hell to gain visibility. They've been gaming the system for well over a decade and we see the results (heh) here.
You're not going to stumble upon (heh) a random blog page these days without very specifically telling google to look for those.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those websites had just died. They aren't free to run and the novelty of hosting them has probably worn off by now
Yeah, I heard a lot 10-20 years ago that "what you put on the internet is there forever" and while there's a kernel of truth to be found in that, a lot of online stuff absolutely decays. Link rot has been a recognized thing forever and lots of websites close shop and go dead without necessarily being archived.
It kind of goes both ways.
If you put something on the internet it could be out there forever, even if you deleted it right away someone could have archived it and you can't get it back, at least not without an extensive legal battle.
But on the other hand if you don't archive something and then it gets deleted, well you better hope someone else did, and that you can locate them, and that they're willing to share it with you, because otherwise you aren't ever going to see it again.
You two are probably right on some level, but the implication is that people are just writing and prodicing less original material and merely consuming, which is such a sad indictment on modern internet culture.
I'm being a bit melodramatic, but it does feel like the internet is a less interesting place. Less of the wild west and more like an archipelago, with some safe populated islands surrounded by robots and ads.
The current version of the web definitely feels like an archipelago, and you hardly ever find websites run by like some dude with a server in his garage. Tildes is, to my understanding, an intentional throwback to this. Websites aren't themselves the most important things either (it looks like apps are taking that mantle) and much of the web seems centralized into a few tech giants. I don't know what a solution to this is either -- and I haven't wrapped my head around the federated/decentralized stuff.
I wouldn't say less. On the contrary, we have more creators than ever.
They are simply centralized these days (or hidden from the public eyes otherwise). You can now make good money as a content creator, so you probably want to be on Youtube or tiktok. If you don't care about that, you probably still want visibility. So you'll either think of posting on (or to) reddit, Facebook, or even 4chan. If you want a true blogging platform, you may choose something like Medium which has started to paywall off access. Or Wordpress which may work but isn't as visible to search engines these days.
So if you have any problems with any of those platforms or their format or their decisions, you cut out a lot of content creators in the process.
99% Invisible had an interesting episode recently about the fall.of Geocities and the concept of pieces of the internet eroding away and being lost forever (or archived by a volunteer effort if lucky)
Have you tried doing similar with things like Bing and DuckDuckGo? Could be interesting ....
It's funny because I do have one site that shares paid porn that I honestly can't find through any search engines, it's accessed by a static IP but has been around for close to 5 years and is very active.
To this day I don't remember how I found it, I have a feeling a link was shared somewhere that got deleted quickly.
I'm really curious what your inbox looks like right now :).
I remember even with Altavista or Yahoo, there wasn't a guarantee people were going to see your site, so the best thing to do was join a portal or other sort of link sharing group. Users were encouraged to put tiny banners in their forum signatures to help drive traffic. Like there was a legitimate reason to get people to essentially help market your site.
Now you can just buy ad space all over the internet, and in a month you'll have a bunch of traffic.
This is a fascinating and somewhat unsettling analysis of the prevalence of bots in the online sphere. I suggest everyone who has an interest in social media give it a watch, it's food for thought.
Related video from a few weeks ago:
https://tildes.net/~tech/16e5/dead_internet_theory_esoteric_internet
When people leave a website, whether because it's not fun anymore or because of something worse, sometimes they want to believe that everyone else will leave it too and it will die. Sometimes that happens.
But Eternal September is still eternal, so maybe it isn't so? Maybe there will be a new crowd that doesn't remember how it used to be. There are likely people new to Reddit who find it fun. For example, kids who are old enough to try it out now. The question is how many, and whether they prefer it to some other website. Or maybe they decide to do something offline? (How likely is that?)
Similarly for Twitter. I wonder what people new to it think?
(Also, Burning Man was better the first time you went, no matter when that was.)
A great thread to start the morning to. I count four hypotheses about the future of the internet and one prediction.
As the theory suggests, more and more content is created by bots and amplified by algorithms. These bots are (unconsciously [lol]) creating feedback loops, so that there are instances in which bots interact with each other, but because they generate traffic, their interactions are then suggested to real users to engage with.
Adjacently, the quality of content that these AIs generate is most likely decreasing at some future point instead of increasing, because the training data becomes contaminated: AI-inbreeding. Also, in order to be economically viable, bot-content needs only to break even. It doesn’t need to be good or helpful, it just needs to be good enough to keep people watching.
For about 15 years now we have witnessed extreme SEO and astroturfing practices all around the web. Websites have given up on nuance for visibility. At the same time, search engines have increasingly 1) commercialised their services so that search results are weighted according to commercial premises and 2) search results are geared towards the median user, despite individual tracking. This is because nudging „outliers“ to commercial websites is lucrative.
As more websites and online services become colonised and every new user (regardless of age) is presented the status quo as a given, the public collectively looses the memory of the internet „before“ these tendencies. By extension, it becomes unable to question the status quo and imagine alternatives. As eternal September continues, we collectively forget what is possible. Just as some people equate Google or Facebook with „the internet as such“, people will become unaware of how the infrastructure could be independent from Big Tech.
As search engines become less and less useful, users who want more than what is on immediate offer will need recommendations validated by humans. Most of it will be mouth to mouth, but there will be some form of aggregation. We will potentially see link repositories like in those old internet books pre-google, just to have humanly verified websites/content
I am really looking forward to where this broader discussion goes here in the coming months and years.