Also annoying is how any research about any product you are interested is mostly spent wading through a thick swamp of websites that are just affiliate marketing generators, which it seems every single brand has now signed on to. Who knew that CNN reviewed e-bikes, or that Parade Magazine was now in the business of evaluating keyboards? Here's Popular Science telling me what the 10 best floor mops of 2024 are.
Every product is amazing and a great value, click here to buy it.
But for every trash Popular Science review there is an LTT deep dive video that is worth your time. For every CNN there is a BBC. If one's gateway to "the internet" is the first dozen google results, the internet is a shallow place. But if you know your way around its back roads, the internet still grants access to very useful information.
(I would describe HN as a borderline back road of the internet, somewhere between reddit and a private-access forum.)
You nention ltt but theyve had their own issues woth fake stuff, and linus famously considers ad- blocking to be theft I've no trust left in damn near anything anymore.
I hear this so often and while the guy has plenty of bad takes he only seems to be saying who pays for the content you enjoy if you’re blocking a significant form of revenue for the people making it.
I have similar frustrations with health and baby queries. The results are all cookie cutter generic BS from a handful of big names. Useful resources and forums maintained by actual practitioners and patients get buried on page 21 or something.
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.
Would love it more if they offered more searches for their basic $5 per month plan. 300 searches in a month is just too low. Now triple that and I would sign up in a heartbeat.
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...the moment you land on a site and the page loads
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.
What frustrates me is that all of the tracking that permeates everything should make it easy to tell if you are a return user and only then prompt for the newsletter/survey/etc after a few visits.
If information is valuable, you usually have to pay for it. Consumer reports, The Economist, Bloomberg terminal, many newsletters. That's not the same as saying that if you pay for it, you get valuable information.
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.
---
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.
One regret I have about HN is that I can't tap the brainpower here when I need a product recommendation. Best I can do is to search for threads and ask if/when appropriate.
Of course, if it became a place for routine Q&A, it would stop being HN!
Worth remembering that the "Eternal September" [1] was in 1993, which is over 30 years ago.
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 distinction I always see is the consumption internet vs the creation internet.
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.
A lot of people thought the people they chatted with or watched content of on the internet were their friends, and not just bored strangers. Once money got legit it became profit seeking individuals/enterprises.
The solution is not to pine for the old days of the internet but to rethink your friendship/companionship seeking strategy.
Bored strangers is the embryonic stage of many, if not most friendships. The more exposure we have to bored strangers, the more opportunities we have for establishing friendships.
I've only had two of those, bur if there was ever such a stage with them, it was exceedingly short... maybe the first few minutes. Come to think, it's the same with friendships. My friendships basically formed with people who were going to be there for longer than I asked for anyway.
YMMV, but the only time I connect with a bored stranger is inside of a video game.
The problem now is that the bulk of the legitimate bored strangers are desperately trying to come up with some witty pun or incredibly comfortable The Office reference on reddit to garner fake internet points and are indistinguishable from AI bots these days. I really fucking hate The Office at this point. Millennials need some new material.
Just want to point out the obvious: if the Internet was _all_ fake, then this post would also be fake and trying to get something from you.
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.
But it's a case of "One bad apple spoils the lot". Even if every other apple in the bushel is good now, they've now all been exposed to too much ethylene and you have to either immediately turn them all into sauce or throw them away.
Or that's a bad analogy and you just have to look harder for the good apples, which don't get spoiled.
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.
The problem is, the algorithm that originally worked really well for Google (PageRank) ultimately contributed to turning the internet into SEO spam. How do you extract signal from noise in a way that doesn’t immediately make the noise problem worse?
This probably speaks more about the observer than you would think.
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.
Whoever can solve discoverability of those indie sites will do very well. I parallel it to the “eat local” movement, where folks really go out of their way to find healthy food locally even when it costs more.
It shouldn’t take me crawling through the mud of social media to find them.
The fediverse is a large and diverse enough social media that you will not be able to traverse in your own lifetime. Follow the links to the artistic, human-made, not-for-profit, "authentic" content. There's more than enough to fulfil your needs.
As a heuristic, if it was made for earning money, it's probably safe to close the tab.
Sometimes I wonder if back when the Internet was "good", how many people were using it and much stuff was on it? Has the proportion of good stuff changed all the much, or is it just not in the same places it used to be, and aging millennials (proud cardholder) just haven't moved on to these new places?
I'm curious...when do you think the internet was "good"? What period would you say defines the so-called "golden age" of the internet? Genuinely asking.
