> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that governments, financiers, and technological utopians have, since the 1970s, given up on trying to model the complex "real world" and instead established a simplified "fake world" for the benefit of corporations and kept stable by neoliberal governments around the world.
Edit: and I know tiktok jumped the shark when it went from an app my gen-x colleagues complained about their tweens spending too much time on, to my older SIL, a teacher, sending me recipe recommendations she saw on there.
As an example of great youtube content check out the channels Asianometry and The Thought Emporium. There are countless other but those two have been some of my favorites for quite a while now.
It’s all fueled by greed, and it’s not a judgement. All humans a greedy. It comes from survival instincts.
The web is practically dead. I use search less and less. Most content creators I know have abandoned/are abandoning blogs and written content because its just not worth competing with the SEO farms and Google’s whimsies.
I found it to be a cesspool before the name change and it's only gotten worse.
I suppose I'm conflating "enjoyable" or "tolerable" with your description of "real" but everything I've glanced at from a distance lately defies your description of Twitter as real.
Barely use reddit since the API shenanigans, and I guess I never curated my Twitter feed because every time I go in I just see people getting angry and enjoying it.
Kinda looking forward to see the internet die, so AI efforts will plateau due to corrupted training data. It will live on in zombie form until we stumble into a nuclear war, at least.
Also buy NordVPN
But there are vast fields of the internet where for-profit entities do not reign supreme. The Matrix rooms. The Gemini capsules. The personal blogs and the RSS feeds. The fediverse.
It's all up to you: do you really believe that giant commercial behemoths will give you happiness and you will find interesting content there ? I believe it is much more interesting to create human connections and never stray away from that. Forget capitalist individuality, come to the socialized communities.
And it should be increasing.
USENET is only what it is precisely because "nobody" uses it. And what it is isn't exactly a utopia anyhow.
Nowadays you have to build out a network with the explicit design goal of preventing this from happening, and execute on it skillfully.
I'm really not sure what argument you're trying to make here.
This is somewhat false. By that I mean you are off by a few billion. Browser users are nowhere near the app user counts: https://techreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/REDDIT-qua...
Every product is amazing and a great value, click here to buy it.
(I would describe HN as a borderline back road of the internet, somewhere between reddit and a private-access forum.)
I’m so jaded by the web and I blame Google for ruining it. It’s search algorithm ensures that the incentives are completely misaligned for content creators.
mind you, i guess you can blame google for the monopoly..
I've been selling floor mops for the past 35 years. Here are the mops I choose to buy for my family. Click HERE now (for minimal useful information and a bunch more ads, and popup videos, and please PLEASE don't forget to sign up for our newsletter.
There is still lots of free and reliable sources of data. Like national statistics, Pew research, apnews.com, even Wikipedia most days, ...
You get trapped to shit because you want to be entertained and feel emotions, not to be informed. That's most of us at some time, but if that's all you consume, you get trapped.
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The first comment to my argument is usually nihilism. Let's point out that one of the sources I mentioned, failed or skewered up badly, everything people do has bias, and thus nothing matters and everything is trash. -- typically from someone who posts links really shitty sources.
Of course, if it became a place for routine Q&A, it would stop being HN!
The internet has been "ruined" by bots, noobs and marketers for as long as anyone here can remember. All those AOL CDs you received in the mid-90s weren't from some grass-roots community organizer, they were from one growth-oriented corporation trying to connect as many users as possible to as many paid advertisers as possible.
Just like pop music, the "good old days" of the internet undoubtedly line up perfectly with the period when you first invested yourself in it, most likely from the ages of 15-25. That was when the communities you explored were humming with life and content was fresh and original. The fact this OP was in /r/millennials kinda hammers home that point. Millennials are no longer in that optimistic 15-25 age group, and the communities they once participated in have faded away and been replaced with new ones.
The first question I ask people is whether or not they edit Wikipedia. That should be the shibboleth. If you don’t participate in the greatest product of the internet, you probably think the internet exists to entertain you, rather than the internet existing to help connect people to do great things together.
The internet is a success, it’s just not the success these types of people want.
The solution is not to pine for the old days of the internet but to rethink your friendship/companionship seeking strategy.
And romantic relationships.
This was true. I don't know what to tell you. I've been to weddings. It used to be a good place to meet people.
We rarely go, meet few and talk little. Of course, people are lonely when they’re atomized.
The reality is the Internet isn't all fake, but lots is so you have to use your brain to not get suckered in, and accept sometimes you probably still will. Overall it's still a good thing, but just not as good as it used to be when there were fewer people and the nasty people hadn't caught up with how to trick you.
The internet certainly doesn't feel fake to me yet. There's more stuff I don't care about and people trying to sell me things than there was 20 years ago, but my internal ruleset for deciding whether I value what I'm reading/watching is so strong that I don't really put any thought into it.
I never "made friends" online. Forums used to be horrifically toxic places. I've mostly steered clear of dumb short form content. Anyone who has a fond memory of the old internet doesn't remember what searching for song lyrics was like.
Yeah, "the internet" is boring and lame, but our generation is also vapid and performative. And it's bled well past the internet. Buying books as decorations. Restaurants designed for photos over taste. Showers and parties for every occasion.
