Dead Internet Theory

https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1auxufd/dead_internet_theory/

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

86 44 2 years ago

old.reddit.com

zero-sharp2• 2 years ago

A few years back Blizzard released the remastered edition of Diablo 2. That was one of my favorite games growing up. I figured I would spend some time playing the original to give myself some nostalgia (on the old school battle net from the early 2000s). This was a game where you level up a character, collect loot, and trade. Without online trading and cooperation, the game can become difficult.

As I started playing, I noticed that 1) there were less games to join and 2) there were still somehow thousands of people playing, as seen in the character rankings. So somehow you didn't see people playing, but they were leveling up ahead of you. Well, as you might have guessed, those thousands of players were actually bots. It actually made me kinda sad because the lively online experience I once had as a kid was gone. It didn't seem like there would ever be any going back either.

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

It actually made me kinda sad because the lively online experience I once had as a kid was gone.

Yeah... Few things on the internet are sadder than a dead online game.

https://youtu.be/pC_aGQyFETU

TylerE3• 2 years ago

There were all kinds of cheats and hacks in basically every networked game back in the day. Hardly some new thing or change.

jprete• 2 years ago

Cheats and hacks aren't the same as bots. Even a cheater wants to engage with other players. Bot players are only there to farm items or leveled characters for sale as quickly as possible.

zero-sharp2• 2 years ago

It's not about whether the cheats or bots existed in the past. I'm confident they did. It's about the experience that the online game is now mostly bots playing with bots.

I mean, they're programmed to work in teams. So, for example, you might enter a game and find that 7 out of the 8 players (8 players is the max per game) are bots doing a speed run. And those are pretty much the only games you see. I'm sure something similar existed in the past, but it definitely wasn't as visible. And I'm not an active gamer, so that was the first time I experienced it.

It just completely trivialized the game. Whenever you needed an item, someone would eventually find out and just give it to you for free. At least back in the day there was an economy where things had value. People even paid for participating in certain events. What made the game fun was the challenge of progress and the excitement of getting that rare drop.

SleepilyLimping• 2 years ago

This is similar to what people found when they went back to World of Warcraft after it introduced an automated "dungeon finder" that matched you with people doing the same content across multiple servers. You had no real social interaction, because you just queued for your role with the tool, got teleported to the instance immediately, did the content, then left. Because you were never going to talk to these people again, you had no real incentive to "meet" them properly, unlike when you were doing public (but admittedly clumsy) "Looking for Group" channel pings/organization.

Also, it's important to realize when going back to remasters/old games how much less distraction players had back then. Because of the prevalence of free-to-play games on phones/Steam, or the immense backlog people have, or the OTHER "lifestyle, log in every day" games people have, they aren't likely to be sticking around with games as long as they did before. A game like Diablo 2 could be "your game" for the entire YEAR because of how much content you had, but also because you might not be able to afford another game until Christmas/birthday. This is also what has kind of killed custom content: people made Starcraft Brood War or Warcraft 3 custom maps that became their own games (Dota, some Tower Defense variants) because they needed to extend the value of the games they were playing.

That isn't the case now.

prisenco• 2 years ago

There was very little monetization

The problem isn’t even necessarily monetization but the hypermonitization that took over the web almost immediately.

We never had much of a mom & pop era, we accelerated immediately from volunteer enthusiasts into megacorporations.

Part of this, ironically, is people getting used to the Internet being free. Paying for content, even small amounts, was blasphemous. But something has to keep the lights on and the proles paid and two decades later, that something was advertising and venture capital. It was a devils bargain.

Now everyone is chasing clicks and VC money and AI is the new accelerator for both.

