The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/

by kimi • 1 year ago

213 246 1 year ago

Betteridge's law in full effect

chungus• 1 year ago

For those not familiar, this post is by John Walker[0] one of the co-founders of Autodesk who made AutoCAD. He passed away last year[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297185

safety_sandals2• 1 year ago

Wow, definitely familiar with his work, though haven't used AutoCAD for quite some time. Pretty sure my fingers still remember some of the text commands.

kragen• 1 year ago

redraw

NotYourLawyer• 1 year ago

I hadn’t heard that he died, sad.

pajko• 1 year ago

There was not even an AI back then, what would he say now?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-da...

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...

kelseydh• 1 year ago

But I fear the cure may be worse than the disease, so much so that I penned a 25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers.

This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the intelligence of content on the internet.

However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and spam would stop internet use.

fzeroracer• 1 year ago

Technically he's not wrong about spam, it's just that the classical view of spam is no longer applicable. When you think of the rise of AI-generated content and SEO-focused design, it is almost impossible to use the internet without being inundated by a deluge of low quality spam. Everywhere we go we're served ads for scam products, have to figure out if someone is an actual person or a bot and so forth.

And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.

bsenftner4• 1 year ago

Do not use ad networks, none of them, they are the source of all this Internet scummery. The spam, the low quality ads for fraud products, and the ads themselves are virus delivery networks. If you really need advertising to support your product, do you really have a product? Or are ya just gossip, er "social media". Social media is just gossip, monetized, what was before recognized as the lowest form of communication now monetized and washed from that dirty name "gossip", now it's "media", "social media"... what fools mass culture is composed.

zyx321• 1 year ago

Rather than "spam", the usual term I see for genAI content is "slop" (original meaning: a mixture of kitchen waste and leftovers that is barely good enough for the pigs)

markhahn8• 1 year ago

that strikes me as odd. I don't see scam ads, ever (you mean like embedded in web pages?) I also don't see much spam anymore, mainly because gmail does a decent job of it. But I still run a few narrow email servers - spam is out there but a lot of it is avoidable though good configuration.

lurk25• 1 year ago

I came across an interesting example of this on Reddit a few days ago. While searching for something on Google, I found a result that was posted on /r/Gifted. I saw that a moderator had suggested that the OP take a psychometric test. This wouldn’t be that weird given the subject of the subreddit, but it had nothing to do with the thread’s topic. I assumed this was the mod trying to cash in on his position on the board and clicked through to his profile to see that he was still making comments like this. When I checked back in the thread I realized it was 5 months old, but the moderator’s comment was only 20 minutes old.

It turns out it was an AI generating responses to every single thread linking to this test.

Here’s one example:

In my experience, I found skipping grades to be challenging initially due to the abrupt environmental and academic changes. It took me a few weeks to adjust to the pace and social dynamics, but it eventually became rewarding. It's important to approach it with openness and patience. By the way, if anyone is curious about their potential for advanced learning, the Gifted Test at [redacted] can provide insight - it's been validated by licensed psychometricians.

Every comment was like this. You can see the mod’s profile here: https://www.reddit.com/user/themightymom/

wruza• 1 year ago

Well I sort of abandoned it now. I visit here and, occasionally, the articles posted here. Also a thin slice of very curated youtube content. And software documentation. And porn. That’s it.

Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise.

Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.

anal_reactor• 1 year ago

Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise.

Most people are stupid, and having the internet available to the masses was a mistake. When accessing the internet required money and knowledge, it was by definition a community of above-average people. At the time it seemed like the internet was enabling the worst part of humanity, but those were actually the good times. Actually, not all people have internet access yet, so buckle up, it's going to get even worse.

You are an elitist

Correct.

dkjaudyeqooe• 1 year ago

I think it's not abandoning the internet, it's abandoning the web, which is arguably the worst and best thing about the internet.

Like you, most people want to take the narrow bits of the internet that are useful to them and ignore the rest. Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time.

Over time this will mean leaving the web entirely for new and better interfaces that block out the toxic sludge and return control to the user.

derefr• 1 year ago

Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time.

What a bizarre thing to say. It's true, in some sense, but it's still bizarre.

Maybe I'm committing a No True Scotsman fallacy, but to me "the web" is, at its core, the thing made of web pages — pieces of human-authored content that very intentionally and manually hyperlink to one another. And these "web pages" themselves are almost always static files — though they could maybe be served by a wiki or CMS backend.

