I’ve been watching the Internet die since I was 10 years old. Fucker’s really draggin’ it out, being all dramatic n shit.
Are We Watching The Internet Die?
Submitted 1 year ago by Gaywallet@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org
https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/
Comments
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
leetnewb@beehaw.org 1 year ago
I always find responses like this funny. You know how old you are, but (mostly) nobody reading the comment does. You could be anywhere from 11 to 50!
EatATaco@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I was going to joke “wow, a whole 4 years?”
8000gnat@reddthat.com 1 year ago
capitalism too, I’ve been hearing that we’re in the “late stage” for a long time now
VinesNFluff@pawb.social 1 year ago
Uhm ackshully the “late stage” in capitalism is in late stage in the same way a Cancer is late-stage. So it doesn’t mean Capitalism dying, it means Capitalism killing its host (humanity)
stefenauris@pawb.social 1 year ago
Die? No there’s no way to put that genie back in the bottle. It might just be a little different going forward.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 1 year ago
the corporate-owned part, hopefully. and I think we’re actually witnessing the renaissance of the small, users controlled one.
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Lemmies unite!
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Habsburg AI? My sides went into orbit. I didn’t know that I needed to know this expression!
I don’t fully agree with the author but that was an enjoyable read. The initial chunk about Reddit is mostly there to provide context for the general trends and directions that the internet is following; the “core” is the impact of generative models into the internet.
Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.
If that’s correct, the impact of those generative models was only to speed up the process, not to cause it. At the end of the day the main concern is that it works a lot like spam - as undesired content avoiding being detected as such, and tweaked to steal your attention from the content that you actually want to consume. And spam is not something new for us (or the internet), what’s new is GAFAM and their vassals (Twitter, Reddit etc.) eating it for lunch.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.social 1 year ago
The author does have a way with words lol. I love this paragraph in particular:
As we speak, the battle that platforms are fighting is against generative spam, a cartoonish and obvious threat of outright nonsense, meaningless chum that can and should (and likely will) be stopped. In the process, they're failing to see that this isn't a war against spam, but a war against crap, and the overall normalization and intellectual numbing that comes when content is created to please algorithms and provide a minimum viable product for consumers. Google's "useless" results problem isn't one borne of content that has no meaning, but of content that only sort of helps, that is the "right" result but doesn't actually provide any real thought behind it, like the endless "how to fix error code X" results full of well-meaning and plausibly helpful content that doesn't really help at all.
And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps" that "steals your attention from the content you actually want." Even moving from Google to DDG has only mitigated this problem, it hasn't fully gone away.
dgriffith@aussie.zone 1 year ago
And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, “content that only sort of helps”
Hello, my name’s dgriffith. I’m a Fediverse Support community member, and I’m here to help.
Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.
If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.
Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.
Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it’s probably more a case of “why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?”.
That is, it used to be the case that you’d put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now it 80 percent of it seems to be a variations of SEO’d recipe sites and AI hallucinations.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Yup, he does. And what he is saying in this excerpt is great (insightful) too, not just how it’s said.
Emperor@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.
It is definitely feeling like this is a trend, we are moving back to more curated ways of sharing information.
The Fediverse feels like a return to the old, open Web before it was captured by Big Tech, just with new bells and whistles attached. With all the enshittification, it seems like it is well-placed to be the solution to the problem. It’s not there yet but it’s a start.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Let’s hope that the new bells and whistles* increase its resilience enough against Big Tech control over the internet. Otherwise we’ll get into a cyclical situation.
*namely, federation and other anti-centralisation aspects of design.
darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org 1 year ago
The answer is, yes.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 year ago
Betteridge’s law of headlines answers this succintly: no
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Dude. The 4th sentence of the page you linked says it doesn’t apply to this type of open ended question.
The only possible answer to this (admittedly silly) headline is, “it depends what you mean by die”. An answer yes or no could easily be rebutted.
criitz@reddthat.com 1 year ago
The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.
But this is a strict yes-no question
brisk@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Will we ever stop referring to the Web as “the Internet”?
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
To be fair, the definition is a bit muddier nowadays. Is Lemmy on the Web? I don’t use it via the website. Bulletin boards used to not be part of the Web, as they pre-date the Web. But nowadays everything is HTTP. There’s so little non-web left, and the vast majority of users never use it, that the Internet is only used for accessing the Web.
