I'd prefer the internet to go to stone age (of internet). Sites owned and serviced by individuals or very small bussinesses (made up of said individuals), let all the big ones drown in their own...
I'd prefer the internet to go to stone age (of internet). Sites owned and serviced by individuals or very small bussinesses (made up of said individuals), let all the big ones drown in their own shit.
I like Tildes becauseit is the perfect example of how simple can work much better than big-company-owned. Sites like this can emerge and someone will discover them and point others to them thus spreading the word. We don't need big search engine with its deformed output (deformed to serve advertisement or sites that can profit from misusing the algorithm). Tildes has no ads and still runs. Other sites can do that as well. If they wanted to, that is...
Yes, Facebook can't because of.how big and world-wide it is. Ok then, let it die. Reddit can't, let it die. The
AI is newplayer in the ring. But is it gonna beuseful for people? Or is it gonna cycle itself to feed upon its tail?
The answer to the question if we are watching internet die would be simple "no". We are watching internet evolve. And I hope it will not evolve much, but rathr devolve. Devolve to the point where people are the driving force, not search engines or algorithms. Where you just write your blog, article or whatever and are free from ads or optimization to be found etc.
Running cost of your own server isn't that high, you can likely afford it and if you are blogger (or other text-heavy user), you can do fine with hosting your web on Raspberry Pi running in your drawer on your home connection. I'm gonna be bold and say that Tildes could run on Raspberry Pi perfectly fine.
Where did I even start thus comment? :-) I hate internet in current form. It is still useful, but also cluttered with useless junk. This junk keeps adding up. And once the junkyard is full, you're not gonna find anything useful there. That is where you would have to go elsewhere. It will still be internet (technically), it will just be in another form, hopefully different than current one.
Let us not be blinded by false nostalgia. The internet has always been corporate. The live nature and ownership structure means that it has always been pay to play. Early personal home pages were...
Let us not be blinded by false nostalgia. The internet has always been corporate. The live nature and ownership structure means that it has always been pay to play. Early personal home pages were put on servers owned by ISPs and large institutions like universities. It’s extremely commonplace for ISPs to block home servers and it has been for an extremely long time. Tildes is a corporation as well, though not one made for profit. And sadly, the last time I checked it cost more to run than the donations were bringing in. Tildes, the software, probably could run on a Raspberry Pi, but not to the scale that Tildes the website currently is.
Money makes the world go ‘round. Until you can solve that problem we will repeat this pattern over and over again.
Well, of course it's about money. Even for me it's about money - my server needs electricity to run, HW had to be paid for, ISP gets paid for providing connection, I have to lease a domain... But...
Well, of course it's about money. Even for me it's about money - my server needs electricity to run, HW had to be paid for, ISP gets paid for providing connection, I have to lease a domain... But it is different reading someone's blog where you only get the information you wanted and looking at Google search output where you get shoved ads into your throat either by plain advertisement right under the search query or in form of paid results or just seo-optimized results. We all know the situation where you look up something and get only eshops on the first page instead of the thing you searched for... You want to look up a name of character from favorite game and you end up on some wiki on fandom.com which is packed by ads... Wiki-styled web packed by ads. Such web (wiki for one game) could be hosted with minimal cost!
This is what I mean - web used to be simpler and worked better. Once something gets too big, it starts to slip away. This is why I would rather have smaller sites for specific content rather than having it all under one umbrella (big corp).
The same goes in gaming bussiness - look at all the big players, Blizzard, Activision, EA, Ubisoft etc. They may be doing great in numbers but I haven't played a new game from either of them in last... actually many years. Nowadays smaller game studios can often throw out unexpected gem that I'd like to play much more than something from the big ones. And it translates to my view of the internet as well.
I'd rather have this smaller Tildes community than being part of some big and very likely toxic or over-moderated or, as unbelievable as it sounds, both at the same time, community. I'd rather read a good blog than scroll through Facebook/TikTok/Instagram/whatever.
See, that's not entirely true. Universities are still producing best-in-class software (see Incommon tooling for identity management) that often outpaces commercial offerings. ISPs blocking...
See, that's not entirely true.
Universities are still producing best-in-class software (see Incommon tooling for identity management) that often outpaces commercial offerings.
ISPs blocking personal services was in part as a malware blocking measure, but is also a symptom of the hostility to a user-centric web.
In the return to a user-centric web, it would not be unreasonable for ISPs to provide server resources again.
It would be helpful if we decoupled the consumer ISP from the owner of the wires, the way we do with cellular networks. That would promote the kind of competion that could bring those offerings back.
I think "often" here is doing a lot of legwork. Outside of software specifically created by academia, for academia, I am really struggling to think of anything that is built and funded by...
Universities are still producing best-in-class software (see Incommon tooling for identity management) that often outpaces commercial offerings.
I think "often" here is doing a lot of legwork. Outside of software specifically created by academia, for academia, I am really struggling to think of anything that is built and funded by universities, that is better than a commercial alternative. I think what makes that particularly difficult is that most things that do well in academic circles tends to get spun off into a separate company and operate commercially anyway.
You mention Incommon, which in fairness I hadn't heard of, but it feels like the exception that proves the rule here.
That's reasonable. Here's the Incommon stack. It's about 10-15 years ahead of most other software in this domain. Namely, because with this free stack, you get a metric ton of functionality that...
It's about 10-15 years ahead of most other software in this domain. Namely, because with this free stack, you get a metric ton of functionality that would require 5+ commercial products to cover. More probably, because these things can integrate with damn near anything else, and thus avoids needing to write a lot of custom integration code to connect disparate things together.
I don't think anyone would ever deny that it comes down to money. But I would suggest that at some point corporate went full "masks off" though in terms of intentions. Google dropped its "do no...
I don't think anyone would ever deny that it comes down to money. But I would suggest that at some point corporate went full "masks off" though in terms of intentions. Google dropped its "do no evil" mantra, we became bombarded by more and more aggressive ads (to the point where it slows down actual page loading to a crawl), search has arguably gotten worse (with more sponsored pages popping up), and then on top of all that subscriptions came out full force. Sometimes in addition to ads instead of as a way to ethically get around them.