But HTML5 web apps that deliver walled-garden social networking experiences? Not "the web", per se. Loosely affiliated with "the web" at best.

My rubric for what constitutes "the web":

• Does each piece of content have a readable, human-friendly permanent URL, that can 1. be search-engine-indexed and 2. through which the public can access the content, without signing up for the service, or being nagged to sign up for the service? (Remember that? That's the web!)

• If you click on hyperlinks in the content, does the page just send you directly to the link destination — implying that the author of the content is the ultimate arbiter of where they want their links to go? (Oh, that's definitely the web!) Or does the page do tracking things? "Warning, you're leaving the platform" things? Embed-unfurling things? "Trying as hard as it can to make you forget there's an outside world" things? (Definitely not the web!)

• Does accessing content at its permalink URL deliver server-rendered HTML containing the content — such that anyone with an HTML-parsing library could write an "alternative User Agent" to render that content? (That's the web I know and love!) Or is the page a template/skeleton that gets populated with the content via an XHR? (Not the web at all!)

• Are there tags in the preloaded HTML with appropriate fragment identifiers, allowing people to hyperlink to specific relevant parts of the content? (That's extremely "the web.")

Under this definition of "the web", there's no real ability for "the web" to do anything like "drawing you in and wasting your time." The worst it can do is to offer you endless opportunities to explore and educate yourself on trivial topics.

But of course, under this definition of "the web", there's only so much "web" — and most of it was created before the year 2005! (Other than the online arms of traditional-journalism news websites — many of which carry on putting out real new "web" pages every day.)

If you disagree with my definition of "the web" — well, I still think the concept is valuable, so maybe keep the concept but choose your own name for it. (Maybe "the intentional web"? "The artisanal web"?)

But I would argue that this is, explicitly, what "the World Wide Web" originally meant, to anyone who lived through the birth and growth of it. That any other, more expansive definition of the term, has been driven by a process of co-option by the very cathedrals to which "the web" functioned as bazaar. That we shouldn't respect this co-option; that we should continue to use "the web" as a reference to that core of good stuff, while considering all the rest of the stuff as "not the web, just using web technologies."

(This distinction used to be easy, because all that platform-y not-the-web stuff used to be built using Java/ActiveX applets, or Flash, or Silverlight. Now it's all HTML5... but does that matter? It's still, on a semantic level, not "the web.")

drekipus• 1 year ago

Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.

in real life and online

INTPenis4• 1 year ago

Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners.

What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person. Americans won't understand this but many European countries are already primed for it.

If you want to go slumming you're free to do so, but I want a stable and safe social media as an alternative.

wizzwizz42• 1 year ago

so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person

So, Facebook? "Real-name systems" are all, unequivocally, bad.

BoredPositron5• 1 year ago

The nice thing is you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.

nodoll2• 1 year ago

What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media..

There is no need for social media, a ten thousand idiots does not make one smart man.

Mountain_Skies• 1 year ago

What does it make when those same "idiots" are voters?

burningChrome• 1 year ago

Social media when it started was originally more about creating communities of people with similar tastes and interests. In the early days for me, it contributed a lot to my journey as a newly minted developer. I'm not sure I would've learned as much or so fast without it. The amount of stuff I discovered and learned just from being on Twitter and other platforms was simply incredible.

Obviously that's not what it is any more and would agree you could argue that its not really needed any more - but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.

msy• 1 year ago

Agreed. Europe won't be sovereign until it fully controls its social media, having American billionaires (or the Chinese state) able to manipulate the narrative at will is unviable. Look at the recent situation in Romania with Călin Georgescu or Musk's pro-AFD meddling. It makes the pearl-clutching in the UK about the ownership of the Telegraph look hilariously quaint.

okeuro492• 1 year ago

In the UK, if you hold opinions that are the same as the state, then expressing yourself using your name is safe.

If you don't, then you risk having a police officer show up at your door.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cev9nxnygzpo

DrScientist5• 1 year ago

Actually you've got that wrong - the government/establishment agrees with Pearson, it was a member of the public that complained about her characterising pro-Palestinian protestors with a hate slur.

Back to the issue of overweaning government power - if you think the above is fixed by some sort of pseudo-anonymity online which is heavily tilted towards governments ( they know who people are, it's just you that doesn't ) - then I think you are sadly mistaken.

