People are way too pessimistic about AI. NVIDIA is going to sell GPUs by the truckload until research finds a way around CUDA.
Sure, the pace of big leaps has slowed, but I liken this phase to the early 1900s. Cars were slow and unreliable, but once the technology took foothold and the 4th Industrial Revolution really took off, look how much progress was made. We went to the moon by the 60s.
AI is causing water shortages, rising electric costs and chip shortages. AI is just a fancy search engine, that can be a useful tool. It was awesome for ai to read my blood test results but I don’t need it for most things, a waste of energy. Search engines should have an off button for ai, turn the lights off when we’re not using it.
The sad truth is that today traditional search engines have been run into the ground by SEO, and some how chatbots backed by LLMs are producing what Google used to call the “I’m feeling Lucky” button. It used to just automatically take you to the first result for your query which was usually what you wanted.
I totally understand the challenges with infrastructure that need solving, but that doesn’t mean AI is useless or that it’ll never be better than it is now.
Frankly, the “AI slop” crusade isn’t working. It’s time to choose a new fighter.
I cannot fathom why I wouldn’t be pessimistic about a tool that’s being crammed into places it doesn’t fit. There are a small handful of things generative algorithms are genuinely useful for. But expecting it to magically solve anything else is foolish, and always will be.
Interesting comparison, but how many of the original car companies are still around today? And did those early car companies inflate and manipulate the stock market?- they probably weren’t even publicly traded in the early days.
I think a crash is on its way regardless of how successful AI will be decades into the future
I don’t doubt they’ll keep selling more GPUs, but AI certainly looks like a bubble that’s ready to burst with all the fake money going around in circles (assuming those diagrams are correct, which I assume they are).
Not the mention the lies that are keeping AI companies propped up, like AGI that will replace everything “in 3 months”. Pretty sure they missed that deadline already.
With the current “fake” money, lies and over-investment, something bad is surely going to happen unless someone steps in.
AI advances quite a bit each day, but I’m not sold on AGI becoming a thing any time soon, maybe even ever idk.
Not sure what you can lookup, probably stuff like “AI investment bubble”
This is probably a good resource (haven’t read it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_bubble (specifically look under Speculation > Circular Financing, soz dunno how to link to a header)
I don’t have a source and this might be old news, but a lot of the big deals right now are just “promises” to invest I think (money, etc not exchanged hands yet)
All that shows is who the business partners are. Nvidia sells GPUs, AI companies buy GPUs, and companies buy products from AI companies. For example, Microsoft’s Copilot is based on OpenAI’s models. End customers buy products from companies that either do AI themselves or buy products from AI companies.
All you’re seeing here is how markets work. If it’s a bubble, it’ll likely impact those in the picture, but it’s not a bubble because of the picture.
Speculation about a bubble largely originates from concerns that leading AI tech firms are involved in a circular flow of investments that are artificially inflating the value of their stocks.
Example: OpenAI buys gpus from nvidia. Nvidia invests in OpenAI with the expectation of them using the money to buy more nvidia gpus.
The hype of any company partnering with OpenAI right now is boosting stock values crazily. Look at the AMD partnership, they basically were given one of the largest stakeholder positions in AMD and given the chips they wanted because they paid AMD by boosting their stock with the hype of the partnership.
If it’s a bubble, it’ll likely impact those in the picture, but it’s not a bubble because of the picture.
Yes if this bursts it’ll effect those in the picture, but we are also in the picture. If it bursts, who gets bailouts with public money? Who has to not buy things because it becomes too expensive?
There’s more to it than a simple picture. If the stock market crashes because of AI (or for any reason), we will all be effected (even just think about peoples retirement funds).
And final note, it’s not a bubble because someone made a graphic, they made a graphic describing how it could be a bubble.
My point is Nvidia isn’t propping up the bubble. If you look at the OpenAI deal, it’s a bit less than their yearly revenue, and the deal is for about the number of GPUs they make in a year, so it’s basically trading GPUs for equity. If anything, Nvidia is profiting from the bubble, not propping it up.
we will all be effected
Oh certainly, but I don’t think it’s any different from other large corrections.
