I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community.

The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre.

I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit because I linger on them because my brain can't help but stare. I open X and it's all engagement bait from major creators I don't give a damn about. I can switch to the Following tab and it's a lot of political opinions I'd just rather not hear about.

Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I was having old internet fun. And then it just died, I don't know. All the energy left the room.

Hacker News and my very curated Reddit are about all I even use the internet for these days, and Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable.

There was a very popular thread on here the other day basically talking about how these modern algorithms are the product, and how they're actually great and everyone loves them despite denying it... I'm just like is my brain so alien? I actively want and desire these services to be interesting or fun to use and they're just... not. They're boring.

There's nothing I want to see, so I don't use them anymore. It's not a leave Meta/X/etc in a huff like some of my more reactionary friends. It's just I don't even think to open them anymore because there's nothing worth my time.

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...

There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.

Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].

Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.

Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:

> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable

No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.

But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.

But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.

I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.

This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.

You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web.

The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.

An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible.

I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.

The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.

Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.

It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.

Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it.

Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.

I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was.

There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier.

In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.

I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.

On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.

Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.

I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.

I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.

Its the not internet, its bad incentives (profit) making once ok platforms shitty. But there are alternatives

Whatsapp - https://signal.org / http://element.io

Instagram - https://fotoapp.co/ / https://glass.photo

Twitter - https://joinmastodon.org/

Substack - https://tuhat.net

Facebook - maybe replace it with a mix of the others

There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet.

It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people.

Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t.

https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_By...

There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself.

One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope.

We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them.

What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything?

But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.

Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.

Social media is a subset of the web, and the web is a subset of the internet. Don’t lump the entire internet into your hatred of social media.

Seems like a random rant to me.

> What is the internet now to me? In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.

It's so much more annoying to do any of these things without/before internet. I don't do half of the other things in the rest of that paragraph. Like for phones I just get a used CAD$400 Android phone with good audio output.

I'm not a doomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.

I think we're reaching a level of maturity in tech that makes us question it for the same reasons it's great.

I think it's healthy for a society to question everything, as long as it doesn't get us stuck, but rather helps us conciously choose our path. We have more options than ever.

I used to be on social media all the time and always want the next shiny thing in tech. And I enjoyed that. But now I can choose to not be on social media and be on a basic iPhone mini. And I'm enjoying that now. All is to reiterate: we can choose our path, and that applies to many verticals.

Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.

It will take the thinking persons a while to realize that like the utility curve for wealth, the utility curve for modernity also has decreasing marginal returns:

A basic bit of modernity is very useful, but as we become more modern, it becomes more nuisance, less comfort.

> He was a good coder ...

Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.

This Internet experience has convinced me that intelligent people need a safe place separate from everyone else. I grew up on BBSes as a kid, a sort of hateful misfit, and learned to write, code and made friends I still know today. Local message forums and meetups, and FIDOnet and other distributed message forums for the wider reach. It took effort to even learn what these were, much less use them. As a kid computer nerds weren't running billion-dollar companies yet (Gates being the first obvious one in the late 90s), were made fun of at school, and were even the butt of jokes (if you remember from those 80s American movies).

The early commercialisation of the Internet killed BBSes but there were web forums. But more people could access it, so more problems. More stupidity, noise.

The dumbing down has fully transpired. Violence, anger and salaciousness are not only the noise in the noise to signal ratio, they're the investor's friend - the engagement hook that we pattern everything after.

Instead of nerds we have plastic faces with big fake lips posing for pictures or recording selfie videos in public.

I have painful nostalgia when I see an old VGA screen with an old operating system or Sierra game on it, and I wish I could find through the slop where the nerds went.

I still find the old Internet in a few ways. Mastodon, Signal group chats, quiet local (geographically) or private Discord servers, RSS, email, XMPP or IRC if I feel like it. Definitely use uBO. I sometimes even surf Neocities.

Stay away from "algorithmic" social media and all 24-hour news—if something important happens, it'll show up on the HN RSS feed.

If you want to stay politically active and informed, subscribe to political activist newsletters and write your congresspeople.

Yes it's bad and it'll only get worse but how about thinking positive and towards ways out of the crisis? If your problem is with social media specifically, you could join the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed/Lemmy and co.) which while not perfect by any means is a bit more resilient and can be used to continue participating in niche interests while avoiding tribalism, doom, and propaganda.

Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself?

I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.

I think we're finally realizing that the Internet is just one thing in an infinite universe of things. You, at any point, can go outside and do something else. Or don't go outside and still do something else

You don't have to "hate" the Internet. You can just choose not to participate in it.

Like how Maduro kidnapped from Venezuela affected RuneScapes[1], maybe our dislikes of internet today is just a reflection of the reality itself.

[1]: https://youtube.com/shorts/3D6LRLwraLg

It is quite sad, isn’t it.

Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy.

High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet.

Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable.

Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.

The road is neither public nor neutral, and that's where the analogy breaks.

This road is owned by a casino, and its signs are scientifically placed so that you take the wrong turn and reach their business. They place guardrails in the specific spot to hide places they don't want you to see. They actively encourage your children to grab a car and drive on it, even at risk of their health, to groom a new generation of casino clients.

> cars

Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.

I think you are ignoring McLuhan's very very famous point ("the medium is the message") which is that new forms of media do more than just allow us to extend ourselves in new ways; they change our mindset by enabling those new capabilities. It's not so much what we're using the media to communicate as it is what kind of communication that medium encourages. Television had disastrous consequences on what would seem to be unrelated behavior [1], including an increase in general antisocial behavior among children.

1: https://justinharter.com/my-god-it-was-awfulmy-husband-and-i...

The over-simplification and over-sharing natures of the current times do seem to fight against balanced positions, unfortunately.

Fritz_Haber, his inventions killed millions and his invention (Haber–Bosch process) helps to produce food for billions.

" It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

" Ammonia production is a highly energy intensive process consuming around 1.8% of global energy output each year (steam methane reforming accounts for over 80% of the energy required) and producing as a result about 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (about 1.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions) "

https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-...

I don't understand. Your comment seems to imply that the Internet has no effect on the ability of groups to organize?

But social media is like a car that drives faster if you’re racist.

Their algorithms promote the wrong posts for the wrong reasons.

Roads are neutral, social networks are not. Twitter is run by white supremacist openly trying to stroke racial violence. Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side before the genocide. And it continues to favor outrage stroking groups.

  roads = ip packet network routing, DNS, telecommunications cabling
  racist conventions/meetups = social media platforms like Facebook

Do you honestly think roads and the internet are similar? I don't think you've really thought that through.

I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.

Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.

A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.

Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.

Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.

I wouldn't disagree if in-person service was even comparable, but nowadays, for the banks available to me in the area, opening hours are even worse than they were in the 00s, there are way less branches still opened than there used to, and there's barely any staff, most are just a room with a branded ATM. I wouldn't call it gracefully degrading so much as them keeping minimal service (legal reasons, maybe, I don't know).

> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable

I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist.

It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?

People consistenty act like they have no agency.

Are you kind of implying that you can have a bank account without internet access in 2026? Extremely disingenuous