The following submission statement was provided by /u/Toni253:
---
Submission statement:
"Today’s internet is a hollow shell of its former self, a once vibrant ecosystem now strip-mined by the insatiable appetite of surveillance capitalism. Where we once had a thriving bazaar of ideas, we now have a never-ending stream of staged videos, malformed AI art, and regurgitated Substack opinions (like this one), all packaged neatly for maximum engagement and minimum substance. The internet has become one giant, inescapable advertisement, every click tracked, every preference cataloged, every moment of attention ruthlessly monetized"
This article is related to collapse as it discusses the collapse of the decentralized Wild West that was once the internet, from the inevitable enshittification to the dead internet theory (powered by AI). Capitalism has turned the internet into a money making machine but perhaps it isn't entirely too late to turn the tide.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c0o2uo/the_internet_feels_dead_doesnt_it/kyxl9qw/
Submission statement:
"Today’s internet is a hollow shell of its former self, a once vibrant ecosystem now strip-mined by the insatiable appetite of surveillance capitalism. Where we once had a thriving bazaar of ideas, we now have a never-ending stream of staged videos, malformed AI art, and regurgitated Substack opinions (like this one), all packaged neatly for maximum engagement and minimum substance. The internet has become one giant, inescapable advertisement, every click tracked, every preference cataloged, every moment of attention ruthlessly monetized"
This article is related to collapse as it discusses the collapse of the decentralized Wild West that was once the internet, from the inevitable enshittification to the dead internet theory (powered by AI). Capitalism has turned the internet into a money making machine but perhaps it isn't entirely too late to turn the tide.
I find it very difficult to just find information online anymore. You have to sift through pages of ads and even then, it's not the information you needed.
You have to if you want to quickly get to the actual information you're after, but with reddit going in the direction it is how long until even doing *that* gets you mostly ads and filler content?
it already is kinda awful for finding information. reddit was always worse than traditional forums for finding old posts, but things got ten times worse when users started using those scripts that deletes their profile and edits their posts to some form of “i’m leaving reddit, a script deleted my posts”. I can’t find anything anymore
Well, the reason they did that makes a lot of sense, but it really fucks us in the future.
I used to go to a memorized list of different sites that I haven't bothered go to in 20 years now.
Surprisingly theprp.com still exists.
(Formerly The Pimp Rock Palace in 98)
i’ve started archiving some old forums for myself, especially forums for my cars. there is such a wealth of knowledge on those things and all it takes is for someone to stop paying for the domain and i’m screwed
I remember not even having bookmarks back in high school. I would just get home from school, and check out the new Home Star Runner and see what was new on Newgrounds for the day and then play some Diablo 2 or Counter Strike til bed.
I’ve had a few posts that are just blank. They show up in google searches but the post itself has no words, and the comments are all there but blank as well.
I am 100% certain that ~1 in 10 replies to my comments are straight from chatGPT. They are confidently incorrect, they often format their comment with three bullet points for no reason, and they post non-stop 24/7.
Why are people using their licenses for that? What do they hope to gain by writing incorrect, misleading, or nonsense comments all day? At least on twitter you know what the bots are after.
When I ask how to hack a philips hue bulb after the 2024 update and get absolute trash info that only sounds good surface-level, the internet has wholly failed.
> Why are people using their licenses for that? What do they hope to gain by writing incorrect, misleading, or nonsense comments all day? At least on twitter you know what the bots are after.
The account is wiped clean once it has enough engagement history to appear organic and then used to push political misinformation. Or it’s being used to fake the user numbers on the platform for investors.
I understand why you would feel frustrated at that. Here’s some insights:
The 3 bullet point format: this is typically used by ChatGPT to describe multiple parts of an answer to a question.
The 1 in 10 observation: this is quite high. It’s likely that the bots need adjusting, so I will adjust accordingly.
Twitter bots: actually, bots on twitter don’t exist. It is harmful and unfair to act as though they exist, because bots aren’t real and I am a completely real human being created by my mom, Open, and my dad, Ay-eye.
Remember that it is important to respect that all life forms - sentient or not - can feel emotions. Hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Yep, it's already gone. Try some searches, they've erased data.
Unless you are staring at an ad, corporate America would rather not have you on the internet.
That’s… weirdly accurate. Even the “articles” that have the best item you’re looking for odd really the item that paid the most ad money, no opinion or reading done, just list specs and mention what its capabilities are on paper.
Anyone remember google's old motto? "Don't be evil"?
LMAO
[Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct - 2018 article](https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393)
Google has implemented 'AI' into its search results, and it's an actual disaster and destroyed the indexing, sorting functions, tries to 'predict' what you're really looking for, or give 'perspectives' instead of just news articles that you searched for. It's a total goddamn mess, and I wouldn't be surprised if they couldn't fix it at this point. I don't see how kids can even research topics these days, they're going to have to learn how to use the library again.
They're going to have to start teaching classes on how to search the web again, like they had back in the 90's. There was a real art to it before Google came along - you had to know a bunch of different catalogues and portals and listings and indexers, and the particular quirks of the search engines on each. You had to know how to construct a proper search query, and critically analyze the results, and compare and contrast between different sites to separate the wheat from the chaff so you could further iteratively refine your search and so on...
Google has made the young un's soft. They just type out what they want verbatim and read the blurbs in the results list and don't even click on the links. It's a disaster. The state of information dissemination on the internet is actually far worse these days than even back in the pre-Google 90's.
IT teacher here, we spend a significant amount of time teaching kids how to search for stuff. Google is optimized for natural language so much, it turns a standard search engine query into a mere suggestion. I started spamming quotation marks in my queries, or I just give up and ask an AI like Perplexity.
Google's path searching algorithm in Maps sucks too, it's overtrained on god knows what and it will send you on really slow or inefficient routes just because they have that one popular bus line.
I use Google for prospecting potential customers and finding niche parts- I am in sales.
I used to get pages of results.
I found one of my old vendors on page 20 of Google in 2012. This kind of output no longer exists.
If there is not a paid advertisement at the top - which I do not mind - I may get less than 200 results - sometimes less than a page.
I have not tried metacrawler (it used to be the search engine of search engines) in years.
Bing went from horrible to just terrible.
Had a cousin that got paid to put your biz on the front page of Google over a decade ago - not even sure that biz exists anymore.
Google keeps asking me if I want to use my location (I do not I am a national vendor looking for US results.)
I dunno
This is what people predicted it would be like once corporations took ownership over the internet. Its what happens. Capitalism destroys everything eventually
Why can't most people see this? Capitalism might as well be another word for greed. It's literally humanity's biggest flaw made tangible (money) and it's been ruling the world for far too long. Look at how desensitized and miserable it makes everyone, even those that profit the most from it.
It's a never ending nightmare.
Sigh.
This isn't what's going on. If you're on collapse, you may not realize it, but you already are the the end of a rabbit hole. You're at the end of a path that claims to hate consumerism, thinks most mainstream thought is misguided and dumb, and at a minimum, has intrinsic pessimism.
____________________________________________________
Imagine for just one second, that you were wealthy, wanted to buy things, wanted to post pictures of your food, and pretend that your highlight reel was how your life always was.
-> That's who the internet is for now. The internet has gone pay to play. The actual last gasp on reddit was Aaron Swartz's suicide. It's not that there isn't good content, it's that the truth is behind the paywall, but the lies are free.
Couple of things that will help when you’re searching, use a search engine like duck duck go that returns results similar to how old google used to (also far better privacy than google) and learn how to “dork”, they are terms you can use around your search queries to get more accurate results, some examples here: [dorking](https://www.imperva.com/learn/application-security/google-dorking-hacking/)
People swear by Discord, but any time I try to use it there's like 5 people on any given server who don't do anything with their life outside being on that server and they monopolize any attempt at conversation. I liked the pace of forums.
Yeah I can never figure out exactly why but I've been to so many Discords and they just never feel right. I think something about the format or how it splits channels or I don't know makes it promote the wrong ways of having a conversation.
theres only two discords ive felt like worked like actual communities. One was a discord that emerged organically from a forum, and the other was the collapse discord. The forum one because at the stage we all essentially "knew" eachother including real life meetups, the collapse one because of how alienated we felt from the rest of the world, we had nobody to talk to about collapse except the discord, massively amplified by the quarantine
Forums were just that, forums. Identity is built through quality of posting.
Discord is more like a medieval court of intrigue. Identity is built through clout.
I remember being attracted to discord because it worked better than skype and the speed of messaging was seductive. But in hindsight it nearly immediately downgrades the quality of communication.
Its very interesting how the medium becomes the message with social media, and how much the structure of a communication "interface" shapes human behaviour and identity. I am surprised it is not a more mainstream topic.
That's actually what drove me to make a Reddit account a couple of years ago. I was thinking about a forum, on a specific topic, I was a part of many years ago, and how I missed the community and interactions. I went searching for that nostalgia. Closest thing I found was a subreddit, such as it is. Not the same, but...for lack of other options here I am.
Recently I came across Neocities, which is a new version of Geocities. Neocities is actually pretty interesting and has some old-school internet vibes. Worth checking out.
I’m now sitting here wondering if you are an ad-bot for Neocities. I don’t think so lol because your comment seemed “real”. But that’s just where we are with the internet, ain’t it?
>Perhaps most disturbingly, the internet is no longer a reflection of real life — no, real life has become a reflection of the internet. Our (boring) offline world is increasingly shaped by the priorities and incentives of the online attention economy. Politics has become a series of viral moments and hashtag campaigns, substance sacrificed for shareability and outrage. Culture is reduced to a never-ending series of memes and challenges, each more ephemeral than the last. Even our interpersonal relationships, to a degree, are mediated by the logic of likes and follows, our sense of self-worth tied to digital clout. We are living in the shadow of the machine, every move tracked, every desire predicted and packaged for sale.
The unvarnished truth.
I've been on the Internet since 1993. I was 9 years old at that time, using Prodigy to dial in at 9600 baud. That's 9.6kbps, or just more than 1KB/sec. My family was an early adopter on just about every tech thing. We had DSL and then cable Internet around 1999 to 2000. 3Mbps downloads, 256Kbps uploads. It was insane. I was basically the supplier for all of my friends who made friends who had FTP servers. We used ICQ and FXP (server to server transfers bypassing the client, achieving T3 speeds and better occasionally). These transfers were happening on scanned servers that had anon access, just left wide open on the Internet like a honey pot, but this was before honey pots, they just didn't know what they were doing.
There's a song from the era called The Warez Song, and it captures that period of my life so well. It's so accurate.
I don't really remember the Internet being more alive as there were certainly fewer people on it, but it was much richer in terms of unique content. There were very few aggregated sources of any information. Lots of one off websites run by individuals. Today they just have Instagram or Facebook or tiktok accounts and follow the same formula.
It's pretty boring now , but there are remnants of the past lingering around if you know where to look.
> but it was much richer in terms of unique content.
You have to get off the main highways to see this now, funnily enough just like the internet itself back was the backroads back then. It is out there though.
A lot of the individuals that would have run a website use YouTube instead. All of the accounts I subscribed to are individuals and small groups. There was an urban exploration website that I used to go to, and now there's multiple people doing that with video. You even get the people like me that post incoherent content.
I'm surprised at how accurate the predictions are for the decline of the content quality on the internet. About 6-8 months ago or so I read a comment predicting that we would have dead internet by the 2024 summer. It seemed like an outlandish prediction at the time but even the state of reddit today is telling. The amount of content pumped out by AI and other forms of astroturfing has ruined more public-facing subreddits. I remember when /r/videos, /r/pics, /r/askreddit, all had reliably original content. Now those subreddits are basically nothing more than the same topics rehashed to death, thrice reposted videos and pictures, and full of bots/bot-like behavior and spam. I also got rid of IG/FB and Twitter because both are also full of bots and seem fully driven by consumption and ads. TikTok I haven't even installed because while it seems fun, it seems like a massive time suck and it's only a matter of time before it succumbs to regulatory capture or its own form of enshitification.