Here’s how I see the major companies in that chart in a crash situation:
Nvidia - currently trading at 50+ times earnings on AI hype, but 25 is more reasonable, so potential crash of 50%, but probably much less since they’re still king in non-AI compute
Microsoft - AI is mostly value add, and the stock isn’t too inspired overhyped, so maybe 10% correction?
OpenAI - would go under and get liquidated
Oracle - datacenters and AI aren’t a huge part of its business, so probably minimal impact
the rest - haven’t looked into all of them, but most will be hit hard
It’ll he hit hard, but not nearly as bad as 2000 or 2008. If I look at the S&P 500, only 3 of the top 10 (Nvidia, Google, Meta) would be severely impacted, the rest only seem to dabble. Those 10 make up almost 40% of the S&P 500 and like 30-35% of the total US market. There are more large companies in there as well, but I don’t think most will be screwed like OpenAI. Palantir, for example, likely retains its government contracts for their data alone.
So in an AI bubble scenario, I’m guessing we see a correction of like 20-30%, maybe less depending on the nature of it. I think a more likely scenario is a bear market where investors slowly get tired of poor earnings as the promises of AI fail to manifest. If OpenAI dies, large companies just move to another provider.
And final note, it’s not a bubble because someone made a graphic, they made a graphic describing how it could be a bubble.
I think they’re missing the forest for the trees here. It’s not a bubble because these companies are investing in AI, it’s a bubble because tons of companies are buying into the hype. These companies are merely investing into solutions those companies claim to want. I work for a relatively small non-US company (a few thousand employees, revenue around $1B), and the board recently came to our tech group asking what we’re doing with AI.
This isn’t a handful of companies propping it up, a large chunk of the market is afraid of being left behind and demanding AI tools. All the graphic shows is how large companies are investing to meet the demand. Microsoft used OpenAI products in its offerings, OpenAI is a major Nvidia customer, etc.
I can’t say I’m an expert in the theory of this stuff, so big chance I’m very wrong.
All i know is experts have already likened the current “AI Boom” to the dot com bubble.
Nvidia might not be propping up the bubble in certain ways, but they could be deemed the center of the bubble. They went from a $370B market cap 3 yrs ago (around ChatGPT launch) to now being around $4.5T (peaking very close to $5T near the start of this month I think).
They could be the king in non-ai compute, but 99% of their revenue comes from b2b sales (and has done for a very long time I believe) so I can’t see them keeping any of those gains if we see an AI burst (this entire gain in stock seems very related to AI, not to any other advancements made for their chips to my monkey brain).
Most big (and small) tech companies are really buying into this AI hype, not sure if using AI has caused gains in stock market prices for certain companies, but I imagine we could see some drops here too (im thinking along the lines of hey your business “relies of ai tooling now” so mby u cant compete im gonna sell).
So I think all these businesses getting on the AI train could be bad too.
And final note again, if we see a burst, I think everyone panic selling could spread over to people panic selling everything and trying to get their hands on cold hard cash so their entire life savings dont vanish in an instant, so market wide we could see big drops? Certainly this could be very bad. I’m not very sure though on all the theory, I don’t think i’m smart enough to theorise this type of stuff, but I tried anyways. Maybe the govt have learned its lesson (pressing doubt rn) and will do ANYTHING to stop a crash, idk.
everyone panic selling could spread over to people panic selling everything and trying to get their hands on cold hard cash so their entire life savings dont vanish in an instant, so market wide we could see big drops?
Yeah, that’s basically what happens in a major correction. In fact, stock prices are valid basically the result of how many prior people are buying vs selling; more buyers than sellers causes prices to go up, more sellers than buyers cause prices to go down. Stock prices tend to have momentum precisely because of this (people try to jump on the bandwagon on the way up and jump off on the way down). And that’s also why we tend to see a quick recovery afterward once all the facts come out.
