Jaded about the internet?

It was exciting when I was a teenager but now I am a fifty year old lady who is just trying to use it to get paid for drawing stuff and I am really tired of fighting the social media corporations' constant decisions to de-emphasize posts with offsite links to places where I can get people to pay for my work. The thought of pivoting to making vertical videos because all the kids are on TikTok now feels incredibly exhausting, especially because I know it'll probably be replaced by yet another corporate-owned social site with its own bullshit in a year or two.

NFTs just seem to add an extra layer of bullshit where every transaction happens via a bunch of people wasting an absurd amount of energy to perform useless computation in hopes of being the one who wins the lottery for some cryptocurrency. Don't tell me your favorite crypto's moving off of PoW, it's wasting incredible amounts of energy right now and moving off of that relies on getting a consensus from people who are financially incentivized to stay on PoW.

(The most damning sentiment about NFTs I've seen is that there are two groups who are historically at the forefront of new ways to get paid on the internet: porn makers and furries. And neither of them is into NFTs.)

The internet used to be so wild, dangerous, unpredictable. At some point, it was defanged. Now everything is safe, sanitized, and governed. Everything has to be nice and inoffensive. Gone are the days when you might stumble across an ISIS beheading video on youtube. Even places like 4chan are heavily moderated now.

As a source of information, the internet has decayed significantly too. Specialized knowledge seems to have moved from phpBB forums into private discords, which cannot be searched, indexed, or archived.

Everything has become centralized. Remember when games (quake, csgo, minecraft, etc) gave you the server executable so you could run your own server under your control? That seems to have completely disappeared in the past ~5 years or so. And discord misleadingly calls chatrooms "servers" when in reality it's all one centralized mainframe.

Websites now subvert the basic function of a computer as a tool for storing and manipulating bytes. To save a video on reddit I have to leave a comment with the name of a bot. To save a video on twitter I have to install a browser extension or use a third-party website.

It just feels like the whole computing world is rotting and I don't know what to do about it. There's nowhere to go, unless you want to live in the past.

I'm jaded about the entire industry, it feels like we've invented everything genuinely useful and now we're just doing make work.

I'm more bullish on technology in general and some of the software that can enable that (e.g. fusion research, CCS, self-driving cars).

But general purpose computing? The open source scene and people tinkering is cool. The commercial side is just pointless, I can't think of anything _useful_ (as opposed to merely being addictive) in the last ten years.

Whenever I speak to software developers in real life now I get the sense that they're just "not my people". No, I don't want to talk about social media VR, or advanced data mining, or facial recognition or whatever.

Even the more mundane stuff is like... okay, so you work at Amazon. Cool, I like to shop on my high street, err... let's talk about something else then.

The internet is infinitely interesting and I'm still as spellbound by it like I was 25 years ago. You just have to look beyond the FAANG websites. Most recently I have been having a lot of fun using AI image generators like https://neuralblender.com/ and grepping 4chan's /x/ archive for cool spooky stories and anecdotes. Did the same with Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28598590). I can give a lot more examples of how to find interesting content.. Let me know if anyone would like me to do a blog post on it.

This sounds more like a complaint about human behavior than about the Internet. Why do people eat at chain restaurants and watch blockbuster movies? There's certainly a cost aspect to it, as well as a simple lack of knowledge about what alternatives are available. But generally speaking, people want what other people want; well-run companies simply cater to a pre-existing demand.

You can level the same complaints to wearing fast fashion, picking which city to live in, and even choosing a tech stack to implement on. The homogeneity you're dismissing is what most people want in the first place. Decentralization won't change any of that.

Yes. The decentralized web already existed. It was phpbb/vbulletin (or self hosted website) powered and had niche forums for all types of topics. You had an identity specific to that site, with each behaving as their own community with rules and norms. Not happy with a given forum? Go rent a server and start your own community. With Linode/DO and things like Softalicous, this is much cheaper and easier than it was back in the day, but everything consolidated into walled gardens meant to track and monetize everything while monopolizing your attention.

"Web 3" is just a cash grab under the guise of a "blockchain". As an analogy, crypto is a channel on IRC-- it is a topic, people love talking about it, but the underlying tech (IRC protocol, blockchain) isn't being fully utilized, and may never have a solid, widespread commercial application. Yes, governments have adopted some crypto, DAOs are a neat concept, but how many applications are so novel that blockchain is actually the best and/or only application of said tech?

For the "new web" concept, we have yet to see internet for the people, created and curated by people without monetization as their primary motive. Will Gen Z (or whoever come next) be tired of the walled gardens and try to reinvent what the old web was, or will they just be amused by the shadows on the wall of their caves?

The internet is a network of nodes, none of which are secure. The addition of commerce to that network brought in a profit motive, which will always find new ways to exploit the insecurity of the nodes, the routes, and the end users, for profit.

