The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here?

https://theconversation.com/the-internet-is-worse-than-it-used-to-be-how-did-we-get-here-and-can-we-go-back-236513

by lr0 • 2 years ago

49 58 2 years ago

superkuh2• 2 years ago

Money and Javascript.

The vast majority of people only visit websites that are other people's jobs. Popular websites now are those that provide legal ways of moving money. It's why no matter how good an open social network can be it'll only ever attract a fractional percentage of people(1) because KYC prevents any non-incorporated/institutional group from moving money. (1: ie, mastodon's 1 million, IRC's ~600k, etc).

And perhaps more importantly: the growth of HTTP as a javascript application delivery protocol instead of a way to access HTML pages on websites. The shift to browsers being fully fledged VMs runing real applications with lots of bare metal access means the utmost of security is required at all times (HTTP/3 can't even make a non-CA TLS connection). That security mindset makes for a lot more friction for humans trying to play around and share things with each other.

soulofmischief• 2 years ago

Blaming JavaScript for the state of the web is like blaming money for greed. JavaScript is only the medium, and the driving force behind it would have created a different language if needed. This take seems too narrow.

ethbr1• 2 years ago

There's a clear argument to be made that technical capability circumscribes commercial possibility.

Without active arbitrary code running on behalf of websites, control would be substantially tilted in favor of user clients.

There was probably no future where AJAX didn't evolve, but if it hadn't then things would look different.

__MatrixMan__• 2 years ago

JavaScript failed to take us to a good place because it was not designed to resist corruption. You might make similar arguments about money.

If we went back and replaced those media with less naive designs, I think it's reasonable to believe that they'd take us somewhere different. We are hackers after all, reshaping technology is what we do.

Of course let's also address the lack of scruples that got us here... In fact, let's each do that primarily in our own ways, I'm just saying that this might not be the forum for that.

TimeBearingDown• 2 years ago

Had me until the end. I haven’t seen the friction? Let’s Encrypt and web 1.0 still work and domains are cheap. OpenBSD’s httpd is great for this job. You’ll exclude less people if you don’t require any features. You can still give your site out on big platforms or use a QR code. Users of open social networks can directly transfer value now, with KYC at the on and off-ramps. Telegram was closest to implementing it into a very large and permissive network with open clients, albeit centralized and closed servers, though we’ll see how Durov’s French situation develops now.

AnthonyMouse5• 2 years ago

Let’s Encrypt and web 1.0 still work and domains are cheap.

First the newest version of the protocol stops supporting something. Then, over time, most things switch to the new version, and the old version becomes unsupported.

It's a notable change when the new version doesn't support something that the old one does, because that thing is probably going away.

Let's Encrypt solves a lot of this but not all of it. In particular, it makes it harder for people to screw around starting out because you can't even send the link to your mom until you buy a domain and learn how DNS and Let's Encrypt work etc.

You can still give your site out on big platforms or use a QR code.

The big platforms don't like to encourage their competitors. Links to off-site content are not likely to be promoted by algorithms.

QR codes imply that you already have access to a large existing network of people in meatspace, which has never been true for most people.

Users of open social networks can directly transfer value now, with KYC at the on and off-ramps.

How does that work? The internet is global but anyone without a first world bank account is stuffed. Even when everyone is in the US they can't send even trivial amounts of money to each other without an incompetent/predatory corporation acting as an intermediary.

Meanwhile the theory also doesn't work, because "KYC at the on and off-ramps" is pretty meaningless for any system popular enough for its internal credits to be a de facto currency. But KYC has never really worked anyway. It has, however, caused a lot of trouble for innocent people who just want to be able to transfer small amounts of money for ordinary purchases without being subject to warrantless mass surveillance and the caprice of infuriating bureaucracies.

These are real problems that deserve to be solved rather than dismissed.

superkuh2• 2 years ago

Try sending a link at your obscure dot com domain to a large group chat. Now try hosting the same material on a well known corporation's website. I'm certain that a lot more people are going to be visiting the corporate hosted URL. Why? Perceived security. People are terrified of personal websites because of the reasoning I gave above. Automatic powerful javascript execution has killed casual web surfing. Now opening a website URL is like running an application rather than reading a document.