I don’t think this is like the .com or financial markets of the 2000s. But let’s say it is. If I bought at the peak of the .com bubble (March 10, 2000), I would’ve gotten 5.3% annualized growth over that 25 years (so $1k would be $3900-ish), assuming I don’t sell. The impact would be limited long term.
The AI bubble popping wouldn’t be the catastrophy many are making it out to be. I think it’ll be closer to the 2020 correction.
I think Nvidia is overvalued. I don’t think the economy will crash if AI crashes.
The worst part is not JUST the circular investment making up basically all the new investment in the last few months… but the fact they are all based in impossible-to-deliver metrics.
So it is literally not a matter of “if” the bubble pops, it’s a matter of when the market speculators will no longer be able to hide it
It’s less dumb, but it’s still fucking dumb. Search gives me garbage results constantly, so does AI. AI is usually just a little bit easier to figure out since you just ask it natural language questions unlike traditional search.
When googling anything today you really can’t find useful information unless it’s a very specific set of instructions usually on a social media site. AI doesn’t give you nearly as much garbage unless you start asking it really complex questions.
The sad thing is, we’ve already had this figured out before.
15-20 years ago Google was almost perfect. It completely blew my mind how accurate and fast it was. Many times it felt like it was a mind-reader. I didn’t even type in half my question and it was already auto-completing it and showing the results, the first few of which contained a very exact and detailed answer that someone wrote on a forum somewhere or an article that gave me a complete and correct answer. Remember the old ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button which directly took you to the first search result? Yea, it was pretty usable back then, because the first result was usually correct. Pepperidge farm 'members…
And then the enshittification started by pumping the site full of ads. First the ads were pretty distinguishable from the real results and you could just scroll through them. Then they started to disguise the ads more and more like real results, and just showing more of them. And by now I think google is basically ONLY ads. There are NO real results on it. Virtually the only ‘content’ you are shown are what somebody has payed for google to show. Even if what you are looking for is a very well known, public interest fact, if nobody is paying for it, google is not going to show it.
E.g. the other day google could not find me the website of a country-wide utility company for electricity by typing their exact name, because I guess they haven’t paid their monthly ads for google.
Luckily there are other alternatives to google, which still have ‘don’t do evil’ in their corporate philosophy. None of them are close to as good as google used to be, especially if you are not searching in english. But still a hell of a lot better than how google is now.
There is more to it than that… 20 years ago most of the people on the internet were likely similar to you, so most of their desired results were similar to yours.
Now people on the internet since the early 2000 are a minority compared to the “democratized” flood of users who joined in the mobile crapplication phase and started skewing search results towards simpler, less useful results.
SEO and ads didn’t help, but the whole ecosystem broke the model.
No, I know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Google’s old results were based on click-through determining which results were best. Now that the quality of the average user is lower, so is the quality of the average click-through result.
That’s as much response as you’re going to get though. You responded in bad faith, so now you’re going to talk to yourself if you choose to respond.
For some reason the folks here don’t get the flood of “normal people” that have taken over the internet that was really only for techies 20-25 years ago. It was even more pronounced before then.
Back then in many ways the internet was a little bit like lemmy today. There isn’t critical mass with shitloads of idiots, there’s tons of like minded people who think critically and try to do what’s right. Unfortunately Pandora’s box has been opened though, so it’s still not exactly the same.
If you ask me, the windows 95/98/xp era required the same level of patience and technical troubleshooting that Linux requires today. Maybe even more than modern Linux honestly. Windows 8/10/11 have been essentially on rails so much that needing to understand and figure shit out is less needed than ever. The people today on the internet generally are not at all like the people who used to be the majority here.
I don’t like elitism. The least techy people I know are the most culturally similar to what I was seeing on the Internet 20 years ago.
Because despite being less necessary for daily survival and thus less popular, it was also less structured and less hierarchical.
It’s the other way around honestly, the “techy types knowing better” have built leviathans.