Ultimately the sunlight of transparency is much better than the murky darkness of anonymity - as comfortable as the blanket of anonymity is ( and yep I'm using that pseudo-anonymity right now ).

ImHereToVote• 1 year ago

The Yookay is cooked.

yard2010• 1 year ago

Democracy must not have to kill itself to prove that it exists.

markhahn8• 1 year ago

very peculiar incident. it's a stretch to construe this as "opinions not same as state" though.

I can see on the one side that police should only ever investigate crimes, not non-crimes. and that "a member of the public" is possibly committing a crime if they make false allegations.

on the other hand, we definitely need someone "official" who will investigate allegations, as a public-safety matter. for instance, if someone suddenly starts combing (hah) beauty-supply places for certain chemicals, it should attact some form of scrutiny.

Bancakes• 1 year ago

First we need social media infrastructure that isn’t made for quick dopamine hits.

balamatom5• 1 year ago

Who's "we" - the AI robots, or the loners?

Mrdarknezz• 1 year ago

No that is a pretty terrible idea

fc417fc8027• 1 year ago

so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person

I don't need to link letters to a government issued ID to use the postal service. Why should government provided social media or email or whatever be any different?

MiiMe192• 1 year ago

I agree with your point, but you do need to use your address to use the postal service...

latexr3• 1 year ago

We definitely do not “need” that. We already had enough years of real name social media before LLMs to know that real names do not stop people from being publicly abusive and that social media is bad for us.

What you’re advocating for is making a bad system worse. Your suggestion won’t solve any problem and will introduce new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier. You’re advocating for an authoritarian’s wet dream (and a treasure trove for data miners). Right now, including in Europe, that’s the last thing we need.

I vote a hard no on your proposal. I’m opposed to it like I am to Chat Control.

Signed,

A European

indigo9452• 1 year ago

Your suggestion won’t solve any problem and will introduce new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier.

This is absolutely untrue for manipulation. Currently, private (both American and Chinese) social media platforms have become mouthpieces of authoritarian propaganda and misinformation. Russian bot farms cooperate with American billionaires to push destabilizing extremist propaganda and suppress moderate voices.

And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here: the proposal is to provide an alternative, which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world. If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.

We are in agreement on "chat control" and similar anti-encryption political schemes, but the social media question pertains to public, not private, communications.

Signed,

Colin Emonds (of Cologne, Germany)

A European

markhahn8• 1 year ago

I guess I have two questions:

- do you think it is so hard to track people by their other behavior? that is, do pseudonyms actually work?

- isn't harrassment by realnamed actors a failure of the (out-of-band) legal system?

Ukv• 1 year ago

Are sites that currently try to enforce real name usage, like Facebook, noticeably better for it than mostly-pseudonymous sites like HN/Reddit?

It doesn't really fix people being gullible (so will spread spam/scams or fall for phishing) or angry about some polarizing topic. Conceivably it could encourage civility, but if anything I feel I've seen arguments turn ugly far more often due to the personal nature.

Lanolderen• 1 year ago

Facebook is pretty dogshit at it.

I have 2 fake accounts, one is named, in translation, Secret Dontknow, the other got hacked at some point and after recovering it it had a nice fake attractive asian woman persona on it. I just changed the location and ran with it. Both have yet to face any issues and they are at least 10 y/o accounts. I don't use them all that often but still.. Secret Dontknow is pretty obvious..

borgdefenser2• 1 year ago

I think using your last name, counter intuitively makes discussion less civil.

In a form like this, if someone is insulted, it is just the idea and words that have been insulted.

When using your last name, it is the real person's identity that has been insulted. Then it goes both ways in a feedback loop involving two real people's real identity without the constraint that face to face confrontation would impose.

The only way to make that worse then would be to have ML algorithms running on top trying to nudge people to but heads for engagement.

Maybe we could design a system that is worse that in order to join you have tell someone using both real names that their newborn baby is ugly and instead of collecting a list of friends you collect a list of enemies. Short of that though we seemed to have really done a great job figuring out the worst possible form of communication.

bdw5204• 1 year ago

All the use of real names on social media accomplishes is a chilling effect on speech. Especially if your opinions differ from those of your employer or customers. Or if people who disagree with you are engaging in harassment campaigns or domestic terrorism against their political opponents.