Most people seem to think that computers, the nodes of the internet, can't ever be made secure. I believe they're wrong, but still have to wait a decade or so before the basic design defect in most operating systems is corrected.

Most computers "on" the internet aren't fully privileged nodes, but rather second class citizens with "access" to "content", instead of being a fully functional computing peer. I'm not sure if this will ever be corrected.

Humans are always going to fall for scams, but that's not specific to the internet, so we can ignore that in the judgement of the nature of the internet. It speeds, and widens, communications between people, when done properly.

I think things will get better in the next few decades, if we don't fall victim to our knowledge of physics (nuclear weapons) or biology (gain of function research).

[Edit/Append] It's extremely important that we don't lose free access to general purpose computing, if we want to maintain our freedoms in general. With general purpose computing, you can build a sneakernet, or your own internet.

> but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it.

Why? Why wait for a while? Why is "leveraging" your goal for it? What does this even mean? 20 years ago were you waiting for things to get fleshed out online before you leverage it? Whatever that means.

No I don't find the web dull. Been here 23 years, always found fascinating stuff. Yes it is different now but also we have aged.

> Other than that, the web seems kinda boring lately.

Sorry but I think it is you not the web here.

I'm jaded about the Internet.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence didn't last.

The web is no longer "surfed". The web is an escalator of sanitised material, surveilled and stateful.

On the plus side, the web is now used by billions of people to solve real problems. That's nice, but it's not a place of exploration for me anymore.

I can point to several communities which unfortunately died after they tried to mistakenly expand and embrace a wider audience.

Small forums worked because a lot of people soaked up the cost of running a little web page on a box that wasn't very expensive per year. A lot of them eventually, decided they didn't want to spend the money or time and hand off to a new maintainer.

The new maintainer looks to (reasonably) expand the community and embrace new technologies, e.g. live chat, video. This creates 10x the work at least and eventually they give up and pack it in.

Now, unfortunately the work to take over the community on it's current state is much larger than the original site and so it eventually dies without someone wanting to work a full time job without the pay...

I miss the optimistic lose communities of the 90s when I was growing up. Not to mention the communities on topics which are now no longer of interest to a wide audience. The amount of organic search needed to rediscover any new forums now is also unfortunately a new barrier to entry there never used to be :(

quote but applied to something else like music:

Are you jaded about music? I've been listening to the radio for 20 years now and I feel like I've reached the pinnacle of what music is about and have in a way reached the end of music. I've listened to just about everything you could want, and went to many concerts over the years, and I feel everything is just 'samey' now and follows the same pattern. It's hard for new music to stand out and be unique (at least for me). YMMV on this.

--

I think this perspective is common and makes sense. Many of us feel it. I am not sure crypto/web3 is the solution. To bring web3/crypto into this analogy, is web3 a new way to decentralize record companies and put power into the "bands" rather than the corporations? If so, then it won't fix the problem. Centralization still finds great stuff and doesn't hinder creativitiy and bands from making music. It eventually finds them and helps change the landscape. However, if crypto is a new way to make music (app platform) with brand new instruments and new sounds.. then maybe it is the future that will take a long time. Artists are still in the basement trying to figure out how to operate these things and get them to make cool sounds

I try to collect and share weird, unique, or independent websites on https://stumblingon.com

I believe that centralization of the web has killed off a lot of the weird uniqueness and made things more boring. I'm trying to find and share sites that aren't like that. I recently changed the site's layout and think it may be messed up on mobile, so sorry about that.

A large portion of the Internet, or perhaps just what Google search somehow ends up optimising towards, seems to fall into the category of celebrity gossip magazines.

I do remember that the more technical content, and all the tiny user created websites about someone's pet trivia, we're more easily found, back in the day. Perhaps it's just a problem of discovery.

I feel like we have experienced a second Eternal September with the rise of smartphones. I started using the internet in the late 90s (so after Eternal September), but even in my early days of being online it wasn't at all normal to spent lots of time on forums, chat rooms etc. Doing so made you a nerd/geek (not necessarily in a bad way). So the communities you encountered online, while less elitist than in the pre-Eternal September days, were still mostly drawn from a small, specific subset of society who shared common interests (and probably socio-economic backgrounds).

Nowadays the "online community" is not just the entire community, it is in fact larger and more diverse than any actual real-life community. It feels like a third age; the online population went from a handful of academics in US universities, to a larger (but still small, relatively speaking) group of like-minded individuals, to literally everyone.

The internet isn't dead, it's just different now. And sadly, maybe it's not really for us anymore.

Art, movies, books, music, lectures, tutorials, interviews, news, weather forecast, maps, dictionaries, encyclopedias (whole libraries!) all literally at my fingertips.