You might not see it, but when people talk about some “better” Internet, an alternative timeline from the 90s to what we got, it’s funny. Because there are people who have that better Internet, Facebook’s and Google’s and others’ infrastructure inside is basically that. These companies and other such have been created and driven by that exact smarter kind of people which you seem to claim was opposed to the bad changes that transpired in the world and on the Internet. And the “democratized” crowd of monkeys was complaining, but couldn’t do anything. Then that same crowd, yes, started using what was given to them. Because the crowd of monkeys is wiser, they look at the whole forest and not some particular trees, as they are not the foresters, and they see when the wind changes. They are not interested in sectarian holywars over specific technologies or elitism on tech, because their interests and elitism are usually in different domains.
Each and every case of something not shit becoming shit is connected to a group of smartasses getting their way at forcing the world go some chosen path. Because nobody is smart enough to choose that path correctly, and when those not smart enough people can no longer get each and every other person’s approval to what they’re doing before doing that, they are turning things into shit.
I also remember how in year 2003 as a kid I loved HTML 4 and such as they were and didn’t understand what are all those movements to CSS, why Flash is bad, and so on. I was a monkey. There were some smarter monkeys who’d say there’s technological development ahead of us, and that it will be better than what we have. And there were some wiser monkeys, who’d predict correctly where all this is going.
OK, some of the wiser monkeys were also studying CS, so now I’m simplifying things to help my claim.
It’s just - when a smaller group decides for all, this is called degeneracy. Degeneracy is not a compliment to the organism described as degenerate.
Yes. Every year the SEO slop article bloat increases.
The trend has been steadily downwards for at least another decade as money making has been the goal above and beyond everything else.
In some ways I think the internet’s era is coming to an end. I don’t even know what the fuck we call it but the slop has taken over. Every website with information has paywalls or the most horrific advertisements we’ve ever seen.
I don’t understand how people even use the internet without ad blockers but many do. Every day all the anti Adblock tech updates and breaks everything unless you fuck with it, and they usually fix it. Feels like any day we’re just a couple of small changes away from BIOS level DRM where no website can be viewed without windows configured with secure boot and some officially sanctioned DRM rootkit. After all, who cares about Linux support when it’s such a small market share? Stuff like chat control feels adjacent to this.
People are way too pessimistic about AI. NVIDIA is going to sell GPUs by the truckload until research finds a way around CUDA.
Sure, the pace of big leaps has slowed, but I liken this phase to the early 1900s. Cars were slow and unreliable, but once the technology took foothold and the 4th Industrial Revolution really took off, look how much progress was made. We went to the moon by the 60s.
AI is causing water shortages, rising electric costs and chip shortages. AI is just a fancy search engine, that can be a useful tool. It was awesome for ai to read my blood test results but I don’t need it for most things, a waste of energy. Search engines should have an off button for ai, turn the lights off when we’re not using it.
Google search used to be able to find answers in the old days.
The sad truth is that today traditional search engines have been run into the ground by SEO, and some how chatbots backed by LLMs are producing what Google used to call the “I’m feeling Lucky” button. It used to just automatically take you to the first result for your query which was usually what you wanted.
I totally understand the challenges with infrastructure that need solving, but that doesn’t mean AI is useless or that it’ll never be better than it is now.
Frankly, the “AI slop” crusade isn’t working. It’s time to choose a new fighter.
I cannot fathom why I wouldn’t be pessimistic about a tool that’s being crammed into places it doesn’t fit. There are a small handful of things generative algorithms are genuinely useful for. But expecting it to magically solve anything else is foolish, and always will be.
This is what I’m talking about. “Always will be”? AGI will come. Don’t bet against it.
Interesting comparison, but how many of the original car companies are still around today? And did those early car companies inflate and manipulate the stock market?- they probably weren’t even publicly traded in the early days.
I think a crash is on its way regardless of how successful AI will be decades into the future
I don’t doubt they’ll keep selling more GPUs, but AI certainly looks like a bubble that’s ready to burst with all the fake money going around in circles (assuming those diagrams are correct, which I assume they are).
Not the mention the lies that are keeping AI companies propped up, like AGI that will replace everything “in 3 months”. Pretty sure they missed that deadline already.
