Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?

Apreche · 2 months ago

A lot of the web is human. You just can’t discover it. It doesn’t rank highly in search results. It doesn’t go viral on social networks. It doesn’t get wildly upvoted on aggregator sites like this one.

That’s the fundamental dilemma of not just the web, but the Internet, as a pull medium opposed to a push medium like television or radio. A human can not remember every URL. From your blank web browser you can only go to URLs you know. Then the only web pages you will ever see are ones that are linked, directly or indirectly, from the ones you know.

Most people only know Google, Facebook, etc. Anything that isn’t linked to from those sites effectively does not exist.

But it does exist. It’s a whole forest full of trees falling and not making a sound. It’s up to you to do what you can to find it.

pajamasam · 2 months ago

For sure. I agree. Maybe I should rephrase to "how can we make the human stuff discoverable again?" Or, can we make tools to help people to find it? Because if people can't find it, less and less people will use it and then it will later become inactive. Or, should we tell people by word of mouth again?

ge96 · 2 months ago

I wonder if registrars provide lists of bought domain names vs. trying to map IPV4 which has multiple domains pointing to same ip

would be interesting to do mapping yourself though probably pointless with how much effort/time it would take

does remind me of this fun video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

pajamasam · 2 months ago

I don't quite understand what would be the goal behind this?

Deleted Comment

mathgeek · 2 months ago

Perhaps some examples would help? The human-centric web I remember was centered on sharing things you found.

exsomet · 2 months ago

We need to bring back (human curated) webrings!

spacemadness · 2 months ago

I love the idea of bringing back human vetted directories. As long as the vetters stay human and sites are readily removed for grifting/SEO optimizing/AI click farming. I think that means they need to stay niche though. I really miss people making content because they wanted no and not because they want to make a living from it.

codingdave · 2 months ago

Step back a few more steps. Maybe the web has run its course, and we need to engage with each other in other ways. Even aside from the obvious IRL options, maybe voice and real-time interaction should gain traction again. Maybe we need completely new inventions to help us share content and thoughts. Maybe the web can go the way of gopher and become the subject of future story-telling: "Man, remember back when that was how we interacted? Crazy, right?"

We should move forward, not sideways.

selfhoster11 · 2 months ago

Given that the old web was as much of a repository of information as a way to connect, the new thing shouldn't involve unsearchable, temporary comms that work only in real time. Forcing the new thing to be synchronous or near-synchronous would be a terrible waste of subject matter experts' time too.

onemoresoop · 2 months ago

All these ways are very harvestable by AI companies. I think the only way is IRL and more people spaces where technology only exists on devices and everything is decentralized.

mbauman · 2 months ago

A highly relevant must-watch here is Bret Victor's Computational Public Space:

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

pajamasam · 2 months ago

I like your thinking! Thank you for taking the time to give your thoughts :)

dogleash · 2 months ago

Even before AI the human element was being drown out.

The neat internet thing was neat for a while because power hadn't worked out how to exploit it for their own ends. They have now, the genie doesn't go back in the bottle.

pajamasam · 2 months ago

Does that mean we need to invent some new thing or rather go back to IRL? And what about news, media, etc. Do we create physical copies again?

lee-rhapsody · 2 months ago

Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.

ASalazarMX · 2 months ago

Forums worked (and still do) because they're small niches, like the budding Internet. As soon as they become big, they lose their sense of community, and become profitable to spam.

So, maybe we have to choose between isolated human islands vs. an ad-and-SEO-infested world?

skhameneh · 2 months ago

> Forums worked (and still do)

They worked and they often worked quite well. Unfortunately, many of those “working” forums I frequented are now inactive. It’s tough to visit some and see it’s been many years since the last post on some - and those are just the ones that are still online.

pajamasam · 2 months ago

> isolated human islands Good point. But how does one find these? Through word-of-mouth, I guess?

onemoresoop · 2 months ago

> Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.

How do you ensure the accounts aren't AI bots or people who scrap and serve it all back to the AI soup pot? The identity seems to be quite a problem online.

muzani · 2 months ago

Charge an entry fee like Something Awful does.

The entry fee let them be a lot more chaotic too - people who go too far and piss someone off would get kicked out and forced to pay money to rejoin again. But it put a price tag on trolling, unlike platforms like Instagram. So people could do it and somehow get better at it until it turns into comedy.

selfhoster11 · 2 months ago

Invite-only, the way private torrent trackers still do it. Which has its own problems, but if you limit the number of invitees a given user can bring in and other such restrictions, it makes it practically impossible to for bots to make up a good chunk of the userbase.

JohnMakin · 2 months ago

Yes, and account creation automation is quite trivial in the majority of cases.

jay_kyburz · 2 months ago

I imagine people will soon have AI post here and other logged in forums on behalf of them. Try and rack up Karma or build reputation.

hinkley · 2 months ago

I am unaware of any ways in which my stupid pile of karma has changed my life for the better.

None of you see it, and doesn’t even change how dang behaves toward me when I’m hangry.

onemoresoop · 2 months ago

I think some are already doing this.

pajamasam · 2 months ago

Like Reddit, you mean? Or with some extra authentication mechanism?

egypturnash · 2 months ago

hahaha god Reddit is fucking full of people who are clearly using AI to write or edit their posts, I get so many people trying to glaze me like ChatGPT does now and it's so fucking creepy.

burnt-resistor · 2 months ago

Sounds about right. Prove you're a real human through some sort of identification verification process. Probably would lead to better conversations, especially if each person could have only one account.

BaudouinVH · 2 months ago

all the Gemini-verse feels more human than the web to me nowadays. My two cents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

beej71 · 2 months ago

Yup, very much so. And Usenet even is coming back to life now that Google dropped it.

Always be on the lookout for the next small thing! :)

egypturnash · 2 months ago

Get a job at someone pushing AI. Sabotage. You're smart, you can do it subtly enough that it just looks like you're kind of incompetent.

onemoresoop · 2 months ago

Too bad these jobs pay well and attract people who are quite myopic and drink all the koolaid.

egypturnash · 2 months ago

Yeah, the first challenge is learning how to sound like someone who's drunk the koolaid without letting it actually affect you.

muzani · 2 months ago

Go in from the data angle. They treat people like cattle and it's $15/hour.

zevon · 2 months ago

There is a lot of humanity in the web. Small blogs, niche forums, personal websites, art and so on - all those things still exist. They may have become harder to find among a lot of trash but using, for example, a mix of different search engines and, more recently, treating LLM output like a first-semester-student's literature review, they can be found. Personally, I also just don't use Instagram, Facebook, Discord or whatever the closed platform du jour currently is.

When I learned how to use the web, google and Facebook were not around. I remember switching search engines as well as adopting and adapting search strategies multiple times. Then, there was a relatively long era of google (as in: It was simply the best and fastest way to find what you were looking for) - but as giants get too big, they inevitably fall, so keeping ready to continue adopting and adapting is - IMO - always a good idea.

spacemadness · 2 months ago

It does suck that everyone’s solution to the web being absolutely trashed by profit seekers was to go to Discord. They are also just profit seekers and do sketchy things that all these companies end up doing in the end. You can’t turn off their scanning if programs you’re running on the Desktop app for instance. There still just data mining like everyone else.

whytaka · 2 months ago

I've been building https://www.webring.gg . It's a webring creation and management tool that lets members vote new websites (and website owners) to join the ring.

I'm hoping that good webrings can hold the integrity of human networks on the web.