As for the friction on the hosting side, the problem mostly has to due with keeping websites up, not setting them up. The short lifespan and fragility of the required CA TLS means any HTTPS only (because JS auto-exec) site will only survive for a few years without active human mantainence. Weather the acme(2) tool breaks, an LE root cert expires (like what happened this summer), acme version depreceates, host OS openssl version doesn't have cross support for required modern cyphers, or something in the 90 day cert lease cycle just breaks because it's so complex with so many things moving. CA TLS sites die. HTTP sites can last forever without being touched. HTTP+HTTPS should be the way, but with the security required for an auto-executing JS browser no one wants to risk HTTP. I've literally had people balk at loading a http://example.com/image.jpg because it was HTTP. The fear is not rationally evaluated on a case by case basis, it's just all security all the time no matter what habit now.

fullshark2• 2 years ago

The economic incentives that drive what gets published/surfaced.

ggm• 2 years ago

Publication is a one-way information flow. We've basically sold out on an interactive 2-way flow for Disney and like, because what we want (as consumers) turns out to be passive entertainment more than active 2-way flow.

That plus ads, and the attempts to monetize. Nobody seriously wants to go back to the public broadcast model but nobody also seriously doubts we were in some ways better served than we are by 10+ monthly rental models, and IPR lockups in packages. Which all start ad-free and then quietly introduce the ads, unavoidably (unlike 30 sec skip days with a decent VHS or the PVR followons) because money.

innagadadavida• 2 years ago

Google.

The perverse ad incentives is what broke it.

burningChrome• 2 years ago

It used to be nearly impossible to game Google for search engine results and for some reason over the last 8-10 years, its become comical how easy it is to game them for good search results now.

vouaobrasil3• 2 years ago

That is because Google realized that there is an optimal compromise between "good search" and "more ad revenue", and that "optimal" is quite far away from "good search". Better than no search, but not by much. In fact, in between searching Wikipeda and simply memorizing/bookmarking the best websites for niche topics, I have stopped using search because the results on the first page are absolutely useless.

elphinstone• 2 years ago

Social media also killed web 1.0 community, but, yes mostly google.

ipv6ipv4• 2 years ago

I think a large part of it is the balkanization of the internet into multiple opaque walled gardens. You can’t find anything, or freely join communities to exchange information anymore because everything is locked away behind some search engine blocking login.

Discussion moved from public, open bulletin boards, forums, and similar to Facebook groups, discord, etc. It’s locked away, unindexable, and unfindable. Even Twitter clammed up recently. So the only thing left searchable is auto-generated clickbait. While FB, and friends are optimizing engagement by nursing misery behind their login walls.

The only growing public forum left is Reddit which is why more of us keep adding “site:Reddit.com” to our search queries to surface quality results. And even Reddit has threatened to close off.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

I don't find reddit to be that great most of the time TBH. It's a lot of unvetted, un-sourced verbal excrement for the most part. Maybe I haven't found the subs that are good.

tayo42• 2 years ago

It's just another data point when researching. Like if you want to buy some thing, it's like another review site. On its own it's unreliable but if comments are consistent with other reviews sites or soemthing, it's stronger signal.

jmward01• 2 years ago

I wonder if this could be solved with standardized embeddings. There are reasons to hide exact content but giving a peak at the content with an embedding could allow meaningful search while still hiding the exact content.

sakjur• 2 years ago

Reddit has closed off, Google is licensing their public records now. Recent content doesn’t show up when searching on e.g. DuckDuckGo and their robots.txt denies all traffic. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525...

z3ncyberpunk• 2 years ago

Reddit hasn't just closed off, it's become a hollow shell of fascism.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I will add to this, locked down Cell Phones, the w** dream of commercial entities. Now consumer Operating Systems are following this model.

In the early days, anyone with a PC could throw something on the internet. It is very hard to do that these days for most people.

Most people here I assume probably run some Linux or a BSD, avoiding this lockdown mode. But, I wonder when ISPs will start locking things down. That is why I think we need Net Neutrally codified before that starts happening.

FWIW, Gopher, USENET and IRC still exists, but seems the masses want bling instead of just "cold hard" text information. Plus "the real" Gemini was created, which where I have moved my WEB site to over the last couple of years. People should look into it.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

gemini://geminiprotocol.net/

LargoLasskhyfv• 2 years ago

Be a pirate with https://opennic.org/ and have a look at

https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/dot there...

debacle• 2 years ago

Google shares an enormous part of the blame for this. We were on the cusp of a semantic web 13 years ago. But the Ad supported Internet can't persist if the Internet is content. So we have 2024's crapfest.

bedatpedant• 2 years ago

Internet is fine and there’s weird fun stuff all over it

It’s the web and social media that sucks

acheron• 2 years ago

Mostly it's Google's fault.