With the current “fake” money, lies and over-investment, something bad is surely going to happen unless someone steps in.
AI advances quite a bit each day, but I’m not sold on AGI becoming a thing any time soon, maybe even ever idk.
I’m not familiar with those. Do you have one handy or maybe some keywords so I can look it up?
Think this one was the one going around
Not sure what you can lookup, probably stuff like “AI investment bubble”
This is probably a good resource (haven’t read it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_bubble (specifically look under
Speculation > Circular Financing, soz dunno how to link to a header)I don’t have a source and this might be old news, but a lot of the big deals right now are just “promises” to invest I think (money, etc not exchanged hands yet)
All that shows is who the business partners are. Nvidia sells GPUs, AI companies buy GPUs, and companies buy products from AI companies. For example, Microsoft’s Copilot is based on OpenAI’s models. End customers buy products from companies that either do AI themselves or buy products from AI companies.
All you’re seeing here is how markets work. If it’s a bubble, it’ll likely impact those in the picture, but it’s not a bubble because of the picture.
From the wiki article:
Example: OpenAI buys gpus from nvidia. Nvidia invests in OpenAI with the expectation of them using the money to buy more nvidia gpus.
The hype of any company partnering with OpenAI right now is boosting stock values crazily. Look at the AMD partnership, they basically were given one of the largest stakeholder positions in AMD and given the chips they wanted because they paid AMD by boosting their stock with the hype of the partnership.
Yes if this bursts it’ll effect those in the picture, but we are also in the picture. If it bursts, who gets bailouts with public money? Who has to not buy things because it becomes too expensive?
There’s more to it than a simple picture. If the stock market crashes because of AI (or for any reason), we will all be effected (even just think about peoples retirement funds).
And final note, it’s not a bubble because someone made a graphic, they made a graphic describing how it could be a bubble.
My point is Nvidia isn’t propping up the bubble. If you look at the OpenAI deal, it’s a bit less than their yearly revenue, and the deal is for about the number of GPUs they make in a year, so it’s basically trading GPUs for equity. If anything, Nvidia is profiting from the bubble, not propping it up.
Oh certainly, but I don’t think it’s any different from other large corrections.
Here’s how I see the major companies in that chart in a crash situation:
It’ll he hit hard, but not nearly as bad as 2000 or 2008. If I look at the S&P 500, only 3 of the top 10 (Nvidia, Google, Meta) would be severely impacted, the rest only seem to dabble. Those 10 make up almost 40% of the S&P 500 and like 30-35% of the total US market. There are more large companies in there as well, but I don’t think most will be screwed like OpenAI. Palantir, for example, likely retains its government contracts for their data alone.
So in an AI bubble scenario, I’m guessing we see a correction of like 20-30%, maybe less depending on the nature of it. I think a more likely scenario is a bear market where investors slowly get tired of poor earnings as the promises of AI fail to manifest. If OpenAI dies, large companies just move to another provider.
I think they’re missing the forest for the trees here. It’s not a bubble because these companies are investing in AI, it’s a bubble because tons of companies are buying into the hype. These companies are merely investing into solutions those companies claim to want. I work for a relatively small non-US company (a few thousand employees, revenue around $1B), and the board recently came to our tech group asking what we’re doing with AI.
This isn’t a handful of companies propping it up, a large chunk of the market is afraid of being left behind and demanding AI tools. All the graphic shows is how large companies are investing to meet the demand. Microsoft used OpenAI products in its offerings, OpenAI is a major Nvidia customer, etc.
I can’t say I’m an expert in the theory of this stuff, so big chance I’m very wrong.
All i know is experts have already likened the current “AI Boom” to the dot com bubble.
Nvidia might not be propping up the bubble in certain ways, but they could be deemed the center of the bubble. They went from a $370B market cap 3 yrs ago (around ChatGPT launch) to now being around $4.5T (peaking very close to $5T near the start of this month I think).