Early 2010's was much more restrained in terms of all this, or at worst did its monetization in the shadows (Facebook). You'll see some ad banners here or there, maybe a pop-up in a blue moon. By the tail end, I don't know what happened. Market capture making the feeling of an appeal to quality not matter, an aggressive response to adblock, plain ol' greed. But something shifted, sometime around the 2016-2018 era or so.
I don’t think the internet was very corporate when I first went online. The web is only 33 years old. My first experiences with the internet were through fidonet gateways to Usenet — much of that...
false nostalgia
I don’t think the internet was very corporate when I first went online. The web is only 33 years old. My first experiences with the internet were through fidonet gateways to Usenet — much of that supported by regular users dialing each other up for overnight relay transfers. IRC predates the web as well, and the servers were largely run by volunteers with no profit motive. Even the early web was entirely without profit, built for the sole purpose of sharing information.
I don’t think that early point-to-point UUCP counts as “the internet”. And while I would say that the point of the predecessor of the internet, ARPAnet specifically, wasn’t a profit-seeking...
I don’t think that early point-to-point UUCP counts as “the internet”. And while I would say that the point of the predecessor of the internet, ARPAnet specifically, wasn’t a profit-seeking venture per se, opening it up to commercial interests to create the modern internet is the point where it became corporate.
In any case I think “the internet” refers to the web in this situation.
I've been here under a year, are there ever donation campaigns to raise awareness? I donated when i joined and can at least personally opine I wouldn't be bothered by an occasional/annual reminder...
the last time I checked it cost more to run than the donations were bringing in
I've been here under a year, are there ever donation campaigns to raise awareness? I donated when i joined and can at least personally opine I wouldn't be bothered by an occasional/annual reminder thread.
That is what gets me about all those discussions about how difficult and unsustainable it is to moderate big platforms. If it's impossible to moderate a platform because it is too big, then maybe...
Yes, Facebook can't because of.how big and world-wide it is. Ok then, let it die. Reddit can't, let it die. The
That is what gets me about all those discussions about how difficult and unsustainable it is to moderate big platforms. If it's impossible to moderate a platform because it is too big, then maybe it has just gotten too big. But the demand for user growth is the very same expectation that investors have of the quarterly growth of stock price. It just needs to go up. Modern capitalism is not interested in sustainability, it just grows like cancer.
You don't even need to go that far. Github Pages, and other such platforms, are effectively free if they fit your requirements. And there are even more free options available as well.
if you are blogger (or other text-heavy user), you can do fine with hosting your web on Raspberry Pi running in your drawer on your home connection.
You don't even need to go that far. Github Pages, and other such platforms, are effectively free if they fit your requirements. And there are even more free options available as well.
Github, as mentioned in the article, is effectively a Microsoft-owned social network that trains AI on your data ignoring the licenses used by projects, right? Wouldn't hosting with them means...
Github, as mentioned in the article, is effectively a Microsoft-owned social network that trains AI on your data ignoring the licenses used by projects, right? Wouldn't hosting with them means you're feeding the inbreeding algorithm?
As I said, you're not limited to GitHub, although it a fairly popular choice. This includes non-profit options. Furthermore, not hosting your website on something corporate-owned will not prevent...
and other such platforms
As I said, you're not limited to GitHub, although it a fairly popular choice. This includes non-profit options.
Furthermore, not hosting your website on something corporate-owned will not prevent your website's contents being used to train the plagiarism machine; simple web crawling is not atypical. It doesn't even need to necessarily be a "known" web-crawler either. If you're putting a website (or any form of content) online publicly, IMO you should assume that you are indeed indirectly training the plagiarism machine.
Regarding Microsoft using FOSS software to train copilot, indeed, they had done that. That being said, though I'm not one to typically defend microsoft, people are now allowed to "opt-out" from having their code used in copilot's training data.
To be fair, nothing is stopping that (We're here, after all), but a lot of people want to either be with friends, or reach out to the largest network, or a bunch of other reasons. the momentum...
Sites owned and serviced by individuals or very small bussinesses (made up of said individuals), let all the big ones drown in their own shit.
To be fair, nothing is stopping that (We're here, after all), but a lot of people want to either be with friends, or reach out to the largest network, or a bunch of other reasons. the momentum moves towards the popular, which puts a lot of money into minimizing friction.
The biggest issue as usual, is that hosting is not a free nor cheap endeavor. Takes a lot of time to ultimately deal with 10 times more spam than actually engaged users. And I'm sure AI will make that even worse. and ofc, it may also cost money to host the server and register a domain. In many's eyes, it's more effort for a worse product and a lot of stress.
You are right. And I don't blame people for not hosting their own site (and bythemselves). The thing is their blog (or whatever sote they make/have) will likely be part of something bigger thus...
You are right. And I don't blame people for not hosting their own site (and bythemselves).
The thing is their blog (or whatever sote they make/have) will likely be part of something bigger thus makong them not own it and reliant on choices that the big company makes (they may sell the website to someone else rendering your own site useless or non-existent).
The thing also is that being part of some bigger blog makes you part of sommunity and makes you exposed there (people can find your site) but this hasthe same drawback - you are part of something bigger and thus lesslikely to be found (like that needle in a haystack).
The best thing to come out of this would be probably good old blogs and forums. Have a look at EEVblog or Linus Tech Tips forums. They don't make money but they are also driven by enthusiasts. Someone is willing to invest in infrastructure (like Deimos is with Tildes) and makes the playground for enthusiasts that make the content (which is made for them, not for resale). This is what I would like the internet to become. Or rather return to?
Regulation is different at an infrastructure level. An ISP that hosts a website doesn't have any real control over how the website works. If they step in, it's only under pretty bad circumstances,...
Regulation is different at an infrastructure level. An ISP that hosts a website doesn't have any real control over how the website works. If they step in, it's only under pretty bad circumstances, and probably means cancelling the account. The website needs to be attracting a lot of bad attention for them to notice.