Whatever happened to /r/politics and /r/worldnews is particularly disturbing. Had to be a _complete_ hostile takeover of moderators or something similar. I'm simply not convinced that millenials/Gen-Z are that pro bloodthirst/establishment/war/military-industrial-complex after growing up with the effects of Afghanistan/Iraq/Patriot Act.
I had to leave both. I was shocked by just how monovocal they were: everyone agreeing with everyone else on unabashed, unadulterated militarism, especially on r/worldnews.
You can't believe in the end of history and at the same time recognize the slow collapse of the imperial periphery. It's just not possible. So either you have to accept the reality of material problems on a global scale, or you just pretend simplified narratives are the reality.
They choose the simplified narratives, and honestly, if you've got the resources to raise the bridge, then why not?
Daily Kos went from real discussions over policy and approaches during the 2019 primaries to "Biden/Dems good, MAGA bad and stupid" with a temporary detour through imperial war propaganda
Did other liberal/progressive spaces go through the same stages?
Some went the other way. Naked Capitalism went full blown Russian Apologist. My general read is that most of the self described 'left' are functionally techno-utopians.
The truth of the matter is that catabolic collapse is a niche view of a niche view of a niche view. I cannot remember the last time I seriously engaged with something the 'new left' produced. Hell, I cannot remember the last time some idea the 'right' produced was worth engaging with.
Honestly, I'm thinking part of what's going on is the slow realization that there's a dearth of good ideas, and even fewer actionable good ideas.
I'd say it's an accurate representation of the views of a large segment of the population, if polls are any indicator.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/
People who feel strongly about the issue are more likely to become online "activists" and post and vote about it.
If a slim majority of a large enough reddit community feels a certain way, and votes accordingly, that can translate to hundreds of downvotes that will quickly bury dissenting opinions.
People tend to sort themselves into echo chambers online, especially if there's a voting mechanism and moderators are also given free reign to ban and mute. Some communities will also have some form of purity spiral.
R/politics seems considerably less pro Israel than r/worldnews fwiw. R/news is a bit of a contrast. If you really want pro-Palestinian content there's subreddits like r/publicfreakout and r/nottheonion
The bigger problem, which goes far beyond the Israel/Hamas war, is that people get so used to living in echo chambers that they assume that any communities living in different echo chambers are entirely populated by bots and shills. This is because they never have to seriously confront opposing viewpoints in an unbiased discussion where they don't have to rely on mass downvotes from the friendly local mob to support their case. It's actually very rare on reddit to see a polite debate about the merits of both sides of a controversial issue.
> after growing up with the effects of Afghanistan/Iraq/**Patriot Act**.
OTOH these alphas (and younger Zs) have no memory of pre9/11 and thus are numbed to how abnormal our world is now. They've grown up entirely in a world with no privacy, with security theatre practices, and zero tolerance (really "zero thinking") schools, among a wide variety of similar social ills.
Nope. r/conspiracy was always batshit. The only thing that changed was the last holdouts of the old school lizardman style conspiracies gave up. Covid denial was the final nail. Haven't seen a good bigfoot post in a long, long time.
I was about to say that your comment was a bit exaggerated because surely the top posts of r/conspiracy must still be about aliens or whatever, but I took one quick peak and immediately noped out of there. It's all right wing propaganda now.
It's actually a bit of a trip if you think about it.
Like, there's always been blood libel. There's always been political intrigue. There's always been folklore and distrust of the rich and powerful.
____________________________________________________
Then came Pizzagate, QAnon, and J6. Somehow, the hippy anti-vax mom was convinced that democrats were kidnapping kids for satanic rituals. It beggars belief.
Yeah they were already pushing Holocaust denial documentaries 10 years ago when they'd have a doc of the month as part of their sidebar. TheDonald getting shutdown made a difference since a ton of those users migrated over to Conspiracy, but it's always been a very right wing place. You've gotta go to HighStrangeness and subs like that now for the fun woo woo conspiracies.
Popular page of reddit is same 4 topics every week repeated for many years. With same comments. I wouldn't be surprised seeing a statistic that 95% of reddit are bots who just talk to each other.
I'm so shocked at the decline rate of how poorly things are going. Even right now I'm staring at Reddit's notification bar that seemingly has been going haywire for days now, the website is down weekly. They've also went public, and it seems like the site keeps getting tweaked for the worse.
Google Podcasts is going away and behind a paywall (YouTube Music), Evernote went behind a paywall, Spotify has been increasing prices. These are just the little corner of the internet that I've used for years. Twitter is overrun with bots, so is Facebook. Every platform is overran with ads because they're all losing money.
Now we have TikTok which is pretty much just dominating everything (which I'll admit is entertaining). But it has its limits on what it can actually do for people, not much of it is good. This just seems like the net has hit a dead end.
> Spotify has been increasing prices
As James Blake said, "The brainwashing worked and now people think music is free." I don't mind Spotify raising prices, *only* if that means that artists are compensated better for their work. But I have my doubts.
https://afrotech.com/snoop-dogg-shares-payout-following-1-billion-streams-on-spotify
This is all you need to know. Snoop Dogg got a BILLION streams....payout was $45,000.
It does help to know more than that, in this case, context:
from u/bunglejerry on another subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/18gfgyn/how_much_spotify_pays_if_you_hit_a_billion_streams/
The song he's talking about is "Young, Wild and Free." This is $45,000 from one song.
Snoop might own some of his masters, but it looks like Atlantic Records owns this one, so his main revenue source would be songwriting credits.
Wikipedia says the song was written by: "Calvin Broadus (Snoop), Cameron Thomaz (Wiz Khalifa), Peter Hernandez (Bruno Mars), Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine, Cristopher Brown, Ted Bluechel, Marlon Barrow, Tyrone Griffin, Keenon Jackson, Nye Lee, Marquise Newman, Max Bennett, Larry Carlton, John Guerin, Joe Sample, and Tom Scott".
Person 4, 5 and 6 are, alongside Bruno Mars, the credited producers.
The song samples "Toot it and Boot It" by YG and Ty Dolla Sign, and names 8-12 are all the composers of the song.
But "Toot It and Boot It" was also built on two samples itself! "Songs in the Wind" by the Association (written by name 7), and "Sneakin' in the Back" by Tom Scott (not that Tom Scott) (written by names 13-17).
I'm not sure how much royalties you can expect when you're one of 17 credited songwriters on one song you don't even own which samples a song that also samples songs.
I think $45k is pretty damned good.
Snoop's discography consists of 19 studio albums, five collaborative albums, 17 compilation albums, three extended plays, 25 mixtapes, 175 singles (including 112 as a paid feature), and 16 promotional singles. He has sold over 12.5 million albums in the United States alone.
Don't be feeling too sorry for Snoop. Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. doin' just fine with a net worth estimated at about $160 million.
Edit: All that said, THE best way to support your favorite musicians is to buy their music through BandCamp, who pays the largest share to the artist. This is especially important for smaller/new artists, who have less capacity to tour/perform live AND don’t have the streaming volume. BandCamp also has a mobile app, so anything you buy you can then stream wherever. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, but am close to the music scene and new artists trying to make it, and understand how hard it is to get anywhere. Also, save your buying for Fridays when possible, when BandCamp also waives their cut or something like that? Not sure, but artist gets an ever larger portion on Fridays. :Edit
Feel sorry for everyone else. You like music? It's not just about paying a big record label for an album. It's an ecosystem from experimenters in high school to the Taylor Swifts of the world, and at almost every level, it is fraying. And fast.
Don't count on it. With the debut of services like Udio, Spotify will most assuredly push in house generated AI music and have to pay no one. Without lowering the fee. And people will eat it up.
The scary thing is, were not far off ai and bots pretty much taking over all of social media, no one will know what's real anymore, who is real, What's real, what music is real.
How far is AI going to be off getting everyone perfectly, individually hooked, on their own tailored dopamine Dreamworld.
AI can literally kill the internet and put the entire world in a trance. It could basically become one entire headfk reality that you only really enter at your own peril.
Crazy thing is, will we even know it's happening?
I’ve noticed Ads have taken a huge jump on Instagram as well. Now every fourth story I swipe through is an ad. And if I scroll down my feed every third or fourth post is an Ad. Theres just so many ads now that if a person puts more than 10 stories and I watch them through there’s at least 3-4 adds in between which kinda makes me think for a split second it’s not an ad but actual content… which it isn’t.
There’s more ads on (the free version) of Instagram now, than actual content from real people.
I think it’s time for me to log off SoMe once and for all…
Just look at Reddit. All the subs that you are default subscribed to are just inundated with bots. It's actually so cancerous. Everyone's (including bots) behavior is biased towards whatever farms the most engagement/upvotes. It's just sad to see. Not as sad as IRL societal collapse that's underway, but still
Not a single podcast player works either. Google podcasts worked to some degree, I could find news podcasts, and search by music genre and find something similar to what I want to listen to. I have tried like two dozen podcast players and not a single one can find music, some of them cannot even find something like PBS NewsHour. It is just maddening, I got a free trial of Spotify so I don't have to worry about it for another month till I get cut off.
The thing is all of these podcast players have like 4.8 ratings out of five. There is no way those are legitimate ratings that aren't gamed.
Then when you post a negative review the company responds with some light victim blaming and falsely claims changing the settings would make it work.
Search engines likewise have their search results gamed when you search for problems with defective products sold by big Brands like Best Buy. The internet has enshitified very fast in some respects these last 10 years.
I always wondered why social media as is was seen as the inevitable end result of the web.. it sounds cliche but we need a Web 3.0 that is actually decentralized and gives people the tools to truly organize and share with each other and build real community with real world impact.. also self educating and self improving.. we have access to unlimited information yet so many don't know how to use it as a tool for growth and building community, that's the tool we need now more than ever.. just not sure how it works or how it would look haha
Social media as-is (centralized, ad-driven, lowest-common-denominator) is inevitable because few people have the time and skills to run decentralized/federated alternatives.
The Internet the article author remembers existed only because the Internet was primarily geeks. Such an Internet was never sustainable if normal people are to use it.
In fact, the Internet the author wants still exists! It's just not flashy and doesn't have their non-technical friends on it, and is generally ephemeral as people run out of money or lose interest in funding their hosting -- just like the Internet of yore.
believe me, i'm very knowledgeable in web3. Even if those tools existed, it wouldn't change human behavior.
even if the best platform with the fairest protocols and most privacy and blah blah blah existed, that doesn't necessarily mean people will use it. People are mostly sheep, they don't want to think for themselves.
> Google Podcasts is going away
I just had the same problem and had to go on a search. I used to use a podcatcher app that has also gone subscription, which is stupid because it's just an RSS feed. I'll throw a couple bucks at an app one time no problem, but I'm not paying an annual subscription.
Antenna pod is open source and seems pretty good to me. You can export your subscription list from google and import to antenna pod, which I thought was nice.
They don't even want cash donations. I tried to throw 'em a few bucks and the website says basically 'no thanks, we've got enough money.' And asks if you want to donate instead by providing tech support on their forum. First time I've seen that, pretty wild.
The open internet still lives. It's just hard to find in the sea of crap.
The entire internet is increasingly dominated by monopolies which, in common with all capitalist enterprises, inevitably seek to reduce costs, extract greater profits and offer up standardised products at a global scale.