They could be the king in non-ai compute, but 99% of their revenue comes from b2b sales (and has done for a very long time I believe) so I can’t see them keeping any of those gains if we see an AI burst (this entire gain in stock seems very related to AI, not to any other advancements made for their chips to my monkey brain).
Most big (and small) tech companies are really buying into this AI hype, not sure if using AI has caused gains in stock market prices for certain companies, but I imagine we could see some drops here too (im thinking along the lines of hey your business “relies of ai tooling now” so mby u cant compete im gonna sell).
So I think all these businesses getting on the AI train could be bad too.
And final note again, if we see a burst, I think everyone panic selling could spread over to people panic selling everything and trying to get their hands on cold hard cash so their entire life savings dont vanish in an instant, so market wide we could see big drops? Certainly this could be very bad. I’m not very sure though on all the theory, I don’t think i’m smart enough to theorise this type of stuff, but I tried anyways. Maybe the govt have learned its lesson (pressing doubt rn) and will do ANYTHING to stop a crash, idk.
Yeah, that’s basically what happens in a major correction. In fact, stock prices are valid basically the result of how many prior people are buying vs selling; more buyers than sellers causes prices to go up, more sellers than buyers cause prices to go down. Stock prices tend to have momentum precisely because of this (people try to jump on the bandwagon on the way up and jump off on the way down). And that’s also why we tend to see a quick recovery afterward once all the facts come out.
A 20-30% drop is a pretty big deal. It’s not anomalous though. There have been 19 major corrections (over 20% loss) over the past 150 years, meaning it happens every 7-10 years on average (150/19 ~= 7.8 years).
I don’t think this is like the .com or financial markets of the 2000s. But let’s say it is. If I bought at the peak of the .com bubble (March 10, 2000), I would’ve gotten 5.3% annualized growth over that 25 years (so $1k would be $3900-ish), assuming I don’t sell. The impact would be limited long term.
The AI bubble popping wouldn’t be the catastrophy many are making it out to be. I think it’ll be closer to the 2020 correction.
I think Nvidia is overvalued. I don’t think the economy will crash if AI crashes.
I really appreciate the info. Yikes! This isn’t looking good.
The worst part is not JUST the circular investment making up basically all the new investment in the last few months… but the fact they are all based in impossible-to-deliver metrics.
So it is literally not a matter of “if” the bubble pops, it’s a matter of when the market speculators will no longer be able to hide it
I really just see current AI as search 2.0.
It’s less dumb, but it’s still fucking dumb. Search gives me garbage results constantly, so does AI. AI is usually just a little bit easier to figure out since you just ask it natural language questions unlike traditional search.
When googling anything today you really can’t find useful information unless it’s a very specific set of instructions usually on a social media site. AI doesn’t give you nearly as much garbage unless you start asking it really complex questions.
The sad thing is, we’ve already had this figured out before.
15-20 years ago Google was almost perfect. It completely blew my mind how accurate and fast it was. Many times it felt like it was a mind-reader. I didn’t even type in half my question and it was already auto-completing it and showing the results, the first few of which contained a very exact and detailed answer that someone wrote on a forum somewhere or an article that gave me a complete and correct answer. Remember the old ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button which directly took you to the first search result? Yea, it was pretty usable back then, because the first result was usually correct. Pepperidge farm 'members…
And then the enshittification started by pumping the site full of ads. First the ads were pretty distinguishable from the real results and you could just scroll through them. Then they started to disguise the ads more and more like real results, and just showing more of them. And by now I think google is basically ONLY ads. There are NO real results on it. Virtually the only ‘content’ you are shown are what somebody has payed for google to show. Even if what you are looking for is a very well known, public interest fact, if nobody is paying for it, google is not going to show it. E.g. the other day google could not find me the website of a country-wide utility company for electricity by typing their exact name, because I guess they haven’t paid their monthly ads for google.
Luckily there are other alternatives to google, which still have ‘don’t do evil’ in their corporate philosophy. None of them are close to as good as google used to be, especially if you are not searching in english. But still a hell of a lot better than how google is now.