Laser@feddit.de 1 year ago
BitTorrent is a pretty big part of the Internet though.
davehtaylor@beehaw.org 1 year ago
But it’s not muddy though. The Internet is the infrastructure that the web runs across. And there are still plenty of other protocols out there beside the web that are in use every single day. Even if the average user were to primarily use the Internet for accessing the web, it doesn’t mean the definitions of the two have become muddy. Interstate 4 is not Walt Disney World, even if you only ever drive I-4 to get to Disney.
Penguincoder@beehaw.org 1 year ago
No.
kniescherz@feddit.de 1 year ago
Whats the difference?
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Not sure if a serious question. So forgive me if your question was meant to be a statement.
The internet is a large set of computers connected via two protocols: IP and TCP.
There’s 65000-ish ports (channels) available on the internet.
The web runs on port 80 and 443.
The internet supports all sorts of other traffic too: Time synchronisation, games, file transfer, e-mail, remote login, remote desktops etc. None of these run on the web, but is traffic that runs in parallel to the web.
The distinction is getting blurrier as lots of traffic that used to be assigned (or simple chose) its own port number is now encapsulated in HTTP(s) traffic. But the distinction is definitely not gone.
davehtaylor@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Think of the Internet as the US Interstate Highway system. The web is a chain of tourist attractions you can visit along those roads.
The Internet is the physical and logical collection of interconnected networks. The web is a protocol that runs on top of that infrastructure, just as email, ssh, ftp, irc, etc. do.
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
Given there’s people in this thread incorrectly using “internet” instead of “web”… Probably never.
eveninghere@beehaw.org 1 year ago
The current internet search is becoming obsolete. People are able to tell apart BS, though. This means, there’s a possibility for a smarter filter. Hard to tell whether we will see one in the near-future.
EatATaco@lemm.ee 1 year ago
People are able to tell apart BS, though.
Please help me be optimistic. Why do you think this is the case? No matter where I go I see mostly confirmation bias and the lack of even the most basic level of critical thought.
eveninghere@beehaw.org 1 year ago
you’re right. I should’ve written some people
rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
This isn’t a new thing. It’s been a long time ago that the internet shifted from being a level playing field and a means of connecting people, to a place where the big companies make money. And it brought some of the currently biggest companies on earth into existence.
Things changed a bit. Harvesting private data and selling information about the users used to be the dominating business model. It still is, but now it gets mixed with selling their content to train AI. I’d argue that in itself isn’t a dramatic change.
memfree@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: thehill.com/…/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-…
LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: washingtonpost.com/…/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smi…
That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.
Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?
Corgana@startrek.website 1 year ago
Corporate social media may be dying, but that’s only one small part of the Internet.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 1 year ago
Yeah. The unpleasant situation this person is describing is also described by the Dark Forest Internet theory, which also includes more of a plausible solution, as opposed to purely terror and resignation.
flashgnash@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I don’t think anyone’s ditching mainstream social media en masse though are they? Sure a bunch of us have but let’s be honest 90% of Lemmy/mastodon users are of a very similar demographic and not exactly a huge chunk of the population
jlow@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Liekd the article but the end was kind of a letdown for me. If capitalism-driven AI is ruining the web even further why would demanding that AI is better today already and not in the future help with any of the problems this (pretty long) article has described?
For me the solution is obvioisly rejecting corpo-spam-social networks and going back to the selfmade small-internet, the fediverse etc. Sure that’s not a solution for humanity as a whole but neither is demanding better AI now.
Are have I completely misunderstood something?
Sub_dermal@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Personally I read it as a general “demand better”, “don’t accept crap wrapped in gold” as an offensive principle against (de)generative AI. Perhaps I’m inserting my own positive spin on their words, but it seems to me that their point is “don’t let the hype win”; if these companies are pushing AI, forming dependencies on bad tech, then we need to say “not good enough” and push back on the BS. Deny the ability of low quality garbage to ‘fulfil’ our needs. It’s not a directly practical line to be sure (how do we do this exactly?), but it does drill down past “AI is bad” to a more fundamental (and arguably motivating) point - that we, all of us, deserve better than to drown in a sea of crap and that is still important.
jlow@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Ok, yeah, but I still think that totally misses the point. At least for me even fully functional AI will still be a desaster and would be used for the most heinous stuff, eroding democracy worldwide even more and it obviously changes nothing of the social-media-silo capitalist hellscape most people live in comfortably (or less comfortably if it gives you eating disorders, depression and stuff).