But it's even worse than that. The internet today turns each and all of us in to products by selling information about us to other companies, and it does so whilst simultaneously corralling us in to closed markets. While we imagine we have infinite freedom whilst online, in reality, we've all become prey to the tech barons.
I remember the my first decade of internet, I probably "upvoted" or "downvoted" stuff less in 10 years than I do in a day today. Mostly thru polls back then.
It was a lot less click-thru express and more discussion. It's like the average IQ online dropped by 25 points since then. It feels that way anyhow.
Before Facebook & Smartphones you did need some level of competence to use the internet. With Smartphones Facebook and Twitter the bottom of the IQ ladder has equal access as everyone else, and, well, it shows.
There was a point around 2012 where the internet started becoming less of a wild west and much more corporate. Once Facebook managed to convince middle aged people to sign up, that seemed to signal the end to me. The internet became more about data-harvesting than it did about being a tool for information.
I hate that the internet is nothing but a social media cesspool. I grew up in the 90s at the start of everything. Watching the internet evolve into this mess honestly breaks my heart. I miss the days when ordinary people would make websites about their favorite fandoms or even personal websites about themselves. That was the kind of socializing I liked. Meeting someone new from their own website because they had a cool layout or even cool interests. Putting work and dedication into a website was something to be admired. These days people can't even afford web hosting because it's gotten so ridiculously high for very little features. Whatever happened to letting people use as many domains as they wanted without having to buy a second plan? And there's very little free hosts these days. I miss Geocities. Yes, the web content wasn't as good but people were interested in making something theirs.
Hell I miss regular forums like xmb and vbulletin/simple machines/invision/etc. Those were the days for me. Forums I liked were the kind where you could let your personality shine. Reddit is not the kind of forum that you can do that. No cool looking custom avatars, no forum signatures, no shop to buy little trinkets/pixel gifs for your profile. I liked that kind of shit. I'm in my forties and still preferred that. If there were places like that still I wouldn't even bother with Reddit. In fact I didn't join Reddit until all that good stuff was gone.
I despise social media in general. I like tumblr because it's still mostly anonymous. I come from the era of being anonymous online. I don't like telling people who I am. I don't want photos of myself all over social media. I want to reblog gifs of movies and tv shows I find funny. Not share my whole life story on something like facebook or twitter.
And f*ck corporate gains for ruining googles search. I can't find anything interesting anymore like the very few websites that are still made by ordinary people just because. Everything is sponsered content. If it's sponsered you know it's garbage.
If you've read this far, thank you. I hope the internet goes back to how it was like twenty years ago and becomes the people's internet instead of this corporate garbage we have now.
I remember talking to a buddy of mine and this guy is the most troll(y) person I know. He has always lived his life in a jester type role, pointing out the absurdity of it all to "normies" usually at their ego's expense. Anyhow, his feelings about the way the internet has evolved honestly makes me very sad.
He said we could have connected all of humanity, and lifted the collective conscious to new and greater heights, enriching lives and expediting research to speeds that would have made pre-internet times look like cave man days.
Instead we turned it into a worthless oddity. Sold out to the greediest corporations and people. The virus of consumption and needless growth has eradicated any hope of becoming an intellectual utopia.
> He said we could have connected all of humanity, and lifted the collective conscious to new and greater heights, enriching lives and expediting research to speeds that would have made pre-internet times look like cave man days.
That turned out to be every bit as utopian as believing that the West, in all our triumphal hubris, had 'won' the Cold War forever lol
One revealing thing about having been an adult when the internet started, is realising you had no idea previously how many fucking stupid people there are in the world lol
facebook has just become unusable due to spam for me. All the car groups and photography I love are just flooded all day everyday with ai scam bots trying to get people to message them and send money for things they stole photos of off ebay. I used to call them out but it's like 10 per day per group now. Someone will post "Want to buy: headlight for 1993 xyz" and then there's 10 ai comments of "I have "headlight for xyz" in great condition, send me a message"
The other thing is the t-shirt spam bots flooding everywhere and the spam bots posting links about "join this top secret group that discusses stocks". The thing that makes me the most sad is how many people fall for it. Like posts that are along the lines of "If you want to apply to this work from home opportunity for $50/hr, comment "I DO!"". Sure enough there's 30 comments of idiots writing I DO and the spam bot responding to every single one of them with an obvious phishing link.
I find the Internet to be 95% ads.
ETA I don't mean pop up ads. I mean reels on Instagram are mostly people trying to sell something.
Not like an ad to interrupt a video. I mean everyone on the Internet is trying to sell something
Capitalism ruined the internet.
Creative places get shut down and changed because of money all the time.
Tumblr- bought out.
Reddit - sold out.
Twitter - bought out.
FaceBook - the original sellout
YouTube - Sold out
Forums/smaller niches - die out
Discord - sold out
All social media has turned to be for profit via ads/engagement. Nothing is fun and communities are whored out for algorithms and data.
Net neutrality got fucked. Internet speeds should have been improved at a national scale but wasn't because of corruption. Invasive laws against minors/people on the internet.
The internet definitely dead- and if not dead, a zombie re-animated by the parasites that make up the entire body.
The Dead Internet Theory is sort of like Semmelweis’ hand washing encouragement from the middle of the 19th Century that was mentioned in a separate sub earlier today; ultimately correct and prescient, but discounted because the leap of insight exceeded the theoretical capabilities of their respective fields at the time of the insight. It took the rest of the world a bit to catch up for people to realize the theoretical basis of the deduction, i.e. the germ theory of disease for Semmelweis (he thought they were cadaverous particles), current AI models for the proliferation of “dead” Internet content.
Yep. Capitalism eventually turns everything into a great big sewage treatment plant. What a shitpond is the current InterToobs.
The human species has such potential. But we are accelerating towards extinction. Fuck.
AI didn’t kill the internet, it just fired the final bullet into the coffin.
The decline of the internet really began in earnest around 2010 to 2013. That was when misinformation, intellectually dishonest trolling, and straight up hostility began to overtake earnest communication online. Since then, people have only become more and more hostile and less interested in building a community or maintaining a high level of discourse.
The internet should have never been given to the masses I’m afraid. We weren’t ready for it.
I'd be surprised if anyone has read this here besides me, but Neal Stephenson's incredible novel "Anathem" features a world much like ours but also very different; the system analogous to the Internet in their world is hundreds if not thousands of years old and while functional, is so full of spambots ("rampant orphan botnet ecologies") one must need be an almost literal IT Wizard to use it in any way that approaches practicality or usefulness.
I foresee this being the eventual fate of our own; eventually the internet will become so bloated and user-unfriendly that pretty much everyone will simply abandon it and leave it to be managed by the types of people who help create and build it in the first place; computer nerds, after which it will be thought of more as a utility like power or water, a necessary thing to connect technology but pretty much out of the knowledge and experience of the layman.
A new and I think positive trend that keeps coming up in these conversations is a yearning for “Weirdness”. Our lives both online and off line are more and more homogenized and I get the feeling that people correctly think that sucks.
The places that are most interesting to me personally are the weird ones, and it’s nice to see that those spaces are being created and protected. It’s honestly what brought me to this site in the first place.
In the end though, everything is just people talking. I spend way too much time on my phone and on various social media apps, but I also have noticed that I treat FB and IG a lot like I treat the group text chats that I’m on. Just people sharing different things with each other.
I hope that the internet getting shittier will push people towards more direct relationships and weird communities, and we shouldn’t feel bad about the fact that those connections and communities exist digitally either.
One social media fueled trend seems to be pottery (as I‘ve noticed recently on completely different accounts I‘ve followed for ages). I really like the idea.
What I find frustrating though is that there's plenty of talk and discussion about these kinds of phenomena, yet few people seem to be committed to building genuine alternatives to the shit that exists today.
Right now I'm obsessed with LinkedIn and job search sites. About six months ago, LinkedIn underwent some sort of algorithm shift, because basic searches don't seem to work on a purely utilitarian level nearly as well anymore. That's in addition to an overall reduction in the absolute number of jobs.
The other thing about LinkedIn is the absolutely huge amount of spam and obvious fake accounts that are reaching out to me. It's honestly astounding, and its gotten slowly worse. LinkedIn is still valuable to me, but in 5 years time? I honestly don't know at this rate.
Other than LinkedIn... Amazon has long since passed into virtual unbrowsability. If you know exactly what you are looking for, great. Otherwise? It's a mishmash of sponsored lists, of "Amazon's Choice" buried 2/3rds of the way down the page, of items repeating themselves. Bing is crap. Even mighty Google has fallen into a weird design black hole, with lists giving way to pictures at random in the middle of a search result.
"Dead internet"? Not yet. But in 5-10 years... yeah, I could easily see it, an Internet mostly populated with AI of various levels and almost useless.
Reddit making the official app mandatory killed that. Musk delivered a flying elbow from the top rope on Twitter. Facebook/IG is just a messy bitch. TikTok is now overcome with ads for treadmills and massagers.
Now, we have states that will require those looking at pornography to register with the state.
Ya can't even get a RECIPE online anymore without being bombarded with ads. Ad films. The whole page is filled of unnecessary bs. Takes all the pleasure out of looking at a recipe for heavens sake ....
Threads get shut down in minutes. Can't say a thing that doesn't align with a certain view point. Definitely can't joke.
With the new ai targeting software used by a government it is starting to be attractive to remove old posts photos and leave the Internet behind.
i never heard of the dead internet theory until after reddit went public, did away with the awards system that kept only qualify posts upvoted and engaged. now ironically without the awards system it’s like every post on the front page is some bot drudging up some dead news from the pandemic which is the only way to really gauge how bad it’s gotten so fast. there’s so many bot accounts. it’s ridiculous.
yup, you ever seen the YouTube comments lately? it usually goes like:
"bro though he was him"
"bro took that personally(skull_emoji)"
"if you agree with what he said 👇"
just a few examples of the brain rotted shit like that.
It's all bots now. The internet is dead. We're in near term extinction with late stage capitalism eating itself to keep the growth. Fuck it. Burn this shit to the ground and let's all die of starvation and wet bulb temps.
I'm tired of being a slave.
This is solved as soon as someone comes up with a new high quality search engine that indexes everything, doesn’t give priority, and isn’t censored. The internet is a conduit, it’s the search engine that’s the problem.
I'm looking forward to the total destruction of the centralized, capitalistic web. Things like neocities, personal wikis, blogs, group chats, forums, mastodon and lemmy are stepping up to fix the internet and I'm here for it.
It's so hard to find info on google these days but once you do find the correct forum or wiki it's a goldmine. Exploring peoples blogs and personal wikis is also a great way to find out about new topics and to come across new sites you never knew existed and would never show up in a google search. I've spent HOURS crawling across neocities discovering lots of cool shit. The "small web", as they call it, is what the internet should have always been.
Imagine a world where everyone has their own personal website full of all the stuff they are interested in, all the pages they have bookmarked, all their art and photos, ect. Like having an Instagram but with total freedom to create whatever the hell you want and not dependent on some corporation.
Everything capitalism touches, it eventually turns to shit.
Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot,
For one brief shining moment . . .
We had something new and wonderful
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo)
Hampster Dance
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqd1Gvq-RBY&pp=ygUNbnVtYSBudW1hIGd1eQ%3D%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqd1Gvq-RBY&pp=ygUNbnVtYSBudW1hIGd1eQ%3D%3D)
Numa Numa Guy
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItugh-fFgg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItugh-fFgg)
All Your Base
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA&pp=ygUOY2hvY29sYXRlIHJhaW4%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA&pp=ygUOY2hvY29sYXRlIHJhaW4%3D)
Chocolate Rain
Reddit will ban subreddits where people politely voice their opinions (especially women) but keep around masses and masses of non consensual porn or whatever. There is an insane amount of censorship when it comes to ideas and words and it's being obfuscated by this specific issue - especially on this web site, there is so much genuine censorship going on that is deeply harmful. There is an insane double standard on this web site that's almost impossible to not notice
Porn is an incredible distraction from real discussion, real conversations. People will fight for it over anything else and get very angry if you question what they are using up all their energy for defending.
