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The internet feels fake now. It's all just staged videos and marketing
- boplicity 3y agoPlenty of weird indie internet still exists. Unfortunately, most people can't stay away from corporate mega-sites. Even HN is run by such a company.
- twelfthnight 3y agoSometimes 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?
- RyanOD 3y agoI'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.
- tivert 3y ago> 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.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoI 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.
- joquarky 3y agoPrince prognosticated the year we would peak.
- cameroncooper 3y agoAgreed that there is plenty of weird internet out there left to enjoy, but I think its a bit of a stretch to call YC a corporate mega-site.
- krapp 3y agoYC is a billion dollar startup incubator. It gives birth to corporate mega-sites.
- reustle 3y agoWhoever 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.
- rakoo 3y agoThe 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.
- joquarky 3y agoJust as we have the dark web for a certain class of subjects, I wish we had a "light web" to balance it Perhaps a community index curated to contain only non commercial websites with no ads or trackers?
- arnaudsm 3y agoRelated : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoDead 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.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoReddit 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".
- keiferski 3y agoIt'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.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoNow 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"?
- keiferski 3y agoThey don't use apps or Google exclusively, and also use the browser. Most people have never even heard of USENET. I'm really not sure what argument you're trying to make here.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago>They don't use apps or Google exclusively, 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-quarterly-ACTIVE-USERS-q2-2021-q1-2022-BY-DEVICE.png https://techreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/REDDIT-qua...
- keiferski 3y agoThat graphic says mobile, not app. I certainly use the browser to look at Reddit on my phone all the time and have never installed the app.
- theossuary 3y agoI 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?
- ryandrake 3y ago> I think this is the reason social media like Discord has taken off. I don't get this. "Social media run by a corporation's centralized platform is terrible! Let's join another corporation's centralized platform!"
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoIt's too dang easy to make accounts to spam and pollute communities. My future would have less anonymity and more user verification.
- decremental 3y agoA lot of very bad people want that same future for you. Maybe you'll get your wish.
- 0_____0 3y agoI hope things get better for you.
- the_af 3y agoMaybe, 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).
- 0_____0 3y agoIt 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.
- fullshark 3y agoA 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.
- candiddevmike 3y agoI blame streamers and influencers.
- uoaei 3y agoDon't hate the player, hate the game. The commercialization of platforms made influencers possible.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>made influencers possible What would we do without them? /s
- effingwewt 3y agoThe saying don't hate the player hate the game is pure cope. It's finger pointing. Blame the game and the players who perpetuate them.
- uoaei 3y agoPlayers wouldn't have the ability nor incentives to play the game if the gamemakers didn't create the conditions for it. Can we agree to hate the gamemakers and not the players? Incentive structures are always more powerful than individuals' choices.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoBored 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.
- twelfthnight 3y agoJust 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.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoBut 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.
- mejutoco 3y agoI think Google became altavista and spam is too easy. Maybe sth like kagi can mitigate it.
- yowzadave 3y agoThe 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?
- mejutoco 3y ago- rank sites without ads higher - Allow the users to blacklist domains (pinterest)
- joquarky 3y agoAt least Altavista had a robust set of Boolean operators that actually worked as documented.
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- dist-epoch 3y agoThere 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.
- AlexandrB 3y agoUnfortunately I suspect reddit will join the rest of the internet soon enough. Once they're public, the money has to come from somewhere.
- Workaccount2 3y agoAlso 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.
- TexanFeller 3y agoYou’ll get that a lot less if you ditch Google. Happy Kagi customer here.
- lenkite 3y agoWould 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.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI 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.
- jahewson 3y agoAre the incentives not coming from the people paying the creators, rather than Google?
- woleium 3y agoits bc google is an effective monopoly on search. if we had to optimize for multiple engines, chances are it’d be a better world mind you, i guess you can blame google for the monopoly..
- mikeyouse 3y agoI 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!
- legitster 3y agoModern day opium dens.
- joquarky 3y agoI expect soon we will have something akin to Nerve Attenuation Syndrome due to relentless burnout
- RiverCrochet 3y agoTikok, 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.
- mikeyouse 3y agoEven 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.
- moi2388 3y agoNo it’s not! Also buy NordVPN
- spaceman_2020 3y agoHonestly 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.
- fer 3y ago> 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.
- smhenderson 3y agoWhat's Twitter lol? 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.
- ryandrake 3y agoBoth 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]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39551598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39551598 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39551410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39551410
- raydev 3y agoThis assumes no curation, and the people I already follow will replace themselves with AI bots.
- MeImCounting 3y agoSounds 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"
- mlhpdx 3y agoAnyone 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.
- joquarky 3y agoI need an hour of meditation a day at minimum or I will burn out.
- morkalork 3y agoMyspace 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.
- beauzero 3y agoIt 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_Am_Nous 3y agoI 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.
- MeImCounting 3y agoYoutube 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.
- CommieBobDole 3y agoMan, 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.
- RiverCrochet 3y ago> 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tayo42 3y agoI 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.
- rhplus 3y agoWorth 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- scoofy 3y agoThe 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.
- agumonkey 3y agoIt'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...
- amelius 3y agoIn a real society, what mechanisms exist to prevent it from becoming a shithole? Maybe apply similar mechanisms to the internet too?
- rakoo 3y agoStop following for-profit entities, start making human connections and keep them human. All of this has one and only one source: capitalism.
- indus 3y agoWe need to go back to the future of something like ODP[1]--human curated directory of weird sites written by humans. [1]Open Directory Project.
- tivert 3y ago> We need to go back to the future of something like ODP[1]--human curated directory of weird sites written by humans. How would you (practically) verify that to make that dream even possible?
- Const-me 3y agoIt’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.
- tivert 3y ago> 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.
- samtho 3y agoOne 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.
- adfm 3y agoThere 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.
- dougmwne 3y agoThis 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.
- joquarky 3y agoI 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.
- neverrroot 3y agoI'm trying to learn more about what disinformation is, could you please post your thoughts under the following Ask HN post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39554369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39554369
- rakoo 3y agoI 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.
- legitster 3y agoThis 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRe: Dead Internet Theory and related 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287616 A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949 Dead Internet Theory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39437211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39437211
- xnx 3y agoThe 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.
- tivert 3y agoWait 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.
- deadbabe 3y agoI’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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoThat'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.
- beej71 3y agoThe 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.
- muneface 3y ago[dead]
- muneface 3y ago[dead]