This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-dox or be silenced.

_Algernon_2• 1 year ago

This is not something I want.

I want social media to disappear.

The main issue with social media are the recommendation algorithms, and I don't want the government or private companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want anyone except myself to be in control of them.

aleph_minus_one3• 1 year ago

The main issue with social media are the recommendation algorithms, and I don't want the government or private companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want anyone except myself to be in control of them.

Quit being friend in real life with people who have a social media account on one of the "big" platforms (yes, I do know quite some people who do this!).

pacifika• 1 year ago

Yes it would make for a good law that whenever a recommendation algorithm is used the user must be able to fully control how the results are filtered and ordered including disabling it, and the service must remember the preference.

erikerikson4• 1 year ago

Then why are you on here?

amiga386• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgtsBm0IQ1Q

"That is when we present our solution. Mandatory digital identity verification for all humans, at all times."

(This video is a pitch-perfect parody of MGS2 but also prescient commentary on modern trends)

RGamma• 1 year ago

Some cryptographic trust anchor and a web of trust yes, government sponsored no.

executesorder66• 1 year ago

As a non-American this is a horrendous idea. People need to accept that assholes and misinformation exist. And you will encounter it in real life and on the internet. You can't expect a nanny state to protect you from every slight discomfort you experience. Learn how to deal with it.

7bit5• 1 year ago

What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person.

Speak for yourself, please, would you?

I (a Europeean) don't need this. I dont want to have everything I write archived forever and linked to my identity, so when an extremist political Party gains Power I'm fucked because I have expressed opinions that dont align with their world View.

No thanks. I feel whenever people express thoughts like yours, you completely ignore all the damage this may cause to individuals and democracy alike.

markhahn8• 1 year ago

Understood - but is it actually realistic to expect pseudonyms to protect expression (in the face of bigdata correlation), or to expect the "right to be forgotten" to actually work?

borgdefenser2• 1 year ago

This is actually the complete opposite of what I want.

I would love to go back to people not using their real name and an internet that is wild, free and maybe even a little bit dangerous.

blueflow2• 1 year ago

Back to the classic imageboards? They still exist.

INTPenis4• 1 year ago

This has always and will always exist.

But we also need a place where we can make sure everyone is a real person, and where everyone stands for what they say online.

cbsks2• 1 year ago

Why not start now, Mr. INTPenis?

INTPenis4• 1 year ago

Did you just assume my gender?

ninalanyon• 1 year ago

I really don't want to use my folkeregister ID to connect to a social media site. I present as feminine but I am not out to everyone in my family and I really don't want to forced to dox myself ahead of time.

FuriouslyAdrift• 1 year ago

Big "I" Internet will further splinter into more "dark" and un-indexed niches along with walled gardens. Basically, the pre-web internet days (1980s).

I await the new AOL or whatever.

MiiMe192• 1 year ago

please tell me this is bait. I refuse to believe there are genuinely people with this opinion.

Terr_2• 1 year ago

Oh god no. That's dangerous and unnecessary.

When you get down to it, what's our real minimum requirement for curbing scams and spams?

We do not need to know someone's legal identity, in fact we don't even need to know if they're a person rather than a person-with-a-program, we just need to know that they have a person-sized footprint of "skin in the game", as opposed to sockpuppets in a botnet.

Terr_2• 1 year ago

To spitball an annoying but way-less-Orwellian response... Imagine your local City Hall has a physical vending-machine. This machine allows you to pay $2 to a charity of your choice in exchange for a kind of special anonymous token that can be used to prove that the $2 donation happened.

Then when you sign up to a site like HN, the administrator has a policy: "New accounts must supply proof from the last year which hasn't already been used on this site before."

There's a lot of technical detail we could go into about how to maximize user privacy (so that you can't be tracked across sites) and prevent a site from "stealing" and reusing things that were shared with it... but the key point is that 99% of sites do not need identity-information to accomplish their moderation goals or personalized block-lists. Such a system could actually be cheaper and more equitable than one based on permanent government IDs.

throwaway545673• 1 year ago

Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners

That has already happend. Though the algorithm(s) trained the lonely humans to do it. Happening right here, right now.

zoobab3• 1 year ago

Belgian minister of Digital just proposed a law which will force mandatory eID for "social media platforms" (whatever that means).