I think Facebook opening up to the general populace in 2006 or the release of the iPhone in 2007 are pretty good places to call the end of the golden age, or at least the beginning of the end. They represent pretty significant milestones in a trend away from "a subset of the population willing to traverse moderate technical challenges in order to communicate with others in mostly anonymous, highly customizable ways" towards "everyone on earth communicating through highly sanitized, advertiser-friendly platforms".
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.
> I'm curious...when do you think the internet was "good"? What period would you say defines the so-called "golden age" of the internet? Genuinely asking.
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.
This feeling has been accelerating for me. I get the sense that state actors are ramping up their use of LLM powered bots. Hacker news is a great place still, but Reddit has become a void except for some of the more niche subs. I also see more and more AI images being passed off as normal content. Soon video will be the same. Paid influencers were bad enough it at least the content creators were humans with their own minds and creativity. Very rapidly there will be nothing human left on the internet and I’ll have to go back to the fleshy smelly real world.
I think the Internet is going through an adolescent stage and genAI disinformation will help us get through it faster.
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.
I was recently at a relative's house - at some point everyone kind of checked their phones and ended up on different apps - I couldn't believe how off-putting it was. Just flipping through the endless void of 'reels' on IG/TikTok/Facebook, many of which were just stolen videos from content mills with horrible AI voiceovers loosely describing the videos. "A man found a dog in a frozen lake, he jumped into action .. ". And they're incredibly addictive. Feels pretty problematic!
Tikok, YouTube and Facebook give me content I want, but I'm aggressive with telling them I don't like something. Those who don't do this really want the Internet to be a TV, and I'm starting to think they deserve what they get.
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.
Even Youtube now pushes tons of the search and discovery results to "Shorts" - I 'busted' a nephew who was supposed to be away from screens mindlessly watching Fortnite shorts on a TV in a far flung corner of the house. Just as pernicious as everything on Instagram or TikTok. Same kid was also sent home from 5th grade for dropping a racial slur that he had no idea what it meant.. just a terrible time to try to be raising kids.
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
I think this is the reason social media like Discord has taken off. The new generation has started to realize that any large scale community on the internet is invested with bots. So instead they've decided to create their own small communities where there's still an assumption of good faith between users.
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?
Maybe, but I find Discord unusable so it's not a solution for me. Also, I dislike apps and walled gardens for communities. And dislike chat apps too (except for a small group of friends or for work).
It amazes me that we had a decentralized, independently run series of chat networks in IRC. It wasn't even weird or hackerey, just how you talked to people on the internet sometimes. Mostly I talked to people about degen shit and doing drugs, not, like, kernel maintenance.
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 ratio of garbage to great content is greater than it has ever been in history.
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.
Anyone else find more time for enjoying NOT paying attention to any “media” anymore? Seriously, I peek every once in a while to confirm it’s still a train wreck and then enjoy closing the window.
It's surprising how until the early 2000s the web was a side thing, without much importance socially or economically. And since society re-rooted itself on top (or at least moved toward that) it's a cultural and political hell. Things had no real impact back in the days, weird stuff was kept inside, died rapidly.. no real name issue...
That's the www not the internet, which is much larger and more flexible than the www. We pay internet services providers for access to the internet. The so-called "tech" companies, backed by advertisers and marketers, are "web service providers" providing access to "websites" and in some cases the greater www. Generally, no one pays for these "services". There is no additional charge on top of what we pay to ISPs. (But there are plenty of exceptions where people do pay additional fees on topof what they pay for internet access. This is quite shocking considering the majority of www users do not pay anything.)
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.
Man, imagine how this person is going to feel in a couple of years when all of social media is just LLM bots talking at each other trying to build up enough karma to be used as scam accounts.
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.
> social media is just LLM bots talking at each other
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.
One thing that I can’t help but to lament the loss of is the wealth of information contained within public forums. Everything is shut away in Facebook groups, discord servers, and other such private-by-default means. Most public forums, and many open Facebook groups, are relegated to answering the same basic, ill-informed question from the hopelessly clueless that appear to operate in a universe absent of any sort of critical thinking.
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’m tired of being AI-splained why something I asked for can’t be fulfilled. We get it AI, you’re grossly incompetent and scared of liabilities, just spit out words for what we asked.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a guy that spends to much time online and get sucked into stupid things like this. Id be curious what his screen time metrics are and time spent on youtube everyday. This guy found a "woe is me" subreddit like millennials to spend time on. Glance at the front page and it's not a healthy place to visit.
I don't think this is the normal youtube experience.
It’s not terribly hard to detect whether a specific page contains any ads. Blacklist any pages with ads, and you remove the incentive to pollute the directory.
The internets worked that way for quite a while, before modern big tech invaded.
> It’s not terribly hard to detect whether a specific page contains any ads. Blacklist any pages with ads, and you remove the incentive to pollute the directory.
