- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607
This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.
We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.
But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.
The internet is fine.
Listen. The era of algorithms and automated aggregators and what not feeding you endless interesting content is over. Before that we read blogs, we shared them on Usenet and IRC, we had webrings. We engaged in communities and the content we were exposed to was human curated. That is coming back. If we can quit it with the