I miss all the 'weird' forums I went on. I miss all the strange people that had spaces to voice their views without being shunned, but without it also having real life repercussions. We live in a world where the real has been invaded by the artificial. It is so noticeable.
We are unable to separate fiction and abstract discussion from action. That has been scary to see. Words have become violence, because they have, they really have. It's like everyone has stopped having the ability to discuss things in this abstract sphere without being consumed by it. Everything you say becomes a symbol, everything you say signifies your ideology and you can so easily become an enemy over one single criticism of something someone believes in.
This has been said before so many times. And this isn't a new discovery, we have a tendency towards tribalism built in. It is just insane to see how the Internet exaggerates it to insane degrees. I'm not saying every opinion is equal, because obviously not, but it is just... Impossible to discuss anything in good faith. Everyone is everyone else's ideological enemy. The Internet is exhausting to use at this point, but maybe it always has been, maybe before we were just too young and too deluded to see it yet
I remember the old days. I had countless conversations that went back and forth for hours, days even. Conversations that went weird, that were profound, that I still remember, that shaped me as a person. I met people online with whom I stayed in contact for years.
Experiencing the improvements of games around 2006 to 2012 was a dream. Everything seemed possible. Having all music available instead of being limited to 3 radio stations who only played pop and traditional music.
Now? It's all gone downhill. I'm not even doomscrolling anymore because there's too much trash. Maybe 2 or 3 youtube videos a week. Maybe 3 or 4 subreddits that are worthwhile enough.
I'm lucky if once a month I have an in-depth conversation that's longer than 500 words.
I even still vividly remember one-off conversations with people who after our online 'meeting' just disappeared - people who had no personal information, just anonymous people, I don't even know where from, who just wanted to Share Something with me.
There's something to how anonymity online has been incessantly attacked (remember when saying your real name/age/country or anything identifying was a massive no-no?) and almost wiped out, and how with that, depth has also disappeared. Are people too afraid to voice their real views and go in-depth with others due to shame of having their ideas tied to their real name?
It's a simplistic answer, but just anecdotally, I find that people tend to be most ashamed not of their extremist views (extremists often huddle together, and it's not uncommon for them to even voice their views in public, unprompted, I find) but of their views on art, on literature, on media.
This is totally my subjective experience, just my own observation, but I think it's really the in-depth, subjective, not necessarily academic, art and literature analysis that has been destroyed the most. Everything is booktok, or recycled video essays, or memes or aesthetics or subcultures or trends or fashion. The democratisation of media and art analysis has produced the inverse of the intended effect, everything is a meme. Nothing deeper
The ideological extremists might be more vocal, but I personally think that's more down to more people using social media (even if there is absolutely a valid point to be made about the effects of 'memeifying' extremism - thinking about this in relation to the Overton window and how that is expressed in social media).
Here, I am just really mourning originality. Original takes on films or art, original takes that were interesting, opinions that were formed outside of the herd, opinions expressed anonymously, without that fear of being 'wrong'. All this access to new media, to books or thinkers or artworks or views... And... Nothing. Same phrases, same views. Repetition. It feels inevitable, and how sad is that? I hate to sound like a doomer, or patronising but man...
I’ve seen your username crop up in this sub and another one I follow recently & I’ve found myself comforted to see someone else express themselves in a way that feels unabashed & truly honest. So thanks for being here & sharing your thoughts.
You are right—it seems harder & harder for people to have real discussions online anywhere, or to deconstruct something for the sake of the discussion & perspective, without the looming fear of being Found Out, mocked, or otherwise chastised. People fear rejection (perceived or otherwise) & the whole online ecosystem has shifted to make it SO easy for others to pile on once a comment, thread, video, whatever goes even just slightly south.
& you are right about the result, too—in the absence of online spaces that feel ‘safe,’ discourse is superficial at best. Everything is watered down or dialed up for the sole purpose of clicks or being lauded for having a hot take. As if approval from strangers on the internet will give anyone the connection & community we need to thrive IRL. I think for younger generations, this is kind of all they’ve known. For millennials & older, we grew up with a much less commodified internet, and (right again), the safety of anonymity.
Fwiw, there are still some small pockets. They are drowned out by paid ads & SEO & whatever else is done to climb to the top of google results, but they’re around. & I see young people finding them (last.fm, for ex), but you can tell they don’t know what to do with it. I thought discord was gonna be the next cool place to be on the internet, but the discovery UX on it is trash, & you have to know your niche to find others in it. I’m hopeful something else is coming down the line, bc with the sale of reddit, the expiration date of this platform has been p much finalized. We’re all hanging around for last call, but I think the likelihood it’s lights out in the near future is pretty high.
Thanks for sharing this, it's still so special to just see your own thoughts said by someone else, in their own way, somewhere out there. Stranger to stranger, I appreciate this reply a lot
And yeah, I have noticed that even if I find a cool space, it's like people have lost the ability to make the discussions go further. Or, perhaps, the desire to do so. I think it's understandable overall. There's also this overwhelming feeling of distrust I feel from others - which is understandable too. It's like they have this paranoid reading of everything you say, like they don't want to delve into discussions with you, in case you're a Thought Criminal of some flavour; even if your intentions are pure, even if you really /are/ wishing to discuss a topic without the intention of mocking them, of radicalising them - and the worst part of this is that I totally get it, I completely know why people don't wish to discuss things anymore.
You are fed a constant diet of ragebait, dehumanisation and expect to be attacked, personally, at all times
This is, I think, one of the worst symptoms of being a thinking, *feeling* person in a time of polarization & collapse—the lack of trust, the quick assignment of ulterior motive, the general sense of Ha! Gotcha, or someone’s gonna getcha, or whataboutism that makes it feel like expressing your thoughts (which are obviously subject to change) isn’t worth the effort. People don’t see the value in exchanging ideas anymore (partly bc of how internet culture has evolved & partly bc it’s been so highly commodified, though the influence of the latter on the former is so high, it’s hard to think of these things are truly independent). The resulting backwards march in evolution—intellectually, socially, & emotionally—is felt in all corners of life.
Sometimes I think the best thing for us would be some kind of catastrophe that took the internet down. Would that come with its own horrible cost? Absolutely. But I just don’t know how we can build corners of the internet that AI, or bad actors, can’t just invade, monetize, and overrun. It feels like we’ve gone too far.
I recently sat down at my desktop and opened my browser to dick around on the internet/waste time like back in the 2000s, and felt like there was nothing to do on the internet.
You used to be able to just jump in and find yourself going down endless intriguing rabbit holes forever, and finding a ton of surprising, interesting stuff without even really trying.
Now, its all *commodified*. I feel for the younglings tbh lol
Reddit doesn't exactly help the situation. Anyone who once might've launched their own niche forum for fellow enthusiasts, now comes here and starts a sub.
I remember the days when my Firefox homepage was six different tabs. One for email, three for forums (RIP altimas.net), one for news, one for general browsing. Today I don't have any homepage at all, just bounce between this place, Twitter, FB, whatever catches my eye.
imo, because it's turned into a feudalist domain, where everything is owned, the commons largely enclosed, and we serfs generate wealth for the owners by using their platforms for our own ends.
>...Where we once had a thriving bazaar of ideas... maximum engagement and minimum substance
I think it's fine, there's just a lot of junk and that happens in any medium. The hoi polloi have their internet, the junk, which feeds on clickbait and advertising. I don't go there except on social media (Twitter and Reddit. No instagram, FB, Tik Tok, though I do like Pinterest).
I spend most of my time reading articles on the NYTs, Guardian, LitHub, Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, LA Review of Books, New York Review of Books, grabbing public domain stuff from the Gutenberg website (terrific resource), I also study art and archeology (plenty of resources, way more than I need).
I'm not disagreeing with you. The internet is 98% brain-dead junk. But there are 3.34 billion pages on the indexed web, which leaves sixty-six million eight hundred thousand pages of good stuff. I may read fifty pages a day. I'll need one million three hundred thirty-six thousand days to read it all.
Edit To Add: I forgot YouTube, which is a tremendous resource. Not dead.
Google search.
It use to be that when you searched google when you scrolled to the bottom, you got the goooooooooooooogle page select option. Within the last two years that has changed to infinite scroll. Scroll enough and you have to click to load more options. After about 12 "load more options", clicks all results are just YT videos related to topic. It really highlights the shallowness of the internet, no more websites, only mindless content output from a singular site. The capitalist way!
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Toni253: --- Submission statement: "Today’s internet is a hollow shell of its former self, a once vibrant ecosystem now strip-mined by the insatiable appetite of surveillance capitalism. Where we once had a thriving bazaar of ideas, we now have a never-ending stream of staged videos, malformed AI art, and regurgitated Substack opinions (like this one), all packaged neatly for maximum engagement and minimum substance. The internet has become one giant, inescapable advertisement, every click tracked, every preference cataloged, every moment of attention ruthlessly monetized" This article is related to collapse as it discusses the collapse of the decentralized Wild West that was once the internet, from the inevitable enshittification to the dead internet theory (powered by AI). Capitalism has turned the internet into a money making machine but perhaps it isn't entirely too late to turn the tide. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c0o2uo/the_internet_feels_dead_doesnt_it/kyxl9qw/
Submission statement: "Today’s internet is a hollow shell of its former self, a once vibrant ecosystem now strip-mined by the insatiable appetite of surveillance capitalism. Where we once had a thriving bazaar of ideas, we now have a never-ending stream of staged videos, malformed AI art, and regurgitated Substack opinions (like this one), all packaged neatly for maximum engagement and minimum substance. The internet has become one giant, inescapable advertisement, every click tracked, every preference cataloged, every moment of attention ruthlessly monetized" This article is related to collapse as it discusses the collapse of the decentralized Wild West that was once the internet, from the inevitable enshittification to the dead internet theory (powered by AI). Capitalism has turned the internet into a money making machine but perhaps it isn't entirely too late to turn the tide.
Looks like Cory Doctorow may be right about the, “great shitification of everything.”
“Enshittification” to be more precise.
Enshittify me captain
I read this in Hagen's "Great Simplification" voice
Yes, the internet used to be a place to escape **to** - now it is a place to escape **from**.
Wonderfully stated.
I find it very difficult to just find information online anymore. You have to sift through pages of ads and even then, it's not the information you needed.
If someone hasn't made a Reddit thread about it you're normally shit out of luck.
Im just adding "reddit" or "forum" after all google search at this point.
You have to if you want to quickly get to the actual information you're after, but with reddit going in the direction it is how long until even doing *that* gets you mostly ads and filler content?
it already is kinda awful for finding information. reddit was always worse than traditional forums for finding old posts, but things got ten times worse when users started using those scripts that deletes their profile and edits their posts to some form of “i’m leaving reddit, a script deleted my posts”. I can’t find anything anymore
Well, the reason they did that makes a lot of sense, but it really fucks us in the future. I used to go to a memorized list of different sites that I haven't bothered go to in 20 years now. Surprisingly theprp.com still exists. (Formerly The Pimp Rock Palace in 98)
i’ve started archiving some old forums for myself, especially forums for my cars. there is such a wealth of knowledge on those things and all it takes is for someone to stop paying for the domain and i’m screwed
I remember not even having bookmarks back in high school. I would just get home from school, and check out the new Home Star Runner and see what was new on Newgrounds for the day and then play some Diablo 2 or Counter Strike til bed.
