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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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?
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).
> 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.)
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 :)
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.
Readit News
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.
There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
(Admittedly I was also pretty drunk).
https://timecube.ai
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.
Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though.
Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?
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.
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.
That you knew of.
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.
Being elderly, the frustration must be unbearable.
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.
Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.
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/
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.
Why not? Simpler life like back in the 80s.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297185
redraw
redraw
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.
And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.
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/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-da...
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...
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.
> 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).
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.)
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 :)
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.