- 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️ ( @Kolanaki@yiffit.net ) English44•10 months ago
I’ve been watching the Internet die since I was 10 years old. Fucker’s really draggin’ it out, being all dramatic n shit.
- leetnewb ( @leetnewb@beehaw.org ) 15•10 months 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 ( @EatATaco@lemm.ee ) English9•10 months ago
I was going to joke “wow, a whole 4 years?”
- 8000gnat ( @8000gnat@reddthat.com ) 7•10 months ago
capitalism too, I’ve been hearing that we’re in the “late stage” for a long time now
- Count Regal Inkwell ( @VinesNFluff@pawb.social ) 5•10 months 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)
- Stefen Auris ( @stefenauris@pawb.social ) English42•10 months 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 ( @noodlejetski@lemm.ee ) 42•10 months ago
the corporate-owned part, hopefully. and I think we’re actually witnessing the renaissance of the small, users controlled one.
- sunbeam60 ( @sunbeam60@lemmy.one ) 5•10 months ago
Lemmies unite!
- umbrella ( @umbrella@lemmy.ml ) 1•10 months ago
lets just hope we are not caught in the bot shitstorm.
- Lvxferre ( @lvxferre@mander.xyz ) 28•10 months 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 ( @HarkMahlberg@kbin.social ) 12•10 months ago
The author does have a way with words lol. I love this paragraph in particular, emphasis mine:
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.
But yeah, one of his conclusions seems to be the Death of the Hyperlink? Which, I mean, not even LLM’s can kill that. I doubt `
- Dave. ( @dgriffith@aussie.zone ) 16•10 months 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 80 percent of it seems to be variations of my “helpful” text above, SEO’d recipe sites, or just AI hallucinations of stuff scraped from other sites.
- Lvxferre ( @lvxferre@mander.xyz ) 4•10 months ago
Yup, he does. And what he is saying in this excerpt is great (insightful) too, not just how it’s said.
- ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 ( @Emperor@feddit.uk ) English4•10 months 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 ( @lvxferre@mander.xyz ) 5•10 months 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.
- supersquirrel ( @supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ) 2•10 months ago
The aspect that makes the fediverse and in particular reddit-likes uniquely adapted to growing in this harsh corporate hellscape has everything in my opinion to do with the critical early seed phase of communities.
When you make a website with its own forum, you have huge friction to overcome with the network effect… but if you are plugging into a federated network than all of a sudden being a tiny community on lemmy with 2 or 3 people becomes an invitation to users passing by who already have an account to start a conversation and create that spark that will grow (slowly) into a real community.
Consider the minimum viable population of users in a community, how many people does there need to be in a room before that warm feeling of a gathering sets in with comfortable conversation naturally occurring? For federated lemmy communities (and similar Reddit-likes) federation effectively lowers that number by a significant amount since it puts doors everywhere that people can spontaneously wander through and contribute small amounts to help kindle a spark and get the community going.
This changes the paradigm of “social media platform metabolism” if you will, it facilitates much more organic early growth in communities.
- Lvxferre ( @lvxferre@mander.xyz ) 1•10 months ago
Yup - federated communities grow specially well in a corporate landscape. However my concern is if they’re able to stay dominant enough to prevent a cycle like:
- Corporate landscape.
- You got a few federated alternatives growing.
- Federations grow enough to become the main landscape.
- Corporations do something [I do not know what] better than federations.
- Corporates grow to the point of dwarfing the federations, into a corporate landscape.
For example, it’s possible for me that corporations are specially able to exploit a federated landscape through EEE. I’m just conjecturing though.
- darkphotonstudio ( @darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org ) 25•10 months ago
The internet, no. The world wide web, yes.
- onlinepersona ( @onlinepersona@programming.dev ) English23•10 months ago
Betteridge’s law of headlines answers this succintly: no
The headline is 6 words. The article is 3,606 words. Expressed as a percentage, the amount of content you have decided to address comes to a grand total of 0.16%.
If you have no interest in interacting with the content, it would be simple enough to state that. But to dismiss the entirety of the article based on 0.16% of the content seems rather short sighted to me. Do you have any thoughts to share about the article?
- onlinepersona ( @onlinepersona@programming.dev ) English9•10 months ago
Nah, I’m allergic to clickbait. If it had a better, more serious title, I’d read it.
If you’re the author of the article, you have to find that line between interesting and clickbait. Sensationalist titles like that are like smearing a distasteful substance on the cover of a book. No matter what you write in that book, I’m not picking it up.
Possible titles (without even reading the article) that would make me click with an open mind
- Threats to the open web
- How much has the web changed since $date?
- Where does the web go after $event?
- The future of the web - an opinion
- How do monopolies affect the internet?
- fluffyb ( @fluffyb@lemmy.fluffyb.net ) 6•10 months ago
I would not have clicked if it had any of those titles. And I do actually agree with the title. We are watching the death of the internet. It will never be again what it was. And what it is now is a clean white washed drip fed version of the expansive and deep knowledge of everything that it once was.
- onlinepersona ( @onlinepersona@programming.dev ) English1•10 months ago
I find that way too dramatic. There was once a firefox extension that randomly clicked on links starting from a randomly generated search term. It went to so many different websites and blogs that I had never seen before. There are still link registries grouped by category out there and they are marvelous to discover on lazy afternoons. Searching for home directories is of course a trip of randomness where people unwittingly expose so many personal thing. Entire music and video collections, family albums, art projects, etc. There is still a massive deep web out there.
There’s also of course the dark web (I only know of I2P and TOR). It’s smaller and more difficult to find, but there’s a bunch of stuff on there too.
The fediverse is also growing, but not only that. There are self-hosted instances of many different things gitlab, gitea, nextcloud, owncloud, wordpress, and so much more. I’m not worried about diversity.