It shouldn’t take me crawling through the mud of social media to find them.
As a heuristic, if it was made for earning money, it's probably safe to close the tab.
Perhaps a community index curated to contain only non commercial websites with no ads or trackers?
Just as a fool who persists in his folly eventually becomes wise, I expect more people will soon learn to be more judicious about the source of their information.
Unfortunately, it will likely require some catastrophic event to catalyze a significant change.
One of the early Internet's promises (as well as that of modernization in general) was that we'd have so much free time to pursue creative, fun things instead of having to be consumed constantly with drudgery. Not all people are creative, some of them really don't know what to do with themselves when they aren't working or engaged in drudgery. I don't know how to fix them. If part of the Internet being fake keeps them happy, then fine.
Instead of linking to reddit discussions, we have our own Ask HN:'s and threads here for that purpose ...... and this has come up recently in a few discussions: Neal Stephenson was prescient about our AI age
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287616
A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949
Dead Internet Theory
I wonder what the next generation of social media will look like if it starts to take that into account in its earliest stages of design?
Now Slack/Discord are standard ish but whenever there's an outage I remember IRC netsplits and how if a server went down you'd still be able to talk to half of everyone until the network healed.
The focussed communities that irc and forums enabled definitely have it.
Discord has bots too though.
Just like something existed before social media, as the users of the internet grow through social media, they will leave it behind for next.
I don't get this. "Social media run by a corporation's centralized platform is terrible! Let's join another corporation's centralized platform!"
And reminder to everybody that „The Three-Body Problem“ is coming to Netflix in March.
But we also have more great content than we've ever had in history.
I'm a relatively old-timer (Internet from ca. 1992) and I love the stuff I get from Mastodon and Lemmy. Kagi is awesome--and has a small web search. uBO is a Godsend--there are multiple means to pay content creators directly. Hell, even comp.lang.c is still kicking and spam is down now that Google bailed on Usenet.
Will these things ever be as big as Twitter? No, at least not until Twitter dies. But that doesn't matter. There's still more stuff there than I can consume and that's on my personally-curated "non-algorithmic" feeds.
In short, just stay away from the garbage. Find the stuff you like.
Hence if the www sucks, the internet offers the potential to use/create something better. Without the internet there is no web. But without the web, there is still an internet.
I think the web has been crappy for a long time because even when it was difficult to scam people online, there were still millions of people poor enough that they'd engage in what seem like prohibitively high effort/low reward scams like creating a fake Facebook account, spending months getting thousands of followers and likes, then selling it to someone for five bucks so they could use it to spam people.
With LLMs, the level of effort is rapidly approaching zero, which results in a huge increase in volume, which results in a huge reduction in returns which necessitates a huge increase in volume, etc. We're heading for a scam singularity. Scamularity, I guess.
I think it's not going to be too much longer before you can't meaningfully post anything online without ID verification, because of "protect the children" rhetoric and because advertisers don't want to pay to advertise to bots. This means only locked-down platforms are going to be useable for interaction at some point. LLM bots will accelerate this.
I would bet that one of the main reasons why organic (non-sponsored) Google results are filled with SEO optimized, nearly incomprehensible drivel is because there’s not enough content that’s valuable for its own sake. Going back to the hopelessly clueless, this makes it difficult to ask the right questions because anything they ask will be some word-spun or ai-generated nonsense that talks in a circle with no specificity and totally devoid of substance.
The troubling part is that this is going to get worse before it gets better. This “content” is going to be recycled through the digestive system of LLMs over as over again in the style of “human centipede” until there we reach the singularity of popular thought causing the entire World Wide Web to become somehow less useful than an airport newsstand self-help book.
I don't think this is the normal youtube experience.
[1]Open Directory Project.
How would you (practically) verify that to make that dream even possible?
The internets worked that way for quite a while, before modern big tech invaded.
Maybe apply similar mechanisms to the internet too?
The modern internet undoubtedly started in the mid-00's. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, all were founded between 2005 and 2007.
The start of the Internet's golden age is a little harder to pin down, but the mid-nineties public release of PHP in '95, or the launch of GeoCities in '94, or the release of CSS in '96 is probably a fair estimate. That gives a good decade of prime World Wide Web.
The period of time where friction and barriers to entry were high enough to filter out much of the chaff, and the parasites had not yet adapted to exploit everything.
Also I think the internet community itself may be parasitic on other institutions that it is simultaneously destroying. Specifically I'm thinking things like traditional journalism, which is being killed off even though the internet needs it for stuff like Wikipedia.
But that doesn't actually verify that they're "weird sites written by humans." I think detecting ads would be harder than you think, and there are more motivations to spam a directory than just pushing banner ads.
YMMV, but the only time I connect with a bored stranger is inside of a video game.
- Allow the users to blacklist domains (pinterest)
Instead of direct human-human comunication (speech), we now write posts on websites and IMs.
It's finger pointing. Blame the game and the players who perpetuate them.
Can we agree to hate the gamemakers and not the players? Incentive structures are always more powerful than individuals' choices.
What would we do without them? /s