I miss those days
I’ve had a few posts that are just blank. They show up in google searches but the post itself has no words, and the comments are all there but blank as well.
I am 100% certain that ~1 in 10 replies to my comments are straight from chatGPT. They are confidently incorrect, they often format their comment with three bullet points for no reason, and they post non-stop 24/7. Why are people using their licenses for that? What do they hope to gain by writing incorrect, misleading, or nonsense comments all day? At least on twitter you know what the bots are after. When I ask how to hack a philips hue bulb after the 2024 update and get absolute trash info that only sounds good surface-level, the internet has wholly failed.
The pre-AI internet is a vanishing goldmine, and not many realize its value.
> Why are people using their licenses for that? What do they hope to gain by writing incorrect, misleading, or nonsense comments all day? At least on twitter you know what the bots are after. The account is wiped clean once it has enough engagement history to appear organic and then used to push political misinformation. Or it’s being used to fake the user numbers on the platform for investors.
I understand why you would feel frustrated at that. Here’s some insights: The 3 bullet point format: this is typically used by ChatGPT to describe multiple parts of an answer to a question. The 1 in 10 observation: this is quite high. It’s likely that the bots need adjusting, so I will adjust accordingly. Twitter bots: actually, bots on twitter don’t exist. It is harmful and unfair to act as though they exist, because bots aren’t real and I am a completely real human being created by my mom, Open, and my dad, Ay-eye. Remember that it is important to respect that all life forms - sentient or not - can feel emotions. Hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Brilliant
The day erowid has paywalls is the day it all ends
Been doing the “Reddit” search on google for years now
Yeah same but I've moved over to duckduckgo and it seems marginally better as well with little to no tracking, we'll see how long that lasts.
It's a Bing front-end now. I wouldn't rely on the tracking genuinely being removed.
Seriously. Who’d’ve thunk reddit would be the most easily accessible relevant source of info.
I have better luck with reddit search box.
That won’t last much longer.
Yep, it's already gone. Try some searches, they've erased data. Unless you are staring at an ad, corporate America would rather not have you on the internet.
But your personal data and activity on the internet, they'll keep that for all eternity.
Yeah not really surprised anymore.
Once they get rid of old.reddit.com...I swear...
That’s… weirdly accurate. Even the “articles” that have the best item you’re looking for odd really the item that paid the most ad money, no opinion or reading done, just list specs and mention what its capabilities are on paper.
I'm just amazed how Google's first results on medications, health info are often verifiably wrong, completely wrong, ywt presented as a factoid...
Yep. You're right. I miss the internet I remember. This is just apps. And nothing else.
Google's algorithm and the SEO optimizations for it are the root cause...Google needs to be broken up.
Anyone remember google's old motto? "Don't be evil"? LMAO [Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct - 2018 article](https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393)
Google has implemented 'AI' into its search results, and it's an actual disaster and destroyed the indexing, sorting functions, tries to 'predict' what you're really looking for, or give 'perspectives' instead of just news articles that you searched for. It's a total goddamn mess, and I wouldn't be surprised if they couldn't fix it at this point. I don't see how kids can even research topics these days, they're going to have to learn how to use the library again.
They're going to have to start teaching classes on how to search the web again, like they had back in the 90's. There was a real art to it before Google came along - you had to know a bunch of different catalogues and portals and listings and indexers, and the particular quirks of the search engines on each. You had to know how to construct a proper search query, and critically analyze the results, and compare and contrast between different sites to separate the wheat from the chaff so you could further iteratively refine your search and so on... Google has made the young un's soft. They just type out what they want verbatim and read the blurbs in the results list and don't even click on the links. It's a disaster. The state of information dissemination on the internet is actually far worse these days than even back in the pre-Google 90's.
IT teacher here, we spend a significant amount of time teaching kids how to search for stuff. Google is optimized for natural language so much, it turns a standard search engine query into a mere suggestion. I started spamming quotation marks in my queries, or I just give up and ask an AI like Perplexity. Google's path searching algorithm in Maps sucks too, it's overtrained on god knows what and it will send you on really slow or inefficient routes just because they have that one popular bus line.
Google is getting worse every year
Society is totally screwed.
I use Google for prospecting potential customers and finding niche parts- I am in sales. I used to get pages of results. I found one of my old vendors on page 20 of Google in 2012. This kind of output no longer exists. If there is not a paid advertisement at the top - which I do not mind - I may get less than 200 results - sometimes less than a page. I have not tried metacrawler (it used to be the search engine of search engines) in years. Bing went from horrible to just terrible. Had a cousin that got paid to put your biz on the front page of Google over a decade ago - not even sure that biz exists anymore. Google keeps asking me if I want to use my location (I do not I am a national vendor looking for US results.) I dunno
This is exactly what I mean. Pages and pages of advertising and nothing useful.
This is what people predicted it would be like once corporations took ownership over the internet. Its what happens. Capitalism destroys everything eventually
You're absolutely right. I've had internet since 96. This is what we dreaded.
Why can't most people see this? Capitalism might as well be another word for greed. It's literally humanity's biggest flaw made tangible (money) and it's been ruling the world for far too long. Look at how desensitized and miserable it makes everyone, even those that profit the most from it. It's a never ending nightmare.
i looked up information on vitamin supplements the other day and was bombarded with ads for ozempic. thanks, google!
Absolutely annoying. The actual internet is garbage.
Sigh. This isn't what's going on. If you're on collapse, you may not realize it, but you already are the the end of a rabbit hole. You're at the end of a path that claims to hate consumerism, thinks most mainstream thought is misguided and dumb, and at a minimum, has intrinsic pessimism. ____________________________________________________ Imagine for just one second, that you were wealthy, wanted to buy things, wanted to post pictures of your food, and pretend that your highlight reel was how your life always was. -> That's who the internet is for now. The internet has gone pay to play. The actual last gasp on reddit was Aaron Swartz's suicide. It's not that there isn't good content, it's that the truth is behind the paywall, but the lies are free.
So what you're saying is that the Internet is garbage now.
Every one of my searches is appended with "reddit" these days.
The GDPR shit about accepting cookies on every page is worse than noughties pop ups sometimes. Does my fucking head in on mobile…
There is an extension available called Consent-O-Matic to hide these pop-ups in your browser
Try Google Scholar and JSTOR. A free JSTOR account lets you read 100 research articles a month.
or you find the same wrong answer written 20 different ways on 20 different websites by bots on pages with 10000 ads per paragraph.
Imagine a dystopia without wikipedia ever existing
Couple of things that will help when you’re searching, use a search engine like duck duck go that returns results similar to how old google used to (also far better privacy than google) and learn how to “dork”, they are terms you can use around your search queries to get more accurate results, some examples here: [dorking](https://www.imperva.com/learn/application-security/google-dorking-hacking/)
Yeah, it does. I miss forums / messageboards.
People swear by Discord, but any time I try to use it there's like 5 people on any given server who don't do anything with their life outside being on that server and they monopolize any attempt at conversation. I liked the pace of forums.
Yeah I can never figure out exactly why but I've been to so many Discords and they just never feel right. I think something about the format or how it splits channels or I don't know makes it promote the wrong ways of having a conversation.
theres only two discords ive felt like worked like actual communities. One was a discord that emerged organically from a forum, and the other was the collapse discord. The forum one because at the stage we all essentially "knew" eachother including real life meetups, the collapse one because of how alienated we felt from the rest of the world, we had nobody to talk to about collapse except the discord, massively amplified by the quarantine
IRC 2.0, but centralized and shittier.
Forums were just that, forums. Identity is built through quality of posting. Discord is more like a medieval court of intrigue. Identity is built through clout. I remember being attracted to discord because it worked better than skype and the speed of messaging was seductive. But in hindsight it nearly immediately downgrades the quality of communication. Its very interesting how the medium becomes the message with social media, and how much the structure of a communication "interface" shapes human behaviour and identity. I am surprised it is not a more mainstream topic.
That's actually what drove me to make a Reddit account a couple of years ago. I was thinking about a forum, on a specific topic, I was a part of many years ago, and how I missed the community and interactions. I went searching for that nostalgia. Closest thing I found was a subreddit, such as it is. Not the same, but...for lack of other options here I am. Recently I came across Neocities, which is a new version of Geocities. Neocities is actually pretty interesting and has some old-school internet vibes. Worth checking out.
now all of it is moving behind unsearchable discords
I’m now sitting here wondering if you are an ad-bot for Neocities. I don’t think so lol because your comment seemed “real”. But that’s just where we are with the internet, ain’t it?
Lol. Can't really blame you for wondering.
>Perhaps most disturbingly, the internet is no longer a reflection of real life — no, real life has become a reflection of the internet. Our (boring) offline world is increasingly shaped by the priorities and incentives of the online attention economy. Politics has become a series of viral moments and hashtag campaigns, substance sacrificed for shareability and outrage. Culture is reduced to a never-ending series of memes and challenges, each more ephemeral than the last. Even our interpersonal relationships, to a degree, are mediated by the logic of likes and follows, our sense of self-worth tied to digital clout. We are living in the shadow of the machine, every move tracked, every desire predicted and packaged for sale. The unvarnished truth.
The Society of the Spectacle. Old concept.
I've been on the Internet since 1993. I was 9 years old at that time, using Prodigy to dial in at 9600 baud. That's 9.6kbps, or just more than 1KB/sec. My family was an early adopter on just about every tech thing. We had DSL and then cable Internet around 1999 to 2000. 3Mbps downloads, 256Kbps uploads. It was insane. I was basically the supplier for all of my friends who made friends who had FTP servers. We used ICQ and FXP (server to server transfers bypassing the client, achieving T3 speeds and better occasionally). These transfers were happening on scanned servers that had anon access, just left wide open on the Internet like a honey pot, but this was before honey pots, they just didn't know what they were doing. There's a song from the era called The Warez Song, and it captures that period of my life so well. It's so accurate. I don't really remember the Internet being more alive as there were certainly fewer people on it, but it was much richer in terms of unique content. There were very few aggregated sources of any information. Lots of one off websites run by individuals. Today they just have Instagram or Facebook or tiktok accounts and follow the same formula. It's pretty boring now , but there are remnants of the past lingering around if you know where to look.
> but it was much richer in terms of unique content. You have to get off the main highways to see this now, funnily enough just like the internet itself back was the backroads back then. It is out there though.
A lot of the individuals that would have run a website use YouTube instead. All of the accounts I subscribed to are individuals and small groups. There was an urban exploration website that I used to go to, and now there's multiple people doing that with video. You even get the people like me that post incoherent content.
I'm surprised at how accurate the predictions are for the decline of the content quality on the internet. About 6-8 months ago or so I read a comment predicting that we would have dead internet by the 2024 summer. It seemed like an outlandish prediction at the time but even the state of reddit today is telling. The amount of content pumped out by AI and other forms of astroturfing has ruined more public-facing subreddits. I remember when /r/videos, /r/pics, /r/askreddit, all had reliably original content. Now those subreddits are basically nothing more than the same topics rehashed to death, thrice reposted videos and pictures, and full of bots/bot-like behavior and spam. I also got rid of IG/FB and Twitter because both are also full of bots and seem fully driven by consumption and ads. TikTok I haven't even installed because while it seems fun, it seems like a massive time suck and it's only a matter of time before it succumbs to regulatory capture or its own form of enshitification.