This means that within some pretty broad limits, the website owner can do what they want. It's also easier than ever to start up a blog.
I think part of the issue is that a blog is not quite what people want. Starting your own blog is often lonely at first, and might stay that way. Writing articles is more work than most people want to do.
Just on a bit of a tangent, I remember at one point there was a website that existed specifically to allow people to create their own social networking websites. They had a selection of different...
Just on a bit of a tangent, I remember at one point there was a website that existed specifically to allow people to create their own social networking websites. They had a selection of different kinds of applications that you could choose, but it actually allowed you to edit the PHP code to make it work however you wanted, and it was essentially free, too. It would be nice if that kind of thing were still available.
Edit: I remember now, it was called Ning. The name is still around, though I don't know if they are the same people. They are also no longer free and seem to be more interested in catering to businesses.
Yeah, there's a fundamental clash between being a creator and working in a community of other creators. If not everyone mutually agrees, you eventually have a competition for something, be it...
The thing also is that being part of some bigger blog makes you part of sommunity and makes you exposed there (people can find your site) but this hasthe same drawback - you are part of something bigger and thus lesslikely to be found (like that needle in a haystack).
Yeah, there's a fundamental clash between being a creator and working in a community of other creators. If not everyone mutually agrees, you eventually have a competition for something, be it views, attention, crediting, etc. It's a messy science because these metrics are limited but also synergize with giving attention to other creators (if someone's meme goes viral, it lets other creators remake the meme and get a lot of attention as well, even if they aren't the "original". attention is limited, but also easily expandable for a short while). an odd balancing act.
Someone is willing to invest in infrastructure (like Deimos is with Tildes) and makes the playground for enthusiasts that make the content (which is made for them, not for resale). This is what I would like the internet to become.
Is this really true? I suppose it depends on if discussions/microblogging is considered "creation". I know that is the point of a forum (even in the non-digital format), but forums always had a mixed purpose of creation and consumption. Many use forums simply as another news feed, for instance.
Not to mention there also is the fact that much of "modern forum" discussion comes from sharing external content first. Like this post sharing a blog. I've been in discussions with other forums thinking about how to properly monetize creators to encourage high quality content, and that line between creation and high quality sharing is a difficult one to straddle.
I know you mentioned not wanting to worry about monetization, but in some regards it feels like the only way to properly entice sources of well presented knowledge that otherwise wouldn't take the time/energy to prepare a proper post. Similar to how Youtube can encourage some very high quality, well edited videos on topics that otherwise wouldnt be made if there wasn't a payoff.
(which is made for them, not for resale)
This in particular may become a fantasy sooner rather than later. Even if the content isn't made for resale, there are parties that will resale it for their own interests. Or simply scrape it. Causes a huge divide between wanting an open internet vs. one not monetized to all hell by dark patterns.
I consider discussion a "creation". Not just simple talking about weather though. Many times I was partof discussing something where there was clear output of that - be it experience or advice or...
I consider discussion a "creation". Not just simple talking about weather though. Many times I was partof discussing something where there was clear output of that - be it experience or advice or something like that.
Forums are also creation by this definition as is blogging. I'm considering doing blog just about tech stuff and my experience with it - ie. we have a robot vacuum that sucks (literally and figuratively) and I want to write down how it went in past year from "great" to "throw it out the window". I could share some Linux things there for others and for me as well (when I need to repeat the stuff). But I'm lazy and slow to get started... But discussions like these help me make up my mind. See? This discussion may lead to creativity :-)
With "not for resale" I meant the primary objective - EEVblog might be scraped by AI and used to learn, but its primary objective will still be meeting place for enthusiasts. If someone wants to make money upon their experience, feel free to do so - even though I don't consider it okay. It is public information and everyone can see it, so can AI and bots. The most important thing is that such places must remain operationa in their current model - there has to be someone willing to put their money in it. Others can donate, but the main motivation must remain to beplace for enthusiasts and not one of making money from it (money for the owner, that is).
Deimos very likely doesn't get any money from donations, if it covers at least running costs, Deimos is happy. It probably doesn't cover even those though. And Deimos (and others) invest also their time when programming the site. And moderating. This is their "donation" to the cause and I'm glad there are people like them. People like them make the good side of the internet from its beginning up to the modern day. They are not driven by profit, rather by passion.
Since the beginning there has always been many different "Internets" all existing at the same time, just with varying degrees of usage. Some people never went on social media and are still using...
Since the beginning there has always been many different "Internets" all existing at the same time, just with varying degrees of usage. Some people never went on social media and are still using the internet just for email and regular browsing. I am sure millions of people will be sucked into the AI generated rabbithole of endless "stimulating" personalized content and others will shy away from it, and use other corners of the internet.
We are probably a bit of an outlier subgroup here on Tildes, with many users (myself included) having been online since the 90s or longer, and miss the old classic web that wasn't driven by algorithms and ad money. But millions of people only know the internet from within various apps by tech giants and as long as there is money to be made, there will be a market for endless AI generated "content".
I find myself pining for (and going back to) old school message boards. There's still a few niche topics that have some solid boards with a large enough community to keep it interesting. I could...
I find myself pining for (and going back to) old school message boards. There's still a few niche topics that have some solid boards with a large enough community to keep it interesting. I could see them experiencing a resurgence if things keep going the way they have on the more generalized sites.
I do too, but I wonder whether the existence of niche, well attended subgroups on a site like Reddit (at least for the meantime) will stymie any attempt to get private communities off the ground....
I do too, but I wonder whether the existence of niche, well attended subgroups on a site like Reddit (at least for the meantime) will stymie any attempt to get private communities off the ground.
Taking Tildes as my example, I come here because of the decorum and the pace of conversation, but when it comes to specific advice, user volume and versatility, I'm still more likely to post on Reddit first.
Unlike in the old days, I think that the competition for small, specific sites is just too great to make them mainstream again.
Whenever I read an article like this, I am reminded of that old John Gilmore quote that people used to smugly parrot - "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Where's...