I sometimes think this is not entirely fair of me -- if it hadn't been Google it would have been someone else? E.g., I'm sure there's a parallel universe where the Internet ended up being dominated by AOL, and it's hard to believe that would have been much better.

But in this universe it was Google.

ravetcofx• 2 years ago

And wasn't Google fun for 15 or so years? They dazzled us with all this cool, free software and early machine learning, making us think they were sending us to technological utopia. 1GB of free email storage! Then 5GB, then Maps and Earth...

vouaobrasil3• 2 years ago

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

thebeardisred• 2 years ago

"It's capitalism, Stupid." We've incentivized bad behavior and have gotten bad behavior.

Super_Jambo• 2 years ago

Capitalists abhor the market. But they captured the political class and well here we are.

vouaobrasil3• 2 years ago

Controversial opinion, and while I do think Google is largely to blame, I think there is another more systemic reason: speed/storage increase. Humans don't do well with an abundance of resources, in the sense that the end result with abundance is usually extreme waste and low quality. We just aren't evolved for handling abundance properly.

For example: extremely cheap food beyond the basics leads to obesity and poor diets. Cheap fossil fuels leads to climate disaster.

And in this case, cheap space and bandwidth (and to some extent ease of use) has led to anyone being able to put up a website, and cheap bandwidth means that people will waste more time using the internet as a random diversion rather than merely using it to obtain the most essential information. That means there's a much higher incentive to put tons of ads on it and SEO game it.

Or, think about this: what are the BEST parts of the internet? In my opinion, they are the parts with the LEAST amount of speed/modern features that require lots of storage. For example: email, this old-fashioned looking website, personal blogs.

Yes of course, some newer things like YouTube are quite interesting, but even YouTube is being overtaken by headline-hype videos and overly commercial things like sponsored videos and an algorithm that promotes tabloid-like stuff.

But imagine if YouTube was more restricted: it takes a while to load a video, maximum 1080P, and maybe you can only watch 1-2 a day. Then I believe it would be much more interesting.

sydbarrett74• 2 years ago

Agreed. Scarcity (real or imagined) leads to creativity. We have largely become Wells's Eloi.

greg_V• 2 years ago

Twenty odd years ago when I was moderating a forum as a teenager, we had to proactively nuke memes (or demotivationals as they were called) because the images ran up our server costs, which we were paying out of pocket money.

Now everyone can stream HD videos from their pocket with a push of a button from anywhere.

The entire infrastructure was reengineered in a span of a generation, completely changing the economics of how it works. It used to be a communal garden or occupied spaces: now it's a gigantic shopping mall.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 2 years ago

counter-take:

if your food stores used to be 800m^3 of grain, and you manage to increase that 1600m^3 of grain, plus 5000m^3 of rabbit shit stored in the room next door, did your food supplies get better or worse?

almost nothing on the internet, in category terms, has gone away.

lots of new stuff has arrived, perhaps (perhaps) in volume outweighing whatever one might consider good.

i suggest that it is far from clear that this means "the internet is worse".

jdmarble• 2 years ago

I would adjust your analogy to describe the new state as 1600m^3 of grain mixed well with 5000m^3 of rabbit shit. I’d be happier if the AI generated, SEO garbage was somehow isolated “in the room next door”.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 2 years ago

But it's not mixed in, unless you are looking at it through the lens of a not very good search engine.

rnd0• 2 years ago

Can this be fixed? If it can't be fixed, can we get around it?

manuelmoreale2• 2 years ago

At a large scale I’d say no.

Because economic incentives will follow where people are and so if you try create something new it will slowly degrade over time. We’re seeing it happen again with the “fediverse” that is already starting to show signs of business people coming in with ideas for how to monetize it and it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a mess.

But at a smaller scale yes. Get yourself a personal site if you don’t already have one. Post content on your own domain. Make an effort to link to other personal sites. Create a blog roll. Join a forum since a few are still around. Or set up one if you want to create space for a new small community.