If it is the case, I will leave to greener pastures.

dash23• 1 year ago

When I'm feeling down I call it “Internet Gated Communities”, when in an optimistic mood, “The Faculty Club”. This may lead to what many observers refer to as “the Balkanisation of the Internet”—a fragmentation of the “goes everywhere, reaches everybody” vision of the global nervous system into disconnected communities. This may not be such a bad thing.

This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn't a gated community, but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.

The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and "old web" nostalgists need to recognize why these services are popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the openness they care about.

Grimblewald• 1 year ago

Precisely this, old internet was fun and good because it was a defacto walled garden. A very specific group of people had access to the internet. Want to bring that magic back? recreate that crowd / demographic. It is really that simple. The internet, once truly connecting everyone, was always just going to mirror the physical human world, because why would it not?

lurk25• 1 year ago

Facebook is a walled garden; it requires you to sign up before viewing most content. Quora, Instagram, and Pinterest are the same way.

Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.

Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners. There are three chief factors motivating owners to walk in their networks: Preventing rivals from scraping content or user data, encouraging users to sign up so that their activity can be monetized, and keeping content platform exclusive (most platforms will penalize content that has a competing platform’s watermarks on it).

dash23• 1 year ago

Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners.

This is true, but the implication that therefore there are no benefits for the users is false. If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web. (At this point, usually some implicit argument is made that users are foolish and misguided. I'd urge you not to go down that route.)

harvey9• 1 year ago

Is that a market where FB traffic is free on otherwise metered connections?

valeg• 1 year ago

see also: Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace - https://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299

disqard• 1 year ago

Seconding this recommendation!

An excerpt from Carmen Hermosillo (humdog):

"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself."

aucisson_masque• 1 year ago

Abandoning is not the answer.

I see the effect with my father, he never got much into it in the first place and now he is completely lost when he need to order stuff. So many scammy website featuring first in Google result thanks to seo optimisation or just advertisement.

Then he is completely oblivious to the fact that people can make deepfake video and believed one to be true when it was shown to him on someone else phone.

As much garbage there can be on the internet, you have to force yourself to keep up with it and overall technology otherwise you're just left behind at the mercy of those who adapted.

donatj2• 1 year ago

Some may even be oblivious to the fact that the article is from 2004 ;)

Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.

unyttigfjelltol• 1 year ago

Spam exploded in 2003[1] to the modern experience of it. Before that, spam was somewhat infrequent, even without countermeasures.

I recall in the 2001 time period being so annoyed by each individual spam note that I would respond to the appropriate "abuse@" email. By 2004, it was a torrent and totally impractical, and I don't think it was because of my own notes to administrators.

[1] https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-trends-2001-2012/

slmkbh• 1 year ago

My brain swapped the second zero to a two... But I did think the 1990 reference a little odd..

bsenftner4• 1 year ago

Actually, as the patent author of what are now called deep fakes, 2004 was when I got formal in my research to create the tech, with full knowledge of what it has become, and a mission to prevent the Orwellian uses active today.

RajT88• 1 year ago

Back then, we called it "Photoshop"

blueflow2• 1 year ago

Or what? The Internet is not required to have a peaceful life.

zoobab3• 1 year ago

"Abandoning is not the answer."

Why not? Simpler life like back in the 80s.

kuhzaam• 1 year ago

Even the 90s and early 2000s! The internet used to be way more endearing back then, with way more individually operated websites, blogs, etc.

jimmydddd• 1 year ago

Re: Left behind My elderly parents can't even go out to eat dinner in the town they've lived in for 60 years because they don't have the phone app to pay the parking meters in town. So they have to drive out of town to a restaurant with a parking lot.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

That’s a shame. We’ve mostly been switched to some app-powered thing in my town as well, but they included some kiosk things as well.

IMO, the apps are quite nice actually and I enjoy not having to ever run out to a meter anyway, but requiring a phone should not be considered meeting accessibility requirements.

ddejohn• 1 year ago

And then throw QR code menus into the mix. I'm 35 and I have to zoom so far in to be able to read the menu, which then also involves having to scroll horizontally to fully read most menu items, which makes it easy to lose your place, etc.