Going down the protocol stack isn’t worrying either. Sure, multinationals buy up IP space and have their own AS and require BGP to route between them, but there are still many internet exchanges out there and at least in Europe, every country has multiple ISPs with some countries quite strictly regulating that there must be competition. IPv4 address space is supposedly full, but somehow getting a temporary IP in existing classes isn’t a problem. I also doubt switching to IPv6 would “kill the internet”.
As a major pillar of our modern society, for the internet to die - not just for a day but for years - the interconnected networks would all have to stop communicating with each other. To reach that level of disconnect, something truly major would have to happen. Infrastructure would have to be destroyed or shut down or legally prevented from transmitting to certain parties at a massive scale.
The world’s economic system would come to a grinding halt.Given this world is heavily influenced by business, I highly doubt killing the internet would be in their interest. Neither in the short, nor long term. This is not like climate change where business as usual can continue for a few decades. Without the internet, changes will be seen very quickly - maybe even immediately.
As I said, overtly sensationalist and clickbait title with an article behind it that probably blows everything out of proportion. No way am I reading that.
That’s more like it, this is a discussion that people can actually interact with! I am not the author, and I agree with you that the title isn’t great, but I am interested in discussing what they wrote and appreciate that you’ve now at least opened the door to a discussion on clickbait titles rather than just leaving a one sentence “gotcha”.
- fine_sandy_bottom ( @fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ) 7•10 months 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 ( @criitz@reddthat.com ) 4•10 months 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
- fine_sandy_bottom ( @fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ) 4•10 months ago
Did you not bother to read the 3rd and 4th sentence of my comment?
The question is open ended. It’s subjective, dependent on the definition of “die”. It’s not answerable with merely yes or no.
- brisk ( @brisk@aussie.zone ) 23•10 months ago
Will we ever stop referring to the Web as “the Internet”?
- jol ( @jol@discuss.tchncs.de ) 17•10 months 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 ( @Laser@feddit.de ) 5•10 months ago
BitTorrent is a pretty big part of the Internet though.
- PenguinCoder ( @Penguincoder@beehaw.org ) English16•10 months ago
No.
- kniescherz ( @kniescherz@feddit.de ) 3•10 months ago
Whats the difference?
- sunbeam60 ( @sunbeam60@lemmy.one ) 17•10 months 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 a set of protocols: IP and on top of that TCP, UDP or very occasionally SCTP (more common on mobile networks).
There’s 65000-ish ports (channels) available on the internet (IP network).
The web runs on port 80 and 443 via TCP (mostly).
The internet supports all sorts of other traffic/channels 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, using either TCP or UDP protocols.
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.
- kniescherz ( @kniescherz@feddit.de ) 6•10 months ago
Totally serious. Never knew there is a difference. Thanks for the explanation.
- Alice ( @Alice@beehaw.org ) 2•10 months ago
Appreciate this, I thought they were both called “the internet”. I knew we called it the worldwide web when I was a kid, but I thought that was just a phrase that fell out of fashion.
- Hamartiogonic ( @Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ) 1•10 months ago
Where does Lemmy fall on this spectrum? Obviously the website part is 100% web, but I’m accessing Lemmy through a mobile app, so I don’t see any website here.
- sunbeam60 ( @sunbeam60@lemmy.one ) 2•10 months ago
Well this is what I mean. In the olden days, this would be custom traffic on a custom port. Nowadays it just uses web HTTPS REST calls as API.
- dan ( @dan@upvote.au ) 1•10 months ago
Given there’s people in this thread incorrectly using “internet” instead of “web”… Probably never.
- eveninghere ( @eveninghere@beehaw.org ) 20•10 months 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 ( @EatATaco@lemm.ee ) English7•10 months 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 ( @eveninghere@beehaw.org ) 5•10 months ago
you’re right. I should’ve written some people
- rufus ( @rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ) 17•10 months 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. It’s still the same concept.
But I also always worry about centralization, enshittification and algorithms shaping our perspective on reality more and more.
- memfree ( @memfree@beehaw.org ) English10•10 months 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: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/
LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/
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 ( @Corgana@startrek.website ) 7•10 months ago
Corporate social media may be dying, but that’s only one small part of the Internet.
- mozz ( @mozz@mbin.grits.dev ) 3•10 months 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 ( @flashgnash@lemm.ee ) 8•10 months 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
- mozz ( @mozz@mbin.grits.dev ) 8•10 months ago
It is ok. I actually prefer the internet as a niche phenomenon. I was on it and I was the only one, and I was cool with that because it had all kinds of nerd stuff. Now it’s all normal people stuff and hostile nonsense and money, and I’d kind of like to just have the unpopular nerd internet back.
- flashgnash ( @flashgnash@lemm.ee ) 1•10 months ago
That wasn’t really my point, I quite like it too but the presence of the nerd net doesn’t mean the mainstream internet stuff goes away
- Corgana ( @Corgana@startrek.website ) 5•10 months ago
You just reminded me of this piece by Danah Boyd
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
- jlow (he/him) ( @jlow@beehaw.org ) 6•10 months ago
Liked 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 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 ( @Sub_dermal@beehaw.org ) 3•10 months 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’s still important.
- jlow (he/him) ( @jlow@beehaw.org ) 2•10 months 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).
- Sub_dermal ( @Sub_dermal@beehaw.org ) 2•10 months ago
I can’t disagree with you on that, you’re absolutely right - I suppose my read just gives the author the benefit of the doubt that it’s not ‘better AI’ that we deserve, but a better internet (i.e. with no AI whatsoever).
- Paragone ( @Paragone@beehaw.org ) 1•10 months ago
-
insightful question,
-
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.
-