There is more to it than that… 20 years ago most of the people on the internet were likely similar to you, so most of their desired results were similar to yours.
Now people on the internet since the early 2000 are a minority compared to the “democratized” flood of users who joined in the mobile crapplication phase and started skewing search results towards simpler, less useful results.
SEO and ads didn’t help, but the whole ecosystem broke the model.
None of what you said explains what they are talking about lol.
It’s like you have no experience with what they’re talking about
Nice troll bait.
No, I know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Google’s old results were based on click-through determining which results were best. Now that the quality of the average user is lower, so is the quality of the average click-through result.
That’s as much response as you’re going to get though. You responded in bad faith, so now you’re going to talk to yourself if you choose to respond.
You know I do agree with you.
For some reason the folks here don’t get the flood of “normal people” that have taken over the internet that was really only for techies 20-25 years ago. It was even more pronounced before then.
Back then in many ways the internet was a little bit like lemmy today. There isn’t critical mass with shitloads of idiots, there’s tons of like minded people who think critically and try to do what’s right. Unfortunately Pandora’s box has been opened though, so it’s still not exactly the same.
If you ask me, the windows 95/98/xp era required the same level of patience and technical troubleshooting that Linux requires today. Maybe even more than modern Linux honestly. Windows 8/10/11 have been essentially on rails so much that needing to understand and figure shit out is less needed than ever. The people today on the internet generally are not at all like the people who used to be the majority here.
I don’t like elitism. The least techy people I know are the most culturally similar to what I was seeing on the Internet 20 years ago.
Because despite being less necessary for daily survival and thus less popular, it was also less structured and less hierarchical.
It’s the other way around honestly, the “techy types knowing better” have built leviathans.
You might not see it, but when people talk about some “better” Internet, an alternative timeline from the 90s to what we got, it’s funny. Because there are people who have that better Internet, Facebook’s and Google’s and others’ infrastructure inside is basically that. These companies and other such have been created and driven by that exact smarter kind of people which you seem to claim was opposed to the bad changes that transpired in the world and on the Internet. And the “democratized” crowd of monkeys was complaining, but couldn’t do anything. Then that same crowd, yes, started using what was given to them. Because the crowd of monkeys is wiser, they look at the whole forest and not some particular trees, as they are not the foresters, and they see when the wind changes. They are not interested in sectarian holywars over specific technologies or elitism on tech, because their interests and elitism are usually in different domains.
Each and every case of something not shit becoming shit is connected to a group of smartasses getting their way at forcing the world go some chosen path. Because nobody is smart enough to choose that path correctly, and when those not smart enough people can no longer get each and every other person’s approval to what they’re doing before doing that, they are turning things into shit.
I also remember how in year 2003 as a kid I loved HTML 4 and such as they were and didn’t understand what are all those movements to CSS, why Flash is bad, and so on. I was a monkey. There were some smarter monkeys who’d say there’s technological development ahead of us, and that it will be better than what we have. And there were some wiser monkeys, who’d predict correctly where all this is going.
OK, some of the wiser monkeys were also studying CS, so now I’m simplifying things to help my claim.
It’s just - when a smaller group decides for all, this is called degeneracy. Degeneracy is not a compliment to the organism described as degenerate.
Google search was was better before, like 10 years ago
Yes. Every year the SEO slop article bloat increases.
The trend has been steadily downwards for at least another decade as money making has been the goal above and beyond everything else.
In some ways I think the internet’s era is coming to an end. I don’t even know what the fuck we call it but the slop has taken over. Every website with information has paywalls or the most horrific advertisements we’ve ever seen.
I don’t understand how people even use the internet without ad blockers but many do. Every day all the anti Adblock tech updates and breaks everything unless you fuck with it, and they usually fix it. Feels like any day we’re just a couple of small changes away from BIOS level DRM where no website can be viewed without windows configured with secure boot and some officially sanctioned DRM rootkit. After all, who cares about Linux support when it’s such a small market share? Stuff like chat control feels adjacent to this.