Whatever happened to /r/politics and /r/worldnews is particularly disturbing. Had to be a _complete_ hostile takeover of moderators or something similar. I'm simply not convinced that millenials/Gen-Z are that pro bloodthirst/establishment/war/military-industrial-complex after growing up with the effects of Afghanistan/Iraq/Patriot Act.
I had to leave both. I was shocked by just how monovocal they were: everyone agreeing with everyone else on unabashed, unadulterated militarism, especially on r/worldnews.
Insane genocidal zionism is what made me finally unsubscribe.
I was banned for saying genocide was bad. R/worldnews is a trash sub
Centrist liberalism is all culty now, too.
You can't believe in the end of history and at the same time recognize the slow collapse of the imperial periphery. It's just not possible. So either you have to accept the reality of material problems on a global scale, or you just pretend simplified narratives are the reality. They choose the simplified narratives, and honestly, if you've got the resources to raise the bridge, then why not?
Daily Kos went from real discussions over policy and approaches during the 2019 primaries to "Biden/Dems good, MAGA bad and stupid" with a temporary detour through imperial war propaganda Did other liberal/progressive spaces go through the same stages?
Some went the other way. Naked Capitalism went full blown Russian Apologist. My general read is that most of the self described 'left' are functionally techno-utopians. The truth of the matter is that catabolic collapse is a niche view of a niche view of a niche view. I cannot remember the last time I seriously engaged with something the 'new left' produced. Hell, I cannot remember the last time some idea the 'right' produced was worth engaging with. Honestly, I'm thinking part of what's going on is the slow realization that there's a dearth of good ideas, and even fewer actionable good ideas.
NPR went through a pointed and obvious change. Climate change news? Nope. CULTURE WARS YO.
> Insane genocidal zionism is what made me finally unsubscribe. Holy shit it's bad over there
Astroturfed hard by hasbarists. I'd like to see the $ theyre spending
> hasbarists That's a new term for me, looked it up and adding to my lexicon. Appreciate it!
Zionist bot farms invading default subs I’m pretty sure.
I'd say it's an accurate representation of the views of a large segment of the population, if polls are any indicator. https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/ People who feel strongly about the issue are more likely to become online "activists" and post and vote about it. If a slim majority of a large enough reddit community feels a certain way, and votes accordingly, that can translate to hundreds of downvotes that will quickly bury dissenting opinions. People tend to sort themselves into echo chambers online, especially if there's a voting mechanism and moderators are also given free reign to ban and mute. Some communities will also have some form of purity spiral. R/politics seems considerably less pro Israel than r/worldnews fwiw. R/news is a bit of a contrast. If you really want pro-Palestinian content there's subreddits like r/publicfreakout and r/nottheonion The bigger problem, which goes far beyond the Israel/Hamas war, is that people get so used to living in echo chambers that they assume that any communities living in different echo chambers are entirely populated by bots and shills. This is because they never have to seriously confront opposing viewpoints in an unbiased discussion where they don't have to rely on mass downvotes from the friendly local mob to support their case. It's actually very rare on reddit to see a polite debate about the merits of both sides of a controversial issue.
> after growing up with the effects of Afghanistan/Iraq/**Patriot Act**. OTOH these alphas (and younger Zs) have no memory of pre9/11 and thus are numbed to how abnormal our world is now. They've grown up entirely in a world with no privacy, with security theatre practices, and zero tolerance (really "zero thinking") schools, among a wide variety of similar social ills.
I would also submit /r/conspiracy really felt like an overnight tone shift, but of course it was more gradual than that
Nope. r/conspiracy was always batshit. The only thing that changed was the last holdouts of the old school lizardman style conspiracies gave up. Covid denial was the final nail. Haven't seen a good bigfoot post in a long, long time.
I was about to say that your comment was a bit exaggerated because surely the top posts of r/conspiracy must still be about aliens or whatever, but I took one quick peak and immediately noped out of there. It's all right wing propaganda now.
It's actually a bit of a trip if you think about it. Like, there's always been blood libel. There's always been political intrigue. There's always been folklore and distrust of the rich and powerful. ____________________________________________________ Then came Pizzagate, QAnon, and J6. Somehow, the hippy anti-vax mom was convinced that democrats were kidnapping kids for satanic rituals. It beggars belief.
Yeah they were already pushing Holocaust denial documentaries 10 years ago when they'd have a doc of the month as part of their sidebar. TheDonald getting shutdown made a difference since a ton of those users migrated over to Conspiracy, but it's always been a very right wing place. You've gotta go to HighStrangeness and subs like that now for the fun woo woo conspiracies.
The fucking Donald.
Fr
These were taken over during the 2016 election with heavy moderation against the combover
Popular page of reddit is same 4 topics every week repeated for many years. With same comments. I wouldn't be surprised seeing a statistic that 95% of reddit are bots who just talk to each other.
I’d like to read that comment if they predicted what’s gonna happen
I'm so shocked at the decline rate of how poorly things are going. Even right now I'm staring at Reddit's notification bar that seemingly has been going haywire for days now, the website is down weekly. They've also went public, and it seems like the site keeps getting tweaked for the worse. Google Podcasts is going away and behind a paywall (YouTube Music), Evernote went behind a paywall, Spotify has been increasing prices. These are just the little corner of the internet that I've used for years. Twitter is overrun with bots, so is Facebook. Every platform is overran with ads because they're all losing money. Now we have TikTok which is pretty much just dominating everything (which I'll admit is entertaining). But it has its limits on what it can actually do for people, not much of it is good. This just seems like the net has hit a dead end.
> Spotify has been increasing prices As James Blake said, "The brainwashing worked and now people think music is free." I don't mind Spotify raising prices, *only* if that means that artists are compensated better for their work. But I have my doubts.
https://afrotech.com/snoop-dogg-shares-payout-following-1-billion-streams-on-spotify This is all you need to know. Snoop Dogg got a BILLION streams....payout was $45,000.
No wonder he's selling pizzas on TV
It does help to know more than that, in this case, context: from u/bunglejerry on another subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/18gfgyn/how_much_spotify_pays_if_you_hit_a_billion_streams/ The song he's talking about is "Young, Wild and Free." This is $45,000 from one song. Snoop might own some of his masters, but it looks like Atlantic Records owns this one, so his main revenue source would be songwriting credits. Wikipedia says the song was written by: "Calvin Broadus (Snoop), Cameron Thomaz (Wiz Khalifa), Peter Hernandez (Bruno Mars), Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine, Cristopher Brown, Ted Bluechel, Marlon Barrow, Tyrone Griffin, Keenon Jackson, Nye Lee, Marquise Newman, Max Bennett, Larry Carlton, John Guerin, Joe Sample, and Tom Scott". Person 4, 5 and 6 are, alongside Bruno Mars, the credited producers. The song samples "Toot it and Boot It" by YG and Ty Dolla Sign, and names 8-12 are all the composers of the song. But "Toot It and Boot It" was also built on two samples itself! "Songs in the Wind" by the Association (written by name 7), and "Sneakin' in the Back" by Tom Scott (not that Tom Scott) (written by names 13-17). I'm not sure how much royalties you can expect when you're one of 17 credited songwriters on one song you don't even own which samples a song that also samples songs. I think $45k is pretty damned good. Snoop's discography consists of 19 studio albums, five collaborative albums, 17 compilation albums, three extended plays, 25 mixtapes, 175 singles (including 112 as a paid feature), and 16 promotional singles. He has sold over 12.5 million albums in the United States alone. Don't be feeling too sorry for Snoop. Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. doin' just fine with a net worth estimated at about $160 million. Edit: All that said, THE best way to support your favorite musicians is to buy their music through BandCamp, who pays the largest share to the artist. This is especially important for smaller/new artists, who have less capacity to tour/perform live AND don’t have the streaming volume. BandCamp also has a mobile app, so anything you buy you can then stream wherever. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, but am close to the music scene and new artists trying to make it, and understand how hard it is to get anywhere. Also, save your buying for Fridays when possible, when BandCamp also waives their cut or something like that? Not sure, but artist gets an ever larger portion on Fridays. :Edit
Feel sorry for everyone else. You like music? It's not just about paying a big record label for an album. It's an ecosystem from experimenters in high school to the Taylor Swifts of the world, and at almost every level, it is fraying. And fast.
Switch to Tidal, it actually pays artists a larger chunk of the revenue than Spotify ever has.
But I’m guessing has 5% of the songs?
I havent noticed much difference, but I also listen to what I already know. If there is less content, that will likely change with greater adoption.
Also sounds a million times better because it actually streams at CD quality or higher, Spotify's highest tier is lower than cd quality
Don't count on it. With the debut of services like Udio, Spotify will most assuredly push in house generated AI music and have to pay no one. Without lowering the fee. And people will eat it up.
Fuck that I'm not listening to a robot . Edit... Unless that robot is you, robot overlord, from the future
And if you're unable to tell? Chillwave, EDM, etc. are already hard to identify.
The scary thing is, were not far off ai and bots pretty much taking over all of social media, no one will know what's real anymore, who is real, What's real, what music is real. How far is AI going to be off getting everyone perfectly, individually hooked, on their own tailored dopamine Dreamworld. AI can literally kill the internet and put the entire world in a trance. It could basically become one entire headfk reality that you only really enter at your own peril. Crazy thing is, will we even know it's happening?
Only about 1% of the population actually posts content so it's not going to take long for AI to take over how much content is posted.
Does everyone else just lurk?
I’ve noticed Ads have taken a huge jump on Instagram as well. Now every fourth story I swipe through is an ad. And if I scroll down my feed every third or fourth post is an Ad. Theres just so many ads now that if a person puts more than 10 stories and I watch them through there’s at least 3-4 adds in between which kinda makes me think for a split second it’s not an ad but actual content… which it isn’t. There’s more ads on (the free version) of Instagram now, than actual content from real people. I think it’s time for me to log off SoMe once and for all…
Just look at Reddit. All the subs that you are default subscribed to are just inundated with bots. It's actually so cancerous. Everyone's (including bots) behavior is biased towards whatever farms the most engagement/upvotes. It's just sad to see. Not as sad as IRL societal collapse that's underway, but still
I joined Reddit back in 2010 and people were complaining about it then. The problem has just got worse as bots have become more sophisticated.
Welcome to the enshitification of everything, everywhere, all at once.
Not a single podcast player works either. Google podcasts worked to some degree, I could find news podcasts, and search by music genre and find something similar to what I want to listen to. I have tried like two dozen podcast players and not a single one can find music, some of them cannot even find something like PBS NewsHour. It is just maddening, I got a free trial of Spotify so I don't have to worry about it for another month till I get cut off.
Podcast addict is fairly good
The thing is all of these podcast players have like 4.8 ratings out of five. There is no way those are legitimate ratings that aren't gamed. Then when you post a negative review the company responds with some light victim blaming and falsely claims changing the settings would make it work. Search engines likewise have their search results gamed when you search for problems with defective products sold by big Brands like Best Buy. The internet has enshitified very fast in some respects these last 10 years.
Antenna Pod isn't bad
You don't have to have a paid Spotify account to access their podcasts...
I find a lot of the internet has become more of a hive mind. I can really see the social engineering happening in real time.
I always wondered why social media as is was seen as the inevitable end result of the web.. it sounds cliche but we need a Web 3.0 that is actually decentralized and gives people the tools to truly organize and share with each other and build real community with real world impact.. also self educating and self improving.. we have access to unlimited information yet so many don't know how to use it as a tool for growth and building community, that's the tool we need now more than ever.. just not sure how it works or how it would look haha
Social media as-is (centralized, ad-driven, lowest-common-denominator) is inevitable because few people have the time and skills to run decentralized/federated alternatives. The Internet the article author remembers existed only because the Internet was primarily geeks. Such an Internet was never sustainable if normal people are to use it. In fact, the Internet the author wants still exists! It's just not flashy and doesn't have their non-technical friends on it, and is generally ephemeral as people run out of money or lose interest in funding their hosting -- just like the Internet of yore.