TylerE3• 2 years ago

We had a mom and pop era. It was called geocities. These days SquareSpace and the like. They’re mostly utterly terribly unusable messes.

pompino2• 2 years ago

I think the 'molotov cocktail' solution is for PC makers to ship with ad-block installed by default. PCs these days ship with all kinds of shitty anti-virus and crappy addons, but somehow they're shy to tackle the ad-based "download now" malware vector.

bonton89• 2 years ago

PC makers used to sell the PCs with that stuff preinstalled.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

See also The Atlantic, "The Dead-Internet Theory" August 2021: <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...>

Discussed at the time (38 comments): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28379872>

The Atlantic piece has a different focus --- that much of the Internet (both Web and other venues) are fake, whilst the Reddit piece addresses both that and the fact that true organic sites are getting harder to find. But yes, the slide's been commented on widely for years now. And by "years", I'd argue that the Atlantic's piece itself came after years of that slide.

andy_xor_andrew• 2 years ago

I found out recently there's a place on the web, right now, that has all the charm and personality of the "homepages" of the 90s and early 00s.

A place where you can make your own little corner of the web, share it with friends, find others with overlapping interests, etc. It can be uniquely yours, and even if there are hundreds of others, yours is unique because it's yours.

And believe it or not, it's... Twitch. Seriously- small, personal Twitch streams, usually with fewer than ~50 views.

And I think this emergence is quite poetic, because the exact same thing that killed the "old" web - that is, nearly unlimited bandwidth for streaming rich media - is the thing that makes Twitch possible.

Just open Twitch, click around, search for something that interests you, and you'll find someone streaming in their cozy room, possibly on camera or possibly with a cute PNG or 3D avatar, talking about that topic, interacting with chat, etc. It's a really nice world there, if you know where to look and what to filter out.

TillE• 2 years ago

Yeah it helps if you're really into some niche gaming community (eg, retro game randomizers), but in my ~30 years of being extremely online, my closest online friends have pretty much all come from small Twitch streams and their associated Discords.

ehnto• 2 years ago

I used to get this from forums and chat rooms and can echo the sentiment that Twitch can have similar community.

The important thing is just that every time you show up, some of the same people are there and there is room to talk to them. Also one of the biggest downsides to matchmaking in games was it removed that aspect of it, which has destroyed the community aspect of a lot of games.

nitwit005• 2 years ago

Hadn't thought of it that way, but it does have that feel at times. Even the animated gifs are there.

dr_kiszonka• 2 years ago

I followed your suggestion and searched for Arduino, DIY electronics, etc. but haven't found anything. Is Twitch only for gaming or was I simply doing something wrong (which is entirely possible)?

navjack27• 2 years ago

Esports_are_for_losers does content like that

The_Colonel• 2 years ago

In what way is it different from e. g. small youtube channels or small subreddits?

wslh• 2 years ago

If Internet is TCP/IP it is well alive and thriving, if it is about power concentration and attention economy it is dying even when there is a virtually infinite content.

Internet now ironically sounds like "if a tree falls and no one hears it...", in the early days you can give your voice. There were fewer people and fewer interests. It seems we can based some of the Internet results in complex system theory where centralization and decentralization compete but it is easier and less energy consuming to just scroll in one app that think and search for a result.

An open discussion.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Instead of linking to reddit discussions, we have our own Ask HN:'s and threads here for that purpose ...... and this has come up recently in a few discussions:

Neal Stephenson was prescient about our AI age

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287616

A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949

Tommy4302• 2 years ago

The internet died when the desktop became an afterthought.

dehrmann• 2 years ago

We're at the point where mobile has been the dominant computing platform longer than desktop.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

Not quite, though there's some argument that smartphone use seems to now dominate desktop worldwide.

The pedants might argue that desktop computing traces back over 50 years to the Mother of All Demos, and was in reasonably widespread business use at some point in the 1980s. But it's probably reasonable to trace widespread general-public adoption to Windows 95, which actually did release that year.

The iPhone released in 2007, though I'd push back widespread adoption by another three years. Search Engine Watch puts the date at which mobile devices exceeded desktop to 2014:

<https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2014/07/08/mobile-now-exce...>

That gives us about 10 years of smartphone dominance as contrasted to nearly two decades to desktop.