Whenever I read an article like this, I am reminded of that old John Gilmore quote that people used to smugly parrot - "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Where's that attitude now? Folks like this predict a dire future where we are so paralyzed by the glut of AI-generated content that we cannot interact with humans reliably, nor even find one to interact with, but this seems to presuppose that they are the only one who will be standing off to the side shaking their head at the state of affairs.
What we are seeing is the introduction of a new factor into an ecosystem that has no tolerance for it. I'm sure that some platforms and services will respond poorly to AI's advent, and fail, but others will likely survive, and new platforms will rise to fill the niches left by the crumbling titans. Things will rebalance around the new normal. And, yes, likely there will be some large percentage of people who happily interact with AI-generated content on a regular basis, laughing at jokes nobody told and resharing pretty pictures that nobody made, and folks like the article author will log on to their curated human-only communities to discuss how those folks are experiencing joy and happiness in an incorrect fashion.
I'm more worried about the underlying dangers and corporate overstepping than how people consume content. we saw this in the 2010s where technically no one was being harmed as Facebook sold off...
and folks like the article author will log on to their curated human-only communities to discuss how those folks are experiencing joy and happiness in an incorrect fashion.
I'm more worried about the underlying dangers and corporate overstepping than how people consume content. we saw this in the 2010s where technically no one was being harmed as Facebook sold off private data to 3rd parties. But eventually some governments stepped in and regulated that.
Ai has the potential to both be more immediately annoying (yay, more ads!) and very dangerous. Completly lowers the bar for slander, revenge porn, cyberbullying, catfishing, and so many things I can't yet imagine. And it can do it in a mass that dwarves the humans, and can go around traditional anti-bot measures (such LLMs were originally trained with goals to get around captchas after all). I feel like we're still not fully regulating humans on all this and now we have to worry about bots.
The scale and circumvention aspects were part of what I was talking about with the current ecosystem not having any protections in place. There's a cultural element where we all have to adapt our...
The scale and circumvention aspects were part of what I was talking about with the current ecosystem not having any protections in place. There's a cultural element where we all have to adapt our behavior to reflect the environmental changes; I've wondered for a while what the tech that millennials wouldn't "get" was going to be and I'm starting to wonder if our failure will be not properly internalizing the new AI-enabled paradigm and its attendant safety standards.
That's an interesting point. I think in some way the internet still routes around censorship, but in different ways. Piracy is an example that comes to mind and all of the technology that...
"The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Where's that attitude now?
That's an interesting point. I think in some way the internet still routes around censorship, but in different ways. Piracy is an example that comes to mind and all of the technology that facilitates it and in the process creates sections of the internet (whether that's P2P services, torrents and related protocols, onions, private forums, and so on).
But a more troubling idea is that people on social media and social news sites are routing around censorship by creating not only echo chambers of their own, but routing around information they don't like by presenting The Real Truth. And they've justified the idea of alternate facts or truths by openly saying "I don't like your version and will substitute my own" and in the process route around information they dislike or don't want to assimilate. That's a real problem, and I think that's a force that's twisting the internet in a new way, or at least putting it into a new cycle.
Yeah, I think the original statement was made with the internet's original demographic in mind - not monolithic by any means, but generally a more curious, tech-savvy crowd that was eager to use...
Yeah, I think the original statement was made with the internet's original demographic in mind - not monolithic by any means, but generally a more curious, tech-savvy crowd that was eager to use new technology and had something of an anti-authoritarian bent. I feel like that's the demographic people are talking about when they say "the internet" is dying; it's an echo of the classic Eternal September lament. In both cases it's an observation that the original use case is no longer the most popular use case, and in fact has become so marginalized that it is in danger of not being viable at all...
...except that it's still perfectly viable. We're on Tildes, after all, a quiet corner of the internet that was set up because of all the unquiet corners. There's no part of the original or nascent internet that can't be duplicated in the current paradigm. The trouble is that there's all the post-September sorts online using the internet ever so incorrectly. The original culture is no longer strong enough to influence new joiners into behaving in an "online" fashion, so we're left with a few scattered communities representing those who care about that vibe.
I don't think the divide is new; people who are wrapping themselves in a bubble now are the same folks that previously achieved the same result by avoiding the internet entirely. Now that internet presence is more or less obligatory, they're adapting.
I honestly find talking about "the internet" as somewhat exhausting because people use that term to mean so many different things. But generally when people talk about it, I take it to mean...
I honestly find talking about "the internet" as somewhat exhausting because people use that term to mean so many different things. But generally when people talk about it, I take it to mean society in the context of communication via internet services.
The old, old, old internet is still around, too. You can get yourself an account on a public access unix system like SDF, for instance. You just have to be interested enough to learn about them and seek them out.
I don't know what will happen, but I think the Internet will survive, one way or the other. Either AI will become better or filtering methods will become better. Probably both. Unless we reach a...
I don't know what will happen, but I think the Internet will survive, one way or the other.
Either AI will become better or filtering methods will become better. Probably both. Unless we reach a sci-fi level of "truly conscious" AI, people are always going to be creeped out by chatbots masquerading as real people. The majority of people don't want to talk to copycat machines or read spam garbage, and I think they will avoid any sites that have this issue.
Cheap copycat articles that tell you how to fix your washing machine might be here to stay, as I think people don't care as much where that kind of information comes from as long as it works. But places like Tildes or Reddit will always exist, even if it means they have to adapt to the new circumstances to prevent AI spam. Some of the possible solutions, such as platforms requiring ID verification for each account, could end up being really bad for privacy, but that's a whole other can of worms.
I think it's interesting that the author suggested video content will be more valued in the coming years due to AI poisoning of text-based posts. I don't think video is going to be much of a barrier for AI going into the future. They've already made huge strides in AI-generated video and I suspect these will improve to become essentially indistinguishable from real video.
Who knows, maybe AI will cause people to start meeting in person more again.
I'm a secondary school teacher. We (teachers and society in general) have a lot of work to do in shaping critical thinking. As I currently see it, 12-15 year olds absolutely don't mind the dross...