No I'm not bored. But it's just a tool, for me.

Being able to walk between AR/VR spaces like we walk between websites is going to be game changing.

Some sort of standardized metaverse protocol is absolutely the next layer that will put the current "internet" to shame.

Some time within the next two decades, most people will be wearing AR glasses and a metaverse will begin to take shape.

Metaverse likely won't obviate the need for traditional internet for some time, but we'll laugh at our arrogance in thinking that we experienced the peak of the internet at any point beforehand.

The ultimate abstraction is not hyperlinked text on a flat panel, but objects, places, and people in our physical reality. Eventually flat-panel internet and UX won't even be a thing.

I would only salvage Archive.org, Libgen and Scihub. Funny taht two out of three things worth something are by Russians dodging copyrights.

>with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all the things, which is good to see

Hate to disappoint, but decentralization won't happen at any real scale. The "sameiest" thing of all will be the manner by which the democratizing hope of technology is once again dashed as it's recaptured by capital (as with the Internet itself). It's already happening.

See: all of the VCs currently touting Web3, NFTs, etc as if they discovered it.

There will be a few new winners, but they will largely win through centralization, and will frequently have the support of incumbents/capital.

I like Web 2.0. People on Reddit and HN are friendly and helpful and I enjoy interactive content platforms like YouTube and Twitch but I can agree most of the internet services feel the same.

>Now with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all the things, which is good to see, but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it.

People care about UX not technology. If Web3 has better utility and UX than Web 2.0 then people will switch to it.

I'm always interested in other alternate Internets. If you're feeling over the existing web there's always Gemini or DAT to conjure up those warm fuzzies of the early net.

- https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ - https://beakerbrowser.com/

I'm nearing 50. I remember first seeing the internet in '95 when I was able to read the Tour de France daily recaps instead of having to wait two-weeks for velonews to be printed.

I'm far from jaded about the internet, in fact, I'm very excited about what this next stage will bring.

Are you familiar with the S curve of innovation? (https://www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/organisati...)

It seems like you almost know that when Web3 gets figured out, you'll get excited again. You don't have to be excited about what is happening every day. If you want to get excited jump in and figure out what you'd like to see Web3 do, and build it (I'm assuming you're an engineer).

The new Web3 stuff has been the most exciting frontier since the bitcoin whitepaper in 2009. Urbit is super cool, ETH is really interesting. There's a ton of stuff happening in the space - like I imagine what 1999 probably felt like. Yeah there's hype and lots of bubbles + company failures, but there's real underlying technical innovation and success too. That's what makes it an exciting frontier of new stuff.

There's a lot of fun stuff going on and the future looks bright.

Hopefully the domination of centralized SaaS of the last decade will mostly be an anachronism of our time, and the original hope of a decentralized p2p web will happen after all. We were trapped in a local maximum of thin clients and accounts, but maybe this will be the way out.

I also feel like the illusion of variety has been broken for me. I feel like it’s always the same kind of person who you find on any forum regardless of the topic — a power user who is on the spectrum and socially awkward and not very smart in certain areas of life. I used to come across a comment and wonder what kind of person wrote it but now I feel like I kind of know who wrote it and the internet has become a lot less mystical and useful since. The parts of the internet where non-spectrum people hang out have all the same problems of exclusion that the real world has for me. It’s all pointing to the fact that the internet hasn’t really changed anything fundamental like we were all led to believe by the hype.

I am. But understandably so.

Web is made by humans, there will be dreams, lies, fluff, wins, fails, rot. It's just another organs amongst organs.

I also believe it was an extrapolation of the previous era (as you do) and that like all extrapolation.. it's partly wrong. Being able to talk to gazillions of people is not necessary a boon.

In any case I'm more and more in the process of focusing on disconnected time. Reading, doing, learning and sharing. Especially with the potential climate change acceleration and societal quakes.

ps: about web3, I just wrote a bit about how it might be useful to keep an eye on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370620

Not jaded, but then, I was never that excited by it, either.

It's a tool. A substrate. An infrastructure.

All of these things go through a "The sky's the limit!" excitement, when they are first introduced. Electricity, TV, and even nuclear fission, were greeted in a similar manner.

I'm glad it's here. I use it all the time, but I don't feel disappointed that it turned to shit, because I never expected it to be anything more.

http://hmpg.net

https://www.internetisshit.org

I honestly think living offline would be next trend in few years.

I thought the Internet would be the great equalizer and bring humanity's knowledge an cohesion to an higher level, and in some way it did with great collaborative platform like Wikipedia, GitHub, etc, but social media and the intense polarization it brings is creating a huge social rift that I am incertain that it will end well.