In terms of traffic originating from mobile vs. desktop/laptop systems, parity (50% from each) seems to have been hit in 2016:

<https://research.com/software/mobile-vs-desktop-usage>

More recent data are ... blurry, though I'm finding claims that 60% of global Web traffic is mobile, but ~50--65% of US Web traffic is desktop. Time-online by device (broken out by country) in 2023 tends to show rough parity, though several countries show much higher mobile use (Indonesia, Thailand, Saudia Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, etc.). For others, desktop is notably higher than mobile (US, Israel, Canada, Poland, Russia, etc.). See:

<https://www.zippia.com/advice/mobile-vs-desktop-usage-statis...>

<https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/mobile-desktop-internet...>

It's interesting to note that conversion rates (follow-through for online purchases) is much higher on desktop than mobile.

Tommy4302• 2 years ago

We're at the point where mobile has been the dominant computing platform longer than desktop.

I do see your point. What I mean is that we have oversized UIs and hamburger menus on the desktop which makes me feel like for a while now, the desktop has been an afterthought when it comes to web design.

atan22• 2 years ago

If I had to guess, we are very close to a movement that says 'no' to the current overflow of online activity and online presence we saw in the past two decades. We see that the new cool thing tends to always clash and go against the current way of doing things. Look at art, movies, music, etc. Every new trend in jazz was a response going against what was hip before. It people play slow, the hip thing is to play fast; if people play in tempo, the new hip thing is to break things.

My bet is that the next "hip" thing will be either off-line or off-tech.

_sys49152• 2 years ago

right....which would include a delivery service or subscription of some sort. like loadstar, the monthly disk magazine

right back into the eighties

atan22• 2 years ago

I'm not saying this will be everyone. It's a movement. And the past shows that the start will be the "elite" that has the luxury of saying no to what the majority of us considers essential. Spending too much time online will be as square as wearing a shirt with a big brand logo or eating processed food. It'll be "something low-class people do."

mvkel• 2 years ago

To me this rings similar to the laments around news: "why does it always have to be bad news, can't we see the good news every once in a while?"

If it didn't work, we wouldn't see it.

If the only way to stop it is through the sheer willpower of a society, it just won't happen.

In my opinion, going offline has to be experientially better than staying online, not just a counter-culture pendulum swing.

mortify• 2 years ago

No one needed to do much with the news. Maybe the weather needed to be semi-accurate so I knew what to wear tomorrow, but my actions rarely hinged on the 3 car pileup that happened 8 hours ago or the money embezzled from a bank that I don't do business with.

People do use the Easterweb to accomplish things: find out how to fix your car, code a mobile app, or buy parts for your refrigerator. If people cannot accomplish these things, traffic and the number of useful sites will drop.

The mindless fear-inducing echo chambers will always be there.

supriyo-biswas• 2 years ago

My bet is that the next "hip" thing will be either off-line or off-tech.

I hope for the same thing. People filtering their best experiences to post on social media was already a thing, and now with LLMs and generative image and video models turning up fake interactions even more, people may eventually turn towards meeting friends and performing social activities IRL.

Tommah• 2 years ago

My bet is that the next "hip" thing will be either off-line or off-tech.

IME, the Internet was much cooler when it took real-life things and improved upon them. If you're a writer, you can post something on a blog, and now potentially anybody in the world can read it. If you like to play chess but you're in an isolated area with few other players, you can go online and play on there. If you have kids and you want their grandparents to see how they're growing, you can send them the pictures online, etc., etc. But so much online activity these days is only about itself, and it turns out vapid and pointless. Manufactured outrage on Twitter, "lifestyle" pics on Instagram, political battles with your cousins on Facebook, etc. really add nothing to anyone's life. And these things only exist because the platforms are there to provide a place for them. No one walks down the street looking for strangers to argue with, or holding pictures of food to show to people. I hope we, or at least the younger generations, will eventually see Twitter and Facebook and the rest for the wastelands that they mostly are. And I hope something else comes along that lets people actually hear each other, that magnifies good ideas, and that rewards effort.

hbossy• 2 years ago

I've heard some rap song on the gym last week and the artist was boasting that he threw his phone in the sea because he sees all his real friends in person.

freetime2• 2 years ago

I spend more time, and get more done on the internet than at any point in the past. I think the internet is by and large doing just fine.