The majority of people don't want to talk to copycat machines or read spam garbage, and I think they will avoid any sites that have this issue.
I'm a secondary school teacher. We (teachers and society in general) have a lot of work to do in shaping critical thinking. As I currently see it, 12-15 year olds absolutely don't mind the dross that comes out of content farms. The 16-18 year olds seem pretty wise to it, but their mushy little brains have some point of comparison from the before times.
With regards to the part of your comment I quoted, imagine a higher and higher percentage of your inputs as a kid were from AI-generated sources. So much of our education is focused on "will this be marked" and just copying and pasting from Google summaries that kids just...don't really notice.
There's a huge amount more to discuss and discover on this topic, but for now I'll just say I'm kinda shitting myself about the next decade of my (new!) career. And I'm somebody who doesn't like doom-and-gloom scenarios, despite being cynical about the tech/capitalism intersection.
I vaguely remember that in the old days, the death of the Internet was predicted quite frequently? “Film at 11,” people would say mockingly, imitating local TV commercials for the late news broadcast.
I vaguely remember that in the old days, the death of the Internet was predicted quite frequently? “Film at 11,” people would say mockingly, imitating local TV commercials for the late news broadcast.
I think questions of the form “Is X dying?”are too vague to be useful when we’re talking about something that was never alive. It’s a metaphor that has no clear meaning. It’s not very clear what...
I think questions of the form “Is X dying?”are too vague to be useful when we’re talking about something that was never alive. It’s a metaphor that has no clear meaning.
It’s not very clear what people mean by “the Internet,” either? I expect that DNS will keep working and packets will continue to be delivered. Bandwidth will likely increase and a lot of costs will continue to drop, at least in bulk. It also seems likely that we will have better hardware, Linux will remain popular, and there will be more open source software than ever.
But that doesn’t seem to be what people are worried about? Maybe there’s a better way to express it.
Maybe it would be best to say the Web is dying. And that is a more reasonable take, there's a lot of rot on the web, much of it little more than billboards or self-service storefronts and...
Maybe it would be best to say the Web is dying. And that is a more reasonable take, there's a lot of rot on the web, much of it little more than billboards or self-service storefronts and utilities. The decline of Google's search speaks to that.
The web is getting older, so there are more ruins. I don't see that as dying, though? I don't expect the number of websites to decrease or the amount of time people spend on websites to decrease.
The web is getting older, so there are more ruins. I don't see that as dying, though? I don't expect the number of websites to decrease or the amount of time people spend on websites to decrease.
I feel like what is dying is more of a concept or idea or even just "quality" than it is literally dying (as in ceasing to exist). A particular (and more beloved) concept of what the web can be...
I feel like what is dying is more of a concept or idea or even just "quality" than it is literally dying (as in ceasing to exist). A particular (and more beloved) concept of what the web can be feels like it is dying.
At least that's how it seems to me this phrasing is often used
I'd prefer the internet to go to stone age (of internet). Sites owned and serviced by individuals or very small bussinesses (made up of said individuals), let all the big ones drown in their own shit.
I like Tildes becauseit is the perfect example of how simple can work much better than big-company-owned. Sites like this can emerge and someone will discover them and point others to them thus spreading the word. We don't need big search engine with its deformed output (deformed to serve advertisement or sites that can profit from misusing the algorithm). Tildes has no ads and still runs. Other sites can do that as well. If they wanted to, that is...
Yes, Facebook can't because of.how big and world-wide it is. Ok then, let it die. Reddit can't, let it die. The
AI is newplayer in the ring. But is it gonna beuseful for people? Or is it gonna cycle itself to feed upon its tail?
The answer to the question if we are watching internet die would be simple "no". We are watching internet evolve. And I hope it will not evolve much, but rathr devolve. Devolve to the point where people are the driving force, not search engines or algorithms. Where you just write your blog, article or whatever and are free from ads or optimization to be found etc.
Running cost of your own server isn't that high, you can likely afford it and if you are blogger (or other text-heavy user), you can do fine with hosting your web on Raspberry Pi running in your drawer on your home connection. I'm gonna be bold and say that Tildes could run on Raspberry Pi perfectly fine.
Where did I even start thus comment? :-) I hate internet in current form. It is still useful, but also cluttered with useless junk. This junk keeps adding up. And once the junkyard is full, you're not gonna find anything useful there. That is where you would have to go elsewhere. It will still be internet (technically), it will just be in another form, hopefully different than current one.
Let us not be blinded by false nostalgia. The internet has always been corporate. The live nature and ownership structure means that it has always been pay to play. Early personal home pages were put on servers owned by ISPs and large institutions like universities. It’s extremely commonplace for ISPs to block home servers and it has been for an extremely long time. Tildes is a corporation as well, though not one made for profit. And sadly, the last time I checked it cost more to run than the donations were bringing in. Tildes, the software, probably could run on a Raspberry Pi, but not to the scale that Tildes the website currently is.
Money makes the world go ‘round. Until you can solve that problem we will repeat this pattern over and over again.
Well, of course it's about money. Even for me it's about money - my server needs electricity to run, HW had to be paid for, ISP gets paid for providing connection, I have to lease a domain... But it is different reading someone's blog where you only get the information you wanted and looking at Google search output where you get shoved ads into your throat either by plain advertisement right under the search query or in form of paid results or just seo-optimized results. We all know the situation where you look up something and get only eshops on the first page instead of the thing you searched for... You want to look up a name of character from favorite game and you end up on some wiki on fandom.com which is packed by ads... Wiki-styled web packed by ads. Such web (wiki for one game) could be hosted with minimal cost!
This is what I mean - web used to be simpler and worked better. Once something gets too big, it starts to slip away. This is why I would rather have smaller sites for specific content rather than having it all under one umbrella (big corp).
The same goes in gaming bussiness - look at all the big players, Blizzard, Activision, EA, Ubisoft etc. They may be doing great in numbers but I haven't played a new game from either of them in last... actually many years. Nowadays smaller game studios can often throw out unexpected gem that I'd like to play much more than something from the big ones. And it translates to my view of the internet as well.