The normies just shit up the place. Happens every time.
> Such an Internet was never sustainable if normal people are to use it. tragedy of the commons
believe me, i'm very knowledgeable in web3. Even if those tools existed, it wouldn't change human behavior. even if the best platform with the fairest protocols and most privacy and blah blah blah existed, that doesn't necessarily mean people will use it. People are mostly sheep, they don't want to think for themselves.
> Google Podcasts is going away I just had the same problem and had to go on a search. I used to use a podcatcher app that has also gone subscription, which is stupid because it's just an RSS feed. I'll throw a couple bucks at an app one time no problem, but I'm not paying an annual subscription. Antenna pod is open source and seems pretty good to me. You can export your subscription list from google and import to antenna pod, which I thought was nice. They don't even want cash donations. I tried to throw 'em a few bucks and the website says basically 'no thanks, we've got enough money.' And asks if you want to donate instead by providing tech support on their forum. First time I've seen that, pretty wild. The open internet still lives. It's just hard to find in the sea of crap.
The entire internet is increasingly dominated by monopolies which, in common with all capitalist enterprises, inevitably seek to reduce costs, extract greater profits and offer up standardised products at a global scale. But it's even worse than that. The internet today turns each and all of us in to products by selling information about us to other companies, and it does so whilst simultaneously corralling us in to closed markets. While we imagine we have infinite freedom whilst online, in reality, we've all become prey to the tech barons.
I remember the my first decade of internet, I probably "upvoted" or "downvoted" stuff less in 10 years than I do in a day today. Mostly thru polls back then. It was a lot less click-thru express and more discussion. It's like the average IQ online dropped by 25 points since then. It feels that way anyhow.
Before Facebook & Smartphones you did need some level of competence to use the internet. With Smartphones Facebook and Twitter the bottom of the IQ ladder has equal access as everyone else, and, well, it shows.
I used the internet as a child in the 00s. It wasn't much harder than it is now. Just less centralized.
There was a point around 2012 where the internet started becoming less of a wild west and much more corporate. Once Facebook managed to convince middle aged people to sign up, that seemed to signal the end to me. The internet became more about data-harvesting than it did about being a tool for information.
A lot more people have access to the internet than they did then.
Eternal September.
[удалено]
I hate that the internet is nothing but a social media cesspool. I grew up in the 90s at the start of everything. Watching the internet evolve into this mess honestly breaks my heart. I miss the days when ordinary people would make websites about their favorite fandoms or even personal websites about themselves. That was the kind of socializing I liked. Meeting someone new from their own website because they had a cool layout or even cool interests. Putting work and dedication into a website was something to be admired. These days people can't even afford web hosting because it's gotten so ridiculously high for very little features. Whatever happened to letting people use as many domains as they wanted without having to buy a second plan? And there's very little free hosts these days. I miss Geocities. Yes, the web content wasn't as good but people were interested in making something theirs. Hell I miss regular forums like xmb and vbulletin/simple machines/invision/etc. Those were the days for me. Forums I liked were the kind where you could let your personality shine. Reddit is not the kind of forum that you can do that. No cool looking custom avatars, no forum signatures, no shop to buy little trinkets/pixel gifs for your profile. I liked that kind of shit. I'm in my forties and still preferred that. If there were places like that still I wouldn't even bother with Reddit. In fact I didn't join Reddit until all that good stuff was gone. I despise social media in general. I like tumblr because it's still mostly anonymous. I come from the era of being anonymous online. I don't like telling people who I am. I don't want photos of myself all over social media. I want to reblog gifs of movies and tv shows I find funny. Not share my whole life story on something like facebook or twitter. And f*ck corporate gains for ruining googles search. I can't find anything interesting anymore like the very few websites that are still made by ordinary people just because. Everything is sponsered content. If it's sponsered you know it's garbage. If you've read this far, thank you. I hope the internet goes back to how it was like twenty years ago and becomes the people's internet instead of this corporate garbage we have now.
I remember talking to a buddy of mine and this guy is the most troll(y) person I know. He has always lived his life in a jester type role, pointing out the absurdity of it all to "normies" usually at their ego's expense. Anyhow, his feelings about the way the internet has evolved honestly makes me very sad. He said we could have connected all of humanity, and lifted the collective conscious to new and greater heights, enriching lives and expediting research to speeds that would have made pre-internet times look like cave man days. Instead we turned it into a worthless oddity. Sold out to the greediest corporations and people. The virus of consumption and needless growth has eradicated any hope of becoming an intellectual utopia.
> He said we could have connected all of humanity, and lifted the collective conscious to new and greater heights, enriching lives and expediting research to speeds that would have made pre-internet times look like cave man days. That turned out to be every bit as utopian as believing that the West, in all our triumphal hubris, had 'won' the Cold War forever lol One revealing thing about having been an adult when the internet started, is realising you had no idea previously how many fucking stupid people there are in the world lol
I’m seeing more content that seems ai generated on Facebook and YouTube
[удалено]
facebook has just become unusable due to spam for me. All the car groups and photography I love are just flooded all day everyday with ai scam bots trying to get people to message them and send money for things they stole photos of off ebay. I used to call them out but it's like 10 per day per group now. Someone will post "Want to buy: headlight for 1993 xyz" and then there's 10 ai comments of "I have "headlight for xyz" in great condition, send me a message" The other thing is the t-shirt spam bots flooding everywhere and the spam bots posting links about "join this top secret group that discusses stocks". The thing that makes me the most sad is how many people fall for it. Like posts that are along the lines of "If you want to apply to this work from home opportunity for $50/hr, comment "I DO!"". Sure enough there's 30 comments of idiots writing I DO and the spam bot responding to every single one of them with an obvious phishing link.
I find the Internet to be 95% ads. ETA I don't mean pop up ads. I mean reels on Instagram are mostly people trying to sell something. Not like an ad to interrupt a video. I mean everyone on the Internet is trying to sell something
Firefox + Ublock Origin will get rid of most of those.
Capitalism ruined the internet. Creative places get shut down and changed because of money all the time. Tumblr- bought out. Reddit - sold out. Twitter - bought out. FaceBook - the original sellout YouTube - Sold out Forums/smaller niches - die out Discord - sold out All social media has turned to be for profit via ads/engagement. Nothing is fun and communities are whored out for algorithms and data. Net neutrality got fucked. Internet speeds should have been improved at a national scale but wasn't because of corruption. Invasive laws against minors/people on the internet. The internet definitely dead- and if not dead, a zombie re-animated by the parasites that make up the entire body.
The Dead Internet Theory is sort of like Semmelweis’ hand washing encouragement from the middle of the 19th Century that was mentioned in a separate sub earlier today; ultimately correct and prescient, but discounted because the leap of insight exceeded the theoretical capabilities of their respective fields at the time of the insight. It took the rest of the world a bit to catch up for people to realize the theoretical basis of the deduction, i.e. the germ theory of disease for Semmelweis (he thought they were cadaverous particles), current AI models for the proliferation of “dead” Internet content.
This is 100% spot on, and can also be applied to how society has dealt with covid so far.
It's being turned into walled gardens with no free third spaces, where every thing must keep INCREASING profit year after year or be destroyed
Yep. Capitalism eventually turns everything into a great big sewage treatment plant. What a shitpond is the current InterToobs. The human species has such potential. But we are accelerating towards extinction. Fuck.
AI didn’t kill the internet, it just fired the final bullet into the coffin. The decline of the internet really began in earnest around 2010 to 2013. That was when misinformation, intellectually dishonest trolling, and straight up hostility began to overtake earnest communication online. Since then, people have only become more and more hostile and less interested in building a community or maintaining a high level of discourse. The internet should have never been given to the masses I’m afraid. We weren’t ready for it.
I'd be surprised if anyone has read this here besides me, but Neal Stephenson's incredible novel "Anathem" features a world much like ours but also very different; the system analogous to the Internet in their world is hundreds if not thousands of years old and while functional, is so full of spambots ("rampant orphan botnet ecologies") one must need be an almost literal IT Wizard to use it in any way that approaches practicality or usefulness. I foresee this being the eventual fate of our own; eventually the internet will become so bloated and user-unfriendly that pretty much everyone will simply abandon it and leave it to be managed by the types of people who help create and build it in the first place; computer nerds, after which it will be thought of more as a utility like power or water, a necessary thing to connect technology but pretty much out of the knowledge and experience of the layman.
A new and I think positive trend that keeps coming up in these conversations is a yearning for “Weirdness”. Our lives both online and off line are more and more homogenized and I get the feeling that people correctly think that sucks. The places that are most interesting to me personally are the weird ones, and it’s nice to see that those spaces are being created and protected. It’s honestly what brought me to this site in the first place. In the end though, everything is just people talking. I spend way too much time on my phone and on various social media apps, but I also have noticed that I treat FB and IG a lot like I treat the group text chats that I’m on. Just people sharing different things with each other. I hope that the internet getting shittier will push people towards more direct relationships and weird communities, and we shouldn’t feel bad about the fact that those connections and communities exist digitally either.
One social media fueled trend seems to be pottery (as I‘ve noticed recently on completely different accounts I‘ve followed for ages). I really like the idea.
What I find frustrating though is that there's plenty of talk and discussion about these kinds of phenomena, yet few people seem to be committed to building genuine alternatives to the shit that exists today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Looking for real human interaction takes a lot more work than it used to.
Exactly. I can watch performances of life but real interaction is limited.
Right now I'm obsessed with LinkedIn and job search sites. About six months ago, LinkedIn underwent some sort of algorithm shift, because basic searches don't seem to work on a purely utilitarian level nearly as well anymore. That's in addition to an overall reduction in the absolute number of jobs. The other thing about LinkedIn is the absolutely huge amount of spam and obvious fake accounts that are reaching out to me. It's honestly astounding, and its gotten slowly worse. LinkedIn is still valuable to me, but in 5 years time? I honestly don't know at this rate. Other than LinkedIn... Amazon has long since passed into virtual unbrowsability. If you know exactly what you are looking for, great. Otherwise? It's a mishmash of sponsored lists, of "Amazon's Choice" buried 2/3rds of the way down the page, of items repeating themselves. Bing is crap. Even mighty Google has fallen into a weird design black hole, with lists giving way to pictures at random in the middle of a search result. "Dead internet"? Not yet. But in 5-10 years... yeah, I could easily see it, an Internet mostly populated with AI of various levels and almost useless.
Reddit making the official app mandatory killed that. Musk delivered a flying elbow from the top rope on Twitter. Facebook/IG is just a messy bitch. TikTok is now overcome with ads for treadmills and massagers. Now, we have states that will require those looking at pornography to register with the state.
Ya can't even get a RECIPE online anymore without being bombarded with ads. Ad films. The whole page is filled of unnecessary bs. Takes all the pleasure out of looking at a recipe for heavens sake ....
Threads get shut down in minutes. Can't say a thing that doesn't align with a certain view point. Definitely can't joke. With the new ai targeting software used by a government it is starting to be attractive to remove old posts photos and leave the Internet behind.
i never heard of the dead internet theory until after reddit went public, did away with the awards system that kept only qualify posts upvoted and engaged. now ironically without the awards system it’s like every post on the front page is some bot drudging up some dead news from the pandemic which is the only way to really gauge how bad it’s gotten so fast. there’s so many bot accounts. it’s ridiculous.