Paragone@beehaw.org 1 year ago
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insightful question,
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it isnt just the internet, in case you hadn’t noticed, it is ALL civil-rights that are being gutted, in the enshittocene.
“once the infection has moved the ‘fulcrum’, the balance between the involuntary-host & the infection, far enough, it can then switch from symbiosis to totalitarian rampaging growth-at-any-cost, excluding-all-vital-functions, enforcing its parasitic & fatal consumption, killing the patient”
A tipping-point is being crossed, though it’s taking a few decades ( planets are slower than individual-animals, in experiencing infection ).
It’s our rendition of The Great Filter, in-which we enforce that we can’t be viable, because factional-ideology “needs” that we break all viability from the world.
Or, to be plainer, it is our race’s unconscious toddler setting-up a world-breaking tantrum, to “BREAK GOD AND MAKE GOD OBEY” its won’t-grow-up.
Read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, & see how the imprint->reaction mind, Kahneman1 ( he calls it “System 1”, but without context, that’s meaningless ) substitutes easy-to-answer questions for the actual questions…
The more you read that book, the most important psychology book in the whole world, right now, the more obvious it is that Ideology/prejudice/assumption-river/religion/dogma is doing all it can to break considered-reasoning ( Kahneman2 ) from the whole world, and it is succeeding/winning.
“Proletariat dictatorship” the Leninists want, “populist dictatorship” the fascists want, religious totalitarianism, political totalitarianism, ideological totalitarianism, etc, it’s all Kahneman1 fighting to break considered-reasoning from the whole world, and the “disappearing” of all comments criticizing Threads from the Threads portion of the internet … is perfectly normal.
It’s simply highjacking of our entire civilization, by the systems which want exclusive dominion.
Have you checked your youtube account’s settings section, in the history section, to see what percentage of your comments have been disappeared??
Do it.
Everybody do it.
Discover how huge a percentage of your contribution to the “community” got disappeared, because it wasn’t what their algorithm finds usefully-sensationalistic, or usefully-pushing-whatever-they-find-acceptable.
I spent a few hours deleting ALL my comments from there, after seeing that around 1/2 of what I’d contributed had been disappeared.
There are a few comments now, but … they’ll be removed, either by yt or by me, soon.
No point in pretending that meaning is tolerable, anymore, you know?
Only fakery & hustle remains, for most of the internet, & that transformation’s going to be complete, in a few years.
1984, but for-profit.
Sorry for the … dim … view, but it’s been unfolding for a couple decades, & it’s getting blatent, fast.
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skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 1 year ago
Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Part of what makes Twitter, Reddit, etc. such easy targets for bot spammers is that they’re single-point-of-entry. You join, you have access to everyone, and then you exhaust an account before spinning up 10 more.
The Fediverse has some advantages and disadvantages here. One significant advantage is that – particularly if, when the dust finally settles, it’s a big network of a large number of small sites – it’s relatively easy to cut off nodes that aren’t keeping the bots out. One disadvantage, though, is that it can create a ton of parallel work if spam botters target a large number of sites to sign up on.
A big advantage, though, is that most Fediverse sites are manually moderated and administered. By and large, sites aren’t looking to offload this responsibility to automated systems, so what needs to get beaten is not some algorithmic puzzle, but human intuition. Though, the downside to this is that mods and admins can become burned out dealing with an unending stream of scammers.
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 1 year ago
explodicle@local106.com 1 year ago
If it really ramps up, we could share block lists too, like with ad blockers. So if a friend (or nth-degree friend) blocks someone, then you would block them automatically.
Rottcodd@kbin.social 1 year ago
I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I've turned around, for the past thirty years now, I've seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.
Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.
When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I'll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.
OneRedFox@beehaw.org 1 year ago
I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 1 year ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Instead of being this gen’s September 1993, I feel like the changes being sped up by the introduction of generative models are finally forcing us into October 1993. As in: they’re reverting some aspects of the internet to how they used to be.
That spells tragedy of the commons for those companies. They ruining themselves will probably have a mixed impact on us [Internet users in general].