Being elderly, the frustration must be unbearable.

bongodongobob3• 1 year ago

Society changes. Smartphones are 20 years old at this point and no longer require you to drop $1k+ up front for one. Should smart phones be required for everything? No. But progress is gonna progress. Who even carries coins with them these days?

cogman102• 1 year ago

Honestly, I wonder if this is something that could be legally challenged under the ADA. Exclusions due to your age aren't legal and not owning a smart phone is very much an age thing.

dasil003• 1 year ago

fuck those apps though, seriously

user9999999999• 1 year ago

if that's true, that's extremely rage inducing. also that sounds like an accessibility violation. which town is this?

bmitc2• 1 year ago

Do the signs not have phone numbers on them for both calling and texting?

specproc• 1 year ago

Counterpoint, my father is very IT literate, at least he was. Managed IT for a large government organisation in Europe, taught me code. Has done his best to keep up over the years.

He's completely useless these days, particularly around social media, but increasingly around everything else. I worry about him.

It's difficult to imagine what it would look like, but I'm increasingly of the opinion the best way forward is a hard break with tech. Minimal engagement outside of what's needed for the daily basics.

It's transparently wrecking our brains and societies. We can't build a better Internet, we need to escape it.

yazantapuz• 1 year ago

If for internet we think of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like...then YES.

api2• 1 year ago

The Internet is BGP, IP, and the like.

Systems that run on the Internet come and go: the open web, the siloed web, social media, private overlay networks, etc. All of those still exist but there's definitely been a progression of the ages in which these things have been dominant and then faded into the background. I'm sure this will keep happening.

I don't think the Internet is going anywhere.

nullpoint420• 1 year ago

Let’s not pretend it’s easy to become a BGP peer as an individual.

api2• 1 year ago

Very much not what I meant. I meant the system that carries packets is the Internet, not the services and protocols that run on top. Stuff above L3 comes and goes.

NickC25• 1 year ago

I haven't abandoned it at all, but I do try to regulate my internet time.

I use it to read articles, trade equities, play chess, communicate with colleagues, and do market research for my company. Of course, I engage with a few communities, particularly HN and a few private Slack / Discord groups that align with my company.

I also try to get out a lot, touch grass, read physical books, and exercise. I try to avoid bringing my phone with me to places where I won't need it, such as to the gym or to the running track.

The crux is that we've completely surrendered ourselves to social media.

fibonachos• 1 year ago

This is basically where I’m at. It’s mostly become a utility.

safety_sandals2• 1 year ago

I already did. I don't use the Internet anymore.

avgDev• 1 year ago

Hello stranger, nice to see you on the interwebz.

AnimalMuppet• 1 year ago

I'm curious about how you posted here, then...

scottLobster• 1 year ago

My dad used to be a Professor at a major State university, and he talked about how one of his older colleagues, who was a professor of Electrical Engineering, had his secretary (yes, he had a secretary) print out his emails for him every morning and put them in his physical inbox. He'd read them, type up his responses, print them out, and have her transcribe and send the responses later in the day.

Just sad really.

meltyness• 1 year ago

He doesn't use the internet any less either, though.

rchaud• 1 year ago

"As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside the rule of law."

I wonder how much of VC thinking skewed this way, encouraging Facebook and others to try and become AOL-like walled gardens, and eventually lobbying governments to make exceptions for them.

0x20cowboy• 1 year ago

Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV.

It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.

Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.

That makes my old hacker heart smile.

MarcelOlsz3• 1 year ago

There is a notable vibe shift from when I showed a date my plex setup 5 years ago to now. Awhile back it was ick-inducing, now it's cool again to own your data / not pay for crap.

__MatrixMan__• 1 year ago

Ideally it will look from the outside like people are abandoning the internet when really what they're abandoning is the web (that's the sick part anyhow) and moving the rest of their digital lives into a vpn-mediated sub-internet made of the participation of people that each user knows via face-to-face interactions.

donatj2• 1 year ago

When normies started asking me how to set up their own Plex, I knew something had shifted.

kouru225• 1 year ago

Anecdotal, but I’ve met like 3 or 4 new plex people in the last year. They’re all just starting out.

cogman102• 1 year ago

real ones not insane made up ones

There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

bitwize• 1 year ago

There was never any doubt that not enough people would take TimeCube guy seriously enough to tip major U.S. elections. That is EMPHATICALLY NOT THE CASE for the racists, fascists, pedophiles, and other scum that formed the core of the 4chan edgelord set.

ge96• 1 year ago

Wonder if anybody collected on those bounties

int_19h• 1 year ago

The Time Cube meme is still very much alive and well.

https://timecube.ai

addicted• 1 year ago

Haha. I attended one of the lectures mentioned in the Wikipedia and I didn’t realize until the very end that it wasn’t a stand up comedy show.