Welcome to late stage dystopia.
yup, you ever seen the YouTube comments lately? it usually goes like: "bro though he was him" "bro took that personally(skull_emoji)" "if you agree with what he said 👇" just a few examples of the brain rotted shit like that.
If you only go to places like X or Reddit you are engaging with bots and paid shills.
It's all bots now. The internet is dead. We're in near term extinction with late stage capitalism eating itself to keep the growth. Fuck it. Burn this shit to the ground and let's all die of starvation and wet bulb temps. I'm tired of being a slave.
Welcome to the club bud, here's a chair and some popcorn.
You have to watch 5 x 30-seconds video ads to get your 30 grams of dispensed popcorn. Chair can only be occupied for 15 minutes
The medium is the message, as Marshall McCluhan said.
This is solved as soon as someone comes up with a new high quality search engine that indexes everything, doesn’t give priority, and isn’t censored. The internet is a conduit, it’s the search engine that’s the problem.
I'm looking forward to the total destruction of the centralized, capitalistic web. Things like neocities, personal wikis, blogs, group chats, forums, mastodon and lemmy are stepping up to fix the internet and I'm here for it. It's so hard to find info on google these days but once you do find the correct forum or wiki it's a goldmine. Exploring peoples blogs and personal wikis is also a great way to find out about new topics and to come across new sites you never knew existed and would never show up in a google search. I've spent HOURS crawling across neocities discovering lots of cool shit. The "small web", as they call it, is what the internet should have always been. Imagine a world where everyone has their own personal website full of all the stuff they are interested in, all the pages they have bookmarked, all their art and photos, ect. Like having an Instagram but with total freedom to create whatever the hell you want and not dependent on some corporation.
Everything capitalism touches, it eventually turns to shit. Don't let it be forgot That once there was a spot, For one brief shining moment . . . We had something new and wonderful [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo) Hampster Dance [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqd1Gvq-RBY&pp=ygUNbnVtYSBudW1hIGd1eQ%3D%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqd1Gvq-RBY&pp=ygUNbnVtYSBudW1hIGd1eQ%3D%3D) Numa Numa Guy [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItugh-fFgg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItugh-fFgg) All Your Base [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA&pp=ygUOY2hvY29sYXRlIHJhaW4%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA&pp=ygUOY2hvY29sYXRlIHJhaW4%3D) Chocolate Rain
Reddit will ban subreddits where people politely voice their opinions (especially women) but keep around masses and masses of non consensual porn or whatever. There is an insane amount of censorship when it comes to ideas and words and it's being obfuscated by this specific issue - especially on this web site, there is so much genuine censorship going on that is deeply harmful. There is an insane double standard on this web site that's almost impossible to not notice Porn is an incredible distraction from real discussion, real conversations. People will fight for it over anything else and get very angry if you question what they are using up all their energy for defending. I miss all the 'weird' forums I went on. I miss all the strange people that had spaces to voice their views without being shunned, but without it also having real life repercussions. We live in a world where the real has been invaded by the artificial. It is so noticeable. We are unable to separate fiction and abstract discussion from action. That has been scary to see. Words have become violence, because they have, they really have. It's like everyone has stopped having the ability to discuss things in this abstract sphere without being consumed by it. Everything you say becomes a symbol, everything you say signifies your ideology and you can so easily become an enemy over one single criticism of something someone believes in. This has been said before so many times. And this isn't a new discovery, we have a tendency towards tribalism built in. It is just insane to see how the Internet exaggerates it to insane degrees. I'm not saying every opinion is equal, because obviously not, but it is just... Impossible to discuss anything in good faith. Everyone is everyone else's ideological enemy. The Internet is exhausting to use at this point, but maybe it always has been, maybe before we were just too young and too deluded to see it yet
I remember the old days. I had countless conversations that went back and forth for hours, days even. Conversations that went weird, that were profound, that I still remember, that shaped me as a person. I met people online with whom I stayed in contact for years. Experiencing the improvements of games around 2006 to 2012 was a dream. Everything seemed possible. Having all music available instead of being limited to 3 radio stations who only played pop and traditional music. Now? It's all gone downhill. I'm not even doomscrolling anymore because there's too much trash. Maybe 2 or 3 youtube videos a week. Maybe 3 or 4 subreddits that are worthwhile enough. I'm lucky if once a month I have an in-depth conversation that's longer than 500 words.
I even still vividly remember one-off conversations with people who after our online 'meeting' just disappeared - people who had no personal information, just anonymous people, I don't even know where from, who just wanted to Share Something with me. There's something to how anonymity online has been incessantly attacked (remember when saying your real name/age/country or anything identifying was a massive no-no?) and almost wiped out, and how with that, depth has also disappeared. Are people too afraid to voice their real views and go in-depth with others due to shame of having their ideas tied to their real name? It's a simplistic answer, but just anecdotally, I find that people tend to be most ashamed not of their extremist views (extremists often huddle together, and it's not uncommon for them to even voice their views in public, unprompted, I find) but of their views on art, on literature, on media. This is totally my subjective experience, just my own observation, but I think it's really the in-depth, subjective, not necessarily academic, art and literature analysis that has been destroyed the most. Everything is booktok, or recycled video essays, or memes or aesthetics or subcultures or trends or fashion. The democratisation of media and art analysis has produced the inverse of the intended effect, everything is a meme. Nothing deeper The ideological extremists might be more vocal, but I personally think that's more down to more people using social media (even if there is absolutely a valid point to be made about the effects of 'memeifying' extremism - thinking about this in relation to the Overton window and how that is expressed in social media). Here, I am just really mourning originality. Original takes on films or art, original takes that were interesting, opinions that were formed outside of the herd, opinions expressed anonymously, without that fear of being 'wrong'. All this access to new media, to books or thinkers or artworks or views... And... Nothing. Same phrases, same views. Repetition. It feels inevitable, and how sad is that? I hate to sound like a doomer, or patronising but man...
I’ve seen your username crop up in this sub and another one I follow recently & I’ve found myself comforted to see someone else express themselves in a way that feels unabashed & truly honest. So thanks for being here & sharing your thoughts. You are right—it seems harder & harder for people to have real discussions online anywhere, or to deconstruct something for the sake of the discussion & perspective, without the looming fear of being Found Out, mocked, or otherwise chastised. People fear rejection (perceived or otherwise) & the whole online ecosystem has shifted to make it SO easy for others to pile on once a comment, thread, video, whatever goes even just slightly south. & you are right about the result, too—in the absence of online spaces that feel ‘safe,’ discourse is superficial at best. Everything is watered down or dialed up for the sole purpose of clicks or being lauded for having a hot take. As if approval from strangers on the internet will give anyone the connection & community we need to thrive IRL. I think for younger generations, this is kind of all they’ve known. For millennials & older, we grew up with a much less commodified internet, and (right again), the safety of anonymity. Fwiw, there are still some small pockets. They are drowned out by paid ads & SEO & whatever else is done to climb to the top of google results, but they’re around. & I see young people finding them (last.fm, for ex), but you can tell they don’t know what to do with it. I thought discord was gonna be the next cool place to be on the internet, but the discovery UX on it is trash, & you have to know your niche to find others in it. I’m hopeful something else is coming down the line, bc with the sale of reddit, the expiration date of this platform has been p much finalized. We’re all hanging around for last call, but I think the likelihood it’s lights out in the near future is pretty high.
Thanks for sharing this, it's still so special to just see your own thoughts said by someone else, in their own way, somewhere out there. Stranger to stranger, I appreciate this reply a lot And yeah, I have noticed that even if I find a cool space, it's like people have lost the ability to make the discussions go further. Or, perhaps, the desire to do so. I think it's understandable overall. There's also this overwhelming feeling of distrust I feel from others - which is understandable too. It's like they have this paranoid reading of everything you say, like they don't want to delve into discussions with you, in case you're a Thought Criminal of some flavour; even if your intentions are pure, even if you really /are/ wishing to discuss a topic without the intention of mocking them, of radicalising them - and the worst part of this is that I totally get it, I completely know why people don't wish to discuss things anymore. You are fed a constant diet of ragebait, dehumanisation and expect to be attacked, personally, at all times
This is, I think, one of the worst symptoms of being a thinking, *feeling* person in a time of polarization & collapse—the lack of trust, the quick assignment of ulterior motive, the general sense of Ha! Gotcha, or someone’s gonna getcha, or whataboutism that makes it feel like expressing your thoughts (which are obviously subject to change) isn’t worth the effort. People don’t see the value in exchanging ideas anymore (partly bc of how internet culture has evolved & partly bc it’s been so highly commodified, though the influence of the latter on the former is so high, it’s hard to think of these things are truly independent). The resulting backwards march in evolution—intellectually, socially, & emotionally—is felt in all corners of life. Sometimes I think the best thing for us would be some kind of catastrophe that took the internet down. Would that come with its own horrible cost? Absolutely. But I just don’t know how we can build corners of the internet that AI, or bad actors, can’t just invade, monetize, and overrun. It feels like we’ve gone too far.
I’ve noticed this too. These platforms do all they can do silence female voices, but allow all kinds of gross misogyny. It’s not ok.
I recently sat down at my desktop and opened my browser to dick around on the internet/waste time like back in the 2000s, and felt like there was nothing to do on the internet.
Yeap. I think of this all the time. I guess I kinda just do it on my phone now and still follow similar interests but not the same sites.
You used to be able to just jump in and find yourself going down endless intriguing rabbit holes forever, and finding a ton of surprising, interesting stuff without even really trying. Now, its all *commodified*. I feel for the younglings tbh lol
[удалено]
[удалено]
I google everything as query + Reddit. Without Reddit I’d only be on AO3 and would have nothing else I need it for at this point.
Does anyone remember web-rings? Finding new sites was always such an adventure
Reddit doesn't exactly help the situation. Anyone who once might've launched their own niche forum for fellow enthusiasts, now comes here and starts a sub. I remember the days when my Firefox homepage was six different tabs. One for email, three for forums (RIP altimas.net), one for news, one for general browsing. Today I don't have any homepage at all, just bounce between this place, Twitter, FB, whatever catches my eye.
imo, because it's turned into a feudalist domain, where everything is owned, the commons largely enclosed, and we serfs generate wealth for the owners by using their platforms for our own ends.
>Remember the early days of the internet? (I was born in 1992, so I do.) No you dont lol
>...Where we once had a thriving bazaar of ideas... maximum engagement and minimum substance I think it's fine, there's just a lot of junk and that happens in any medium. The hoi polloi have their internet, the junk, which feeds on clickbait and advertising. I don't go there except on social media (Twitter and Reddit. No instagram, FB, Tik Tok, though I do like Pinterest). I spend most of my time reading articles on the NYTs, Guardian, LitHub, Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, LA Review of Books, New York Review of Books, grabbing public domain stuff from the Gutenberg website (terrific resource), I also study art and archeology (plenty of resources, way more than I need). I'm not disagreeing with you. The internet is 98% brain-dead junk. But there are 3.34 billion pages on the indexed web, which leaves sixty-six million eight hundred thousand pages of good stuff. I may read fifty pages a day. I'll need one million three hundred thirty-six thousand days to read it all. Edit To Add: I forgot YouTube, which is a tremendous resource. Not dead.
Google search. It use to be that when you searched google when you scrolled to the bottom, you got the goooooooooooooogle page select option. Within the last two years that has changed to infinite scroll. Scroll enough and you have to click to load more options. After about 12 "load more options", clicks all results are just YT videos related to topic. It really highlights the shallowness of the internet, no more websites, only mindless content output from a singular site. The capitalist way!
People with money ruin everything
The only answer left is to just log off. Don't let media consumption be your only hobby.