1659447091• 2 years ago

Make an effort to link to other personal sites

Yes, Bring back the Webring! And guest books! (...but maybe not <marquee> & <blink>)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

tropicalfruit• 2 years ago

"In sum, the accelerated commercialisation of the internet, the dominance of media tech giants and the presence of bad actors have infiltrated content on the internet. The rise of AI further intensifies this, making the internet more chaotic than ever."

monopoloies and enshittification?

like almost everything, at the start it serves and is designed by it's users. then when money gets involved it shifts to serving the interests of the money people.

you see the same in so many other industries, films, tv, video games.

tempodox• 2 years ago

The old profit motive. The internet went from a collection of places where we cooperate with each other, or simply hang out, to one giant market place where everyone is trying to sell you something. Those other places still exist, but search engines won't help you find them. There's no money in it for them.

namaria2• 2 years ago

Yeah the early internet was a public facility funded by the government. They chose to privatize it and it became a cesspool of advertising and corporate rent extraction. Very lucrative, created a lot of profits for American corporations. Working as designed isn't it?

system2• 2 years ago

I agree with most of what the op is saying, but it's not all bad. ChatGPT has transformed the way I use my computer and brought back the excitement I felt in the late '90s. Shopping online and finding the parts I need has never been easier, and shipping back in the '90s and early 2000s was terrible compared to today.

The internet people often complain about is mainly used by casual users who stick to social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, or by those who use Google for basic searches without knowing how to filter out low-quality content. With ad blockers and some discretion, you'll mostly be fine. Just steer clear of content farms, like those health and beauty sites, and you'll have a much better experience. Wikipedia and YouTube alone have the potential to change lives, and we didn't have access to either in the '90s or early 2000s.

If you're stuck on social media and don't know how to navigate the internet, that's on you. I didn't have the luxury of watching any episode of Star Trek whenever I wanted in the '90s. I still remember when the movie Mimic was released in 1997, and they posted the trailer online. I was so excited to watch a tiny square on a website after waiting almost 30 minutes for it to load. (The resolution was probably less than 200px!) Now, we can stream 4K movies whenever we want. That's true freedom. What we really miss is the time when fewer people were online, and the internet felt like our own special club.

technick• 2 years ago

Advertisements, marketing, "streamers" er I mean influencers, and monopolies.

renegat0x0• 2 years ago

1) We have become lazy. Bit tech worked for us. Provided value. Bait and switch. Enshittification. Remove features, make them worse

2) Internet islands are not connected. Walled gardens. Platforms want to keep you in. Balkanization

3) Bots are everywhere. When you remove, sometimes you remove too much. Sanitization.

3) Controversial topics boosts your visibility. Social media therefore focus on what divides us

2) Algorithms use users vulnerability to waste time on funny gifs with cats. Algorithms use their users to sell their attention for profit

1) People had their blogs. Their pages. There were hobby related. No many pages I see are CV-like pages. It is again used for "sell-buy" mechanics. There are no "Links" section where author provides link to interesting places. Often there is no passion

0) Search is broken. Since you cannot find anything there is no motive to "create anything" outside what is visible

-1) I am trying to fix my approach toward search. I cannot replace google, but I may create something that helps me. My project for keeping bookmarks, and navigate the internet https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

trilbyglens• 2 years ago

I think the real reason is that now EVERYONE is online. It used to be only people with high levels of interest and motivation could even participate, but now that there are no barriers at all, it's just awash in shitty halfbaked ideas and low effort junk.

j_timberlake• 2 years ago

If you genuinely enjoy something, then capitalism will do its best to extract more value from you doing that thing until you can barely stand to do it anymore. Anything less is equivalent to leaving money on the table.

My favorite example is ads on NBA jerseys. Fans probably hate that shit, but as long as they keep watching, they're actively rewarding the capitalists who made that choice. IOW fans are not just complacent, they're actively part of the problem.

fullshark2• 2 years ago

Or the sad pathetic state of the video game industry in 2024. Growth used to come from globalization / competition over market share, but now comes from eating consumer surplus.

Find the players that enjoy your game the most, and make sure you bleed them dry.

JohnFen• 2 years ago

leaving money on the table

This one phrase summarizes everything that has gone wrong with capitalism, in my opinion. The notion that "leaving money on the table" is always a bad thing allows for most of the abuses companies inflict on people.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 2 years ago

Ads. It was ruined by advertising.

The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here?

Related Stories