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.
The modern age is defined by the limited resource of attention (which is itself a representation of the ultimate finite resource: time). Most seek your grab your attention and influence you for financial gain, but even in the absence of financial motives, most of us are drawn to want attention for innate psychological reasons.
There is a lot of noise out there and it is only going to get worse with generative AI effortlessly pumping out hallucinatory mediocrity. It is up to all of us within earshot to boost the signal and suppress the noise.
There is a documentary which is somewhat related - HyperNormalization. It talks about how politics is fake now:
> 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.
Myspace and LiveJournal died when Facebook killed them.
Facebook died when our boomer parents joined and killed all the fun.
So we went to Instagram. Which died after everyone started caring about curating an image of themselves and stopped posting authentically. Now it's all influencers and suggested content.
Tumblr died when they nuked the racy content.
Reddit is the eternal September on steroids at best and manipulated narratives and bots at worst.
I don't watch YouTube but from the comments that's what it appears like to me as an outsider.
Google search has clearly lost the war against spam so badly that lay people are talking about it. Sadbeans all around.
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.
It wasn't the boomer parents killing the fun. They have more money so the ads came, the addiction cycle was changed to accommodate that potential revenue, and it didn't/doesn't appeal to anyone from GenX younger anymore.
I was just reading about how Temu is finding their main market is older women. The same demographic targeted by most infomercials...so now they have to choose to embrace that or branch out. The latter is potentially expensive, while the former is just extracting more value out of customers they already attract. It's no surprise corps commonly choose the "easier" path of raising rent on the people who willingly chose to become their market.
Youtube is full of seemingly endless high quality, meaningful content. Its just also got lots of corporate BS as well and the algorithm really does try to push the corporate BS. I have a feeling other sites are like this as well. I think alot of the dissatisfaction in "modern internet" is that people expect their search engine or "feed" to give them the good stuff instead of having to go out and curate stuff themselves.
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.
Honestly Reddit and Twitter feel like the only “real” places left online, provided you have a curated feed.
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.
Both platforms are already pretty obviously overrun with automated/staged content. This commenter[1] has it right. Very soon now, any site that allows anyone to sign up for a free account is going to very quickly end up saturated with LLMs LLMing at each other, totally closed loop and automated. Including text and multimedia. I wouldn't be surprised if it's already starting to happen on HN. 100% we are moving towards Dead Internet Theory[2].
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.
> Honestly Reddit and Twitter feel like the only “real” places left online
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.
Wait until generative "AI" gets better and can convincingly do videos from scratch. You ain't seen nothing yet.
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.
I completely disagree. Capitalism-led internet entities are fake, that is absolutely no surprise, that's how capitalism works: producing more and more garbage to make you pay for it in one way or another.
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.
Sounds like maybe OP is just bad at curating content for themselves? Try to recognize "staged videos and marketing" and dont click on them? These posts have become so tiresome the title should be changed to "The internet feels fake now. Its all just posts complaining and pining for "ye olde days"
Dead Internet Theory meets enshitification. The internet was allowed to grow into a network primarily designed to connect companies with consumers to extract value. The people who make waves (good or bad) are banned from platforms because such waves are hard to control from the top down. That "wave maker mold" is also the original reason people went online -- there were cool people with new ideas to discuss. Now discussion is mostly argument so cool people are replaced with people just gaming whatever meta the platform is currently running.
Reddit continually conflates the Internet with WWW. If they got off their virtual asses and tried to explore USENET they wouldn't be so depressed about their "dead internet theory".
It's perfectly reasonably to consider the Internet as the thing 99.999% of the population uses, and not relatively obscure and technologist-only things like USENET.
Now you need to say the same thing about App stores. Since 99% of the population uses Google or Apple Apps, is it still perfectly reasonable to consider these gateways ontop of the Internet or are they "the Internet"?
So to answer your question, my overall point is that a redditor's experiences are generally doubly enshittified before they actually get to the content. First via their ad tracking and privacy-leaking-as-default mobile device, and second via their small 4" screen and just as horrible reddit app. They dismiss these two transparent enshittifiers as "just part of the dead Internet" when it's clearly not.
It is tragic that so many people are unaware of or uninterested in the fact that they're not allowed/encouraged to run software that Apple and Google haven't given them permission to use.
What USENET? The one my ISP took away from me before I ever got the chance to experience it? The USENET that's today basically just a venue for piracy?
While the Internet certainly is more than the Web, the whole reason people are here on HN and on Reddit is because unlike 20 years years ago USENET is basically a ghosttown (other than the people using it for piracy). Or maybe that's your point? That while the Web isn't what it was, USENET is an example of how things could get even worse?
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