(Admittedly I was also pretty drunk).

YesBox2• 1 year ago

There were definitely insane views.

When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.

There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.

lurk25• 1 year ago

It was definitely there, but the scale of it was different back then and it was decidedly less mean-spirited by the early 2010s. I can remember when I first started using YouTube, I had someone from my city threaten to kill my entire family. A few years later when the 2012 Mayan Calendar Apocalypse was trending, another guy tried to justify his beliefs that it was real by claiming to have “top contacts” in a federal intelligence agency.

You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on.

YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.

asdf6969• 1 year ago

You should respect those people for actually looking into it. I do believe the moon landing is real but it’s based almost on blind faith. Same thing for almost everything I believe about the world. Stay open minded and don’t criticize people who put effort into things you’ve never bothered to research. You’ll be surprised how often you don’t know much about anything.

AlecSchueler• 1 year ago

it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.

That you knew of.

znpy2• 1 year ago

Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.

Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies).

TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people.

The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other.

A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.

What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze.

Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.

rightbyte2• 1 year ago

Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.

Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though.

Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?

imoreno• 1 year ago

You don't need to abandon "the Internet". Maybe we could improve on the TCP/IP stack or the ISP model but it's hardly a priority. What we need is to abandon the web and start a divergent platform.

It's not your average Chrome-with-no-adblock user that's ruining the web. It's the "slumlords" if you will. For those slumlords it's all about the money and they've already invested into building a slum on the web. They already have all the users on that platform. They're happy to milk them. They don't care about capturing profit from techies - if they did, we would see companies do a much better job of providing hacker-friendly services. If the hackers all move to some other platform where they don't have ads, trackers or JS bloat the slumlords will ignore it like they ignored the internet in the 80s and 90s. Only if there is potential to bring the non-technical users in droves on that platform will they care, but those users already have the current Web, so why would they bother?

Unfortunately so far it seems like everybody wants to try their own take on the "next" platform. Experimentation and diversity of opinion is great and all, but ultimately we can't leave the slum until everyone agrees on one place to go instead. Best I can think of is Gemini that has some traction, but in its current form I doubt it will succeed - the creators put too much of their idiosyncrasies into it.

6510• 1 year ago

A group of humans (with all kinds represented) blurs out all refined qualities almost by definition.

Eventually some of them (of more similar thought) will leave for greener pastures. Perhaps naively so as it involves a lot of work or perhaps working on something together brings people together. If these few heretics succeed others will follow until the new place truly becomes as wonderful as imagined. More and more will follow, even people who don't want to be there will show up until eventually everything blurs out again and the process continues.

Besides the new place where interesting people gather there is the old place left behind where the interesting is undesired or made illegal. Meanwhile they also want to bring back the old days.

There are countless examples of this process from IRC and the USA to TV and Facebook. The Moon and Mars colony will also start out stupid then turn into something wonderful... for a while :)

This will be the only thing I write on the internet today eventho I shouldn't bother. The point use to be to get some useful intelligent response to refine or correct my perspective.

Solving world hunger costs only 35 billion per year. It's a great bench mark. If the internet is the sum of human knowledge we must be short of something else. Apparently we can type text into inputareas ad infinitum without accomplishing even this simple, cheap and easy goal. What a bunch of losers we are :)

jmholla• 1 year ago

@dang, it's small, but there's a spelling error in the title. Intenet -> Internet

Etheryte• 1 year ago

HN doesn't support tagging users, if something is off, you can use the flag button or send an email.

Beijinger• 1 year ago

Bots now make most internet traffic. I wonder how many Reddit stories are written by bots. Answered by bots. Interesting to read, don't get me wrong.

This is why worldcoin may have a bright future: https://world.org/world-id

I think we are moving to gated communities again. The internet will split into several parts. Microsoft always wanted the internet to be a Microsoft thing. So maybe we move into this direction.

chairmansteve• 1 year ago

The internet is the new daytime TV.

bentt• 1 year ago

That's like saying you should abandon the Earth. There's a multitude of ways to be a part of and use The Internet.

Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.

The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)

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