The international element is interesting. Chinese censorship shaping technology and our own domestic surveillance, the battle of platforms, ai and psychological manipulation. So much teeters on the brink. So much will change, soon. Not that I’m an optimist, but it’s hard to call it boring when it’s not nearly as static as op implies.

If you’ve only been online for 20 years then you missed the best of it. Nothing truly new has been invented on the internet after 2000. By then I think we had www, email, irc, geocities, aol, search engines, e-commerce, napster, etc.

Everything that came after is just a reverberation.

This version or evolution (or arguably devolution) of the internet is due to for-profit interest drivers leading to design decisions that aren't overall good for people. This was all accelerated by the VC industrial complex, along with the Ad industrial complex.

SnR is bad now, but has been since mid 90s and Eternal September feels like as good a time as any on the timeline. However, I’m sure more quality and novelty exists now than has ever existed, it’s just harder to find.

“web3” is a marketing lie designed to sell suckers on 21st century tulip mania.

all the things are decentralized already.. facebook is not the internet, it's just a website, you're free to put one up too, just install a webserver program on your computer and forwawrd port 80 on your router to your computers ip address, and you're literally a part of it!

Started getting disappointed as surveillance capitalism started taking roots and when the cartelization of internet began and BigTech started dividing it among themselves.

Nope, very hopeful, lot of stuff to do, we are still at the beginning of the Internet

I've been jaded about the internet since September 1993.

Wake me up when September ends ;)

Three words: Industrial Dance Battle

You're welcome.

90% of the web is broken/slow/glitchy/inaccessible. It’s an absolute scandal. Shame on you managers and devs.

I don't think we've reached the pinnacle just yet. If anything, I feel like we've only scratched the surface. But I can see a transition on the horizon and I'm not fully sure what that would be. I feel like it's yet another case of Charles H. Duell's famous "Everything that can be invented has been invented" quote from the late 19-th century. I basically grew up on the internet, starting from when I was six in 1994. And in those 27 years the internet has changed multiple times and each time I heard people saying "this is it, this is as good as it will ever get". The semantics of the word "good" aside, they were always proven wrong. The internet created an economy that is almost independent from the real world. Starting from the early emails, the first online payments, then it was web 2.0, bandwidth caught up to the demand, then it was the whole smartphone-social network-streaming services pack. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but AI never picked up and was almost killed off by an artificially blown out hype from marketing side. Just try and remember what the HN frontpage used to look like 4-5 years ago - a good 30% of all posts were AI related. At this point in time there could be weeks without anything on the subject. Don't get me wrong, it's an incredibly interesting field with a lot of potential but I don't think it is/will be the next big thing. The cryptocurrency thing really caught me off guard to be honest and I would have never imagined that it would be such a big deal. If anything I was willing to bet more on AI than crypto but here we are. As far as NFT I'm incredibly skeptical and I can't see this going anywhere. I'm equally skeptical about metaverses - that sounds plain stupid if you ask me.

Two things I'm keeping my eyes open for however:

1. IoT. Much beyond your wifi enabled light bulbs crap. Low power microcontrollers and sensors are dirt cheap and are opening a whole new world. Also 3d printing has come a long way and is very easily accessible to most people. Prototyping and developing small, low powered devices has never been this accessible. Just to give you an idea, this[1] entire section of my shelf in my office has probably set me back less than 200 euros and there's 3 times more stuff which has gone into different projects already from those 200 euros. The one thing missing are standards for communication and interfacing with those devices because as we stand right now, it's more or less every man for himself. IoT is a gold mine not just for smart homes but for manufacturing, distribution and infrastructure - the amounts of things that can be built is insane.

2. It is related to the first point and I might be a bit biased here/geeking out but... Space. This is something I've been investing a lot of time in lately and have been researching/thinking about prototypes. I was absolutely blown away by how accessible it is to launch your own micro satellite into the thermosphere. As it turns out, you could do that for less than a five figure. Of course you'd need to go through an absolute nightmare of paperwork, regulations, licenses and whatnot but... The number of companies that are working in that field is incredibly small. Shameless plug in here - if anyone is interested in giving me a hand on a (mostly) open source project in that area, do contact me(email in profile).

[1] https://i.imgur.com/XRRmpwd.jpg

If you want to keep vertically scaling the internet as an engaging virtual experience, Zuckerberg is your guy. Once the "Metaverse" launches in a meaningful sense, the masses will stop caring about cryptocurrencies/NFTs and start caring about whatever virtual goods and markets and experiences emerge on that platform.

For me, the internet is getting more interesting because it is increasingly materialized. It is unbelievable that we can deploy a fleet of battery-powered flying robots, linked over 5G and sharing intelligence while pathing with superhuman precision.

It's sad that in America, IoT/smart cities were more or less a temporary fad, probably having to do with cultural opposition to "surveillance" and low standards of governance. We've only scratched the surface with what's possible with it.