I'd rather have this smaller Tildes community than being part of some big and very likely toxic or over-moderated or, as unbelievable as it sounds, both at the same time, community. I'd rather read a good blog than scroll through Facebook/TikTok/Instagram/whatever.
See, that's not entirely true.
Universities are still producing best-in-class software (see Incommon tooling for identity management) that often outpaces commercial offerings.
ISPs blocking personal services was in part as a malware blocking measure, but is also a symptom of the hostility to a user-centric web.
In the return to a user-centric web, it would not be unreasonable for ISPs to provide server resources again.
It would be helpful if we decoupled the consumer ISP from the owner of the wires, the way we do with cellular networks. That would promote the kind of competion that could bring those offerings back.
I think "often" here is doing a lot of legwork. Outside of software specifically created by academia, for academia, I am really struggling to think of anything that is built and funded by universities, that is better than a commercial alternative. I think what makes that particularly difficult is that most things that do well in academic circles tends to get spun off into a separate company and operate commercially anyway.
You mention Incommon, which in fairness I hadn't heard of, but it feels like the exception that proves the rule here.
That's reasonable. Here's the Incommon stack.
It's about 10-15 years ahead of most other software in this domain. Namely, because with this free stack, you get a metric ton of functionality that would require 5+ commercial products to cover. More probably, because these things can integrate with damn near anything else, and thus avoids needing to write a lot of custom integration code to connect disparate things together.
I don't think anyone would ever deny that it comes down to money. But I would suggest that at some point corporate went full "masks off" though in terms of intentions. Google dropped its "do no evil" mantra, we became bombarded by more and more aggressive ads (to the point where it slows down actual page loading to a crawl), search has arguably gotten worse (with more sponsored pages popping up), and then on top of all that subscriptions came out full force. Sometimes in addition to ads instead of as a way to ethically get around them.
Early 2010's was much more restrained in terms of all this, or at worst did its monetization in the shadows (Facebook). You'll see some ad banners here or there, maybe a pop-up in a blue moon. By the tail end, I don't know what happened. Market capture making the feeling of an appeal to quality not matter, an aggressive response to adblock, plain ol' greed. But something shifted, sometime around the 2016-2018 era or so.
I don’t think the internet was very corporate when I first went online. The web is only 33 years old. My first experiences with the internet were through fidonet gateways to Usenet — much of that supported by regular users dialing each other up for overnight relay transfers. IRC predates the web as well, and the servers were largely run by volunteers with no profit motive. Even the early web was entirely without profit, built for the sole purpose of sharing information.
I don’t think that early point-to-point UUCP counts as “the internet”. And while I would say that the point of the predecessor of the internet, ARPAnet specifically, wasn’t a profit-seeking venture per se, opening it up to commercial interests to create the modern internet is the point where it became corporate.
In any case I think “the internet” refers to the web in this situation.
When is the line? When banner ads started? Commercial ISPs? Yahoo?
I've been here under a year, are there ever donation campaigns to raise awareness? I donated when i joined and can at least personally opine I wouldn't be bothered by an occasional/annual reminder thread.
That is what gets me about all those discussions about how difficult and unsustainable it is to moderate big platforms. If it's impossible to moderate a platform because it is too big, then maybe it has just gotten too big. But the demand for user growth is the very same expectation that investors have of the quarterly growth of stock price. It just needs to go up. Modern capitalism is not interested in sustainability, it just grows like cancer.
Perfectly said! I agree with everything.
You don't even need to go that far. Github Pages, and other such platforms, are effectively free if they fit your requirements. And there are even more free options available as well.
Github, as mentioned in the article, is effectively a Microsoft-owned social network that trains AI on your data ignoring the licenses used by projects, right? Wouldn't hosting with them means you're feeding the inbreeding algorithm?
You think that they will not spider your blog and take your data regardless whatever
robots.txtor other terms you put on there?As I said, you're not limited to GitHub, although it a fairly popular choice. This includes non-profit options.
Furthermore, not hosting your website on something corporate-owned will not prevent your website's contents being used to train the plagiarism machine; simple web crawling is not atypical. It doesn't even need to necessarily be a "known" web-crawler either. If you're putting a website (or any form of content) online publicly, IMO you should assume that you are indeed indirectly training the plagiarism machine.
Regarding Microsoft using FOSS software to train copilot, indeed, they had done that. That being said, though I'm not one to typically defend microsoft, people are now allowed to "opt-out" from having their code used in copilot's training data.
To be fair, nothing is stopping that (We're here, after all), but a lot of people want to either be with friends, or reach out to the largest network, or a bunch of other reasons. the momentum moves towards the popular, which puts a lot of money into minimizing friction.
The biggest issue as usual, is that hosting is not a free nor cheap endeavor. Takes a lot of time to ultimately deal with 10 times more spam than actually engaged users. And I'm sure AI will make that even worse. and ofc, it may also cost money to host the server and register a domain. In many's eyes, it's more effort for a worse product and a lot of stress.
You are right. And I don't blame people for not hosting their own site (and bythemselves).
The thing is their blog (or whatever sote they make/have) will likely be part of something bigger thus makong them not own it and reliant on choices that the big company makes (they may sell the website to someone else rendering your own site useless or non-existent).
The thing also is that being part of some bigger blog makes you part of sommunity and makes you exposed there (people can find your site) but this hasthe same drawback - you are part of something bigger and thus lesslikely to be found (like that needle in a haystack).
The best thing to come out of this would be probably good old blogs and forums. Have a look at EEVblog or Linus Tech Tips forums. They don't make money but they are also driven by enthusiasts. Someone is willing to invest in infrastructure (like Deimos is with Tildes) and makes the playground for enthusiasts that make the content (which is made for them, not for resale). This is what I would like the internet to become. Or rather return to?
Regulation is different at an infrastructure level. An ISP that hosts a website doesn't have any real control over how the website works. If they step in, it's only under pretty bad circumstances, and probably means cancelling the account. The website needs to be attracting a lot of bad attention for them to notice.