It’s the “real world” that I’m more worried about.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

This is not a new idea [0], it's been bouncing around message boards since the perhaps the late 2010s, breaking into the mainstream with a piece in The Atlantic in 2021 [1].

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...

phaedrus• 2 years ago

The last time this came up on HN, someone pointed out something that's stuck with me: the Internet and indie web pages didn't go away, we (the users) did.

colordrops• 2 years ago

The open source community and the myriad of webpages still has the vibe.

pompino2• 2 years ago

I think monetization via ads makes all platforms tangibly worse over time. Google, while not directly responsible, is definitely the catalyst that made everything shitty on the web. I, for one would love to see Google go out of business, but probably its going in the other direction with their claws now deeply entrenched in the so called web "standards". We're in for a rough ride.

cykros• 2 years ago

Everyone likes to complain that IRC is dead, but nobody wants to go just populate IRC. It's not like it takes much bandwidth; I've got a good few servers just connected in a screen session that runs mostly in the background and pop in from time to time in a few spots, and get a ding if someone mentions me.

I probably should take up Matrix as well for how much I disparage Discord, but Discord is definitely another spot where lots of humans congregate.

atduskgreg• 2 years ago

Can’t wait for the AI-generated “botshit” (to borrow Cory Doctorow’s term) to start killing of social media sites. You can see from the decline of Twitter (and Facebook amongst anyone under the age of 40) how weak some of their hold on their users already is. Hopefully AI’s big “contribution” to tech of empowering spammers will be the thing that pushes them the rest of the way into their much deserved grave.

RecycledEle• 2 years ago

Imagine that you run HN. Imagine that I challenge your beliefs and worse, that I provide proof on a regular basis.

So you (the not-trying-to-be-evil admin) label me as toxic. You think up some way that what I am posting is illegal.

You tried banning people in the past, but that made them angry and they came back with multiple alternate accounts (alts,) so you mix deprecating many of my posts to the unseen bottom of feeds and shadow banning other posts.

This lowers the level of disagreement. Other moderators follow suit, until the whole HN forum is full of people who agree with the party line.

At that point, HN is dead. And this is what we want. We all want the world to agree with us.

I want a forum of autistic tech nerds who distrust authority and just want to be contributing members of society who help others. So I might use sneaky tricks to limit pro-cop and pro-socialism posters. They would feel like the whole Internet had died when their favorite forums were full of anti-cop libertarians who believed in the individual right to keep and bear suitcase nukes.

I've been there as a pro-liberty responsibility person. The reality might be that 90% of people agree with me, but the sneaky moderator tricks make it impossible to know.

If you want real change, mandate several things:

1. Anything moderated must list the reason it was moderated and a real human mist sign the moderation. For example, if this post were hidden the moderator would have to say why (spam, NSFW, bad language, off topic, etc) and include their real name.

2. A notice must be sent by email when moderation happens. So I would get an email explaining what post was moderated by who, why, and how to appeal. A permalink to the post must be included. No generic notifications would be allowed.

3. Anyone can easily appeal a moderation decision by filling out a web form that must accept 10,000 characters or more in each field. If any part of the moderation is incorrect, the post must be given a permanently promoted placement.

4. A right to sue in federal small claims court over inaccurate moderation that is not corrected within 12 hours. Cases should be prepared and filed online so that the other side has time to respond. The plaintiff gets to respond to the defenses response. After the sides go back and forth a few times the judge rules.

5. The right for everyone to see all posts, including moderated ones, and to select what to see and not to see based on author, keywords, and reason for moderation. So, for example, I see the user JoeBlow was moderated down for an insightful post I agree with so I can permanently unmoderate his comments on my view of HN, even if the mods hate us both.

Dead Internet Theory

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