This means that within some pretty broad limits, the website owner can do what they want. It's also easier than ever to start up a blog.
I think part of the issue is that a blog is not quite what people want. Starting your own blog is often lonely at first, and might stay that way. Writing articles is more work than most people want to do.
Just on a bit of a tangent, I remember at one point there was a website that existed specifically to allow people to create their own social networking websites. They had a selection of different kinds of applications that you could choose, but it actually allowed you to edit the PHP code to make it work however you wanted, and it was essentially free, too. It would be nice if that kind of thing were still available.
Edit: I remember now, it was called Ning. The name is still around, though I don't know if they are the same people. They are also no longer free and seem to be more interested in catering to businesses.
Yeah, there's a fundamental clash between being a creator and working in a community of other creators. If not everyone mutually agrees, you eventually have a competition for something, be it views, attention, crediting, etc. It's a messy science because these metrics are limited but also synergize with giving attention to other creators (if someone's meme goes viral, it lets other creators remake the meme and get a lot of attention as well, even if they aren't the "original". attention is limited, but also easily expandable for a short while). an odd balancing act.
Is this really true? I suppose it depends on if discussions/microblogging is considered "creation". I know that is the point of a forum (even in the non-digital format), but forums always had a mixed purpose of creation and consumption. Many use forums simply as another news feed, for instance.
Not to mention there also is the fact that much of "modern forum" discussion comes from sharing external content first. Like this post sharing a blog. I've been in discussions with other forums thinking about how to properly monetize creators to encourage high quality content, and that line between creation and high quality sharing is a difficult one to straddle.
I know you mentioned not wanting to worry about monetization, but in some regards it feels like the only way to properly entice sources of well presented knowledge that otherwise wouldn't take the time/energy to prepare a proper post. Similar to how Youtube can encourage some very high quality, well edited videos on topics that otherwise wouldnt be made if there wasn't a payoff.
This in particular may become a fantasy sooner rather than later. Even if the content isn't made for resale, there are parties that will resale it for their own interests. Or simply scrape it. Causes a huge divide between wanting an open internet vs. one not monetized to all hell by dark patterns.
I consider discussion a "creation". Not just simple talking about weather though. Many times I was partof discussing something where there was clear output of that - be it experience or advice or something like that.
Forums are also creation by this definition as is blogging. I'm considering doing blog just about tech stuff and my experience with it - ie. we have a robot vacuum that sucks (literally and figuratively) and I want to write down how it went in past year from "great" to "throw it out the window". I could share some Linux things there for others and for me as well (when I need to repeat the stuff). But I'm lazy and slow to get started... But discussions like these help me make up my mind. See? This discussion may lead to creativity :-)
With "not for resale" I meant the primary objective - EEVblog might be scraped by AI and used to learn, but its primary objective will still be meeting place for enthusiasts. If someone wants to make money upon their experience, feel free to do so - even though I don't consider it okay. It is public information and everyone can see it, so can AI and bots. The most important thing is that such places must remain operationa in their current model - there has to be someone willing to put their money in it. Others can donate, but the main motivation must remain to beplace for enthusiasts and not one of making money from it (money for the owner, that is).
Deimos very likely doesn't get any money from donations, if it covers at least running costs, Deimos is happy. It probably doesn't cover even those though. And Deimos (and others) invest also their time when programming the site. And moderating. This is their "donation" to the cause and I'm glad there are people like them. People like them make the good side of the internet from its beginning up to the modern day. They are not driven by profit, rather by passion.
Since the beginning there has always been many different "Internets" all existing at the same time, just with varying degrees of usage. Some people never went on social media and are still using the internet just for email and regular browsing. I am sure millions of people will be sucked into the AI generated rabbithole of endless "stimulating" personalized content and others will shy away from it, and use other corners of the internet.
We are probably a bit of an outlier subgroup here on Tildes, with many users (myself included) having been online since the 90s or longer, and miss the old classic web that wasn't driven by algorithms and ad money. But millions of people only know the internet from within various apps by tech giants and as long as there is money to be made, there will be a market for endless AI generated "content".
We have a bit of a "back in my day" mentality sometimes huh :)
I love it - that's why I'm here.
I find myself pining for (and going back to) old school message boards. There's still a few niche topics that have some solid boards with a large enough community to keep it interesting. I could see them experiencing a resurgence if things keep going the way they have on the more generalized sites.
I do too, but I wonder whether the existence of niche, well attended subgroups on a site like Reddit (at least for the meantime) will stymie any attempt to get private communities off the ground.
Taking Tildes as my example, I come here because of the decorum and the pace of conversation, but when it comes to specific advice, user volume and versatility, I'm still more likely to post on Reddit first.
Unlike in the old days, I think that the competition for small, specific sites is just too great to make them mainstream again.
Whenever I read an article like this, I am reminded of that old John Gilmore quote that people used to smugly parrot - "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Where's that attitude now? Folks like this predict a dire future where we are so paralyzed by the glut of AI-generated content that we cannot interact with humans reliably, nor even find one to interact with, but this seems to presuppose that they are the only one who will be standing off to the side shaking their head at the state of affairs.
What we are seeing is the introduction of a new factor into an ecosystem that has no tolerance for it. I'm sure that some platforms and services will respond poorly to AI's advent, and fail, but others will likely survive, and new platforms will rise to fill the niches left by the crumbling titans. Things will rebalance around the new normal. And, yes, likely there will be some large percentage of people who happily interact with AI-generated content on a regular basis, laughing at jokes nobody told and resharing pretty pictures that nobody made, and folks like the article author will log on to their curated human-only communities to discuss how those folks are experiencing joy and happiness in an incorrect fashion.
I think we'll be fine.
I'm more worried about the underlying dangers and corporate overstepping than how people consume content. we saw this in the 2010s where technically no one was being harmed as Facebook sold off private data to 3rd parties. But eventually some governments stepped in and regulated that.
Ai has the potential to both be more immediately annoying (yay, more ads!) and very dangerous. Completly lowers the bar for slander, revenge porn, cyberbullying, catfishing, and so many things I can't yet imagine. And it can do it in a mass that dwarves the humans, and can go around traditional anti-bot measures (such LLMs were originally trained with goals to get around captchas after all). I feel like we're still not fully regulating humans on all this and now we have to worry about bots.
The scale and circumvention aspects were part of what I was talking about with the current ecosystem not having any protections in place. There's a cultural element where we all have to adapt our behavior to reflect the environmental changes; I've wondered for a while what the tech that millennials wouldn't "get" was going to be and I'm starting to wonder if our failure will be not properly internalizing the new AI-enabled paradigm and its attendant safety standards.
That's an interesting point. I think in some way the internet still routes around censorship, but in different ways. Piracy is an example that comes to mind and all of the technology that facilitates it and in the process creates sections of the internet (whether that's P2P services, torrents and related protocols, onions, private forums, and so on).
But a more troubling idea is that people on social media and social news sites are routing around censorship by creating not only echo chambers of their own, but routing around information they don't like by presenting The Real Truth. And they've justified the idea of alternate facts or truths by openly saying "I don't like your version and will substitute my own" and in the process route around information they dislike or don't want to assimilate. That's a real problem, and I think that's a force that's twisting the internet in a new way, or at least putting it into a new cycle.
Yeah, I think the original statement was made with the internet's original demographic in mind - not monolithic by any means, but generally a more curious, tech-savvy crowd that was eager to use new technology and had something of an anti-authoritarian bent. I feel like that's the demographic people are talking about when they say "the internet" is dying; it's an echo of the classic Eternal September lament. In both cases it's an observation that the original use case is no longer the most popular use case, and in fact has become so marginalized that it is in danger of not being viable at all...
...except that it's still perfectly viable. We're on Tildes, after all, a quiet corner of the internet that was set up because of all the unquiet corners. There's no part of the original or nascent internet that can't be duplicated in the current paradigm. The trouble is that there's all the post-September sorts online using the internet ever so incorrectly. The original culture is no longer strong enough to influence new joiners into behaving in an "online" fashion, so we're left with a few scattered communities representing those who care about that vibe.
I don't think the divide is new; people who are wrapping themselves in a bubble now are the same folks that previously achieved the same result by avoiding the internet entirely. Now that internet presence is more or less obligatory, they're adapting.
I honestly find talking about "the internet" as somewhat exhausting because people use that term to mean so many different things. But generally when people talk about it, I take it to mean society in the context of communication via internet services.
The old, old, old internet is still around, too. You can get yourself an account on a public access unix system like SDF, for instance. You just have to be interested enough to learn about them and seek them out.
I don't know what will happen, but I think the Internet will survive, one way or the other.
Either AI will become better or filtering methods will become better. Probably both. Unless we reach a sci-fi level of "truly conscious" AI, people are always going to be creeped out by chatbots masquerading as real people. The majority of people don't want to talk to copycat machines or read spam garbage, and I think they will avoid any sites that have this issue.
Cheap copycat articles that tell you how to fix your washing machine might be here to stay, as I think people don't care as much where that kind of information comes from as long as it works. But places like Tildes or Reddit will always exist, even if it means they have to adapt to the new circumstances to prevent AI spam. Some of the possible solutions, such as platforms requiring ID verification for each account, could end up being really bad for privacy, but that's a whole other can of worms.
I think it's interesting that the author suggested video content will be more valued in the coming years due to AI poisoning of text-based posts. I don't think video is going to be much of a barrier for AI going into the future. They've already made huge strides in AI-generated video and I suspect these will improve to become essentially indistinguishable from real video.
Who knows, maybe AI will cause people to start meeting in person more again.
I'm a secondary school teacher. We (teachers and society in general) have a lot of work to do in shaping critical thinking. As I currently see it, 12-15 year olds absolutely don't mind the dross that comes out of content farms. The 16-18 year olds seem pretty wise to it, but their mushy little brains have some point of comparison from the before times.
With regards to the part of your comment I quoted, imagine a higher and higher percentage of your inputs as a kid were from AI-generated sources. So much of our education is focused on "will this be marked" and just copying and pasting from Google summaries that kids just...don't really notice.
There's a huge amount more to discuss and discover on this topic, but for now I'll just say I'm kinda shitting myself about the next decade of my (new!) career. And I'm somebody who doesn't like doom-and-gloom scenarios, despite being cynical about the tech/capitalism intersection.
I would post here my mantra that I've been repeating for a while: "Reject algorithms, return to categories."
I vaguely remember that in the old days, the death of the Internet was predicted quite frequently? “Film at 11,” people would say mockingly, imitating local TV commercials for the late news broadcast.
I mean....they weren't wrong. A lot went to shit between then and now.
Lots of stuff is better, but a lot is substantially worse.
I think questions of the form “Is X dying?”are too vague to be useful when we’re talking about something that was never alive. It’s a metaphor that has no clear meaning.
It’s not very clear what people mean by “the Internet,” either? I expect that DNS will keep working and packets will continue to be delivered. Bandwidth will likely increase and a lot of costs will continue to drop, at least in bulk. It also seems likely that we will have better hardware, Linux will remain popular, and there will be more open source software than ever.
But that doesn’t seem to be what people are worried about? Maybe there’s a better way to express it.
It's the first time I'm unsure which X and whether you meant "Is xyz dying" or "is twitter dying".
Oops! Yeah, I didn't mean Twitter.
Maybe it would be best to say the Web is dying. And that is a more reasonable take, there's a lot of rot on the web, much of it little more than billboards or self-service storefronts and utilities. The decline of Google's search speaks to that.
The web is getting older, so there are more ruins. I don't see that as dying, though? I don't expect the number of websites to decrease or the amount of time people spend on websites to decrease.
I feel like what is dying is more of a concept or idea or even just "quality" than it is literally dying (as in ceasing to exist). A particular (and more beloved) concept of what the web can be feels like it is dying.
At least that's how it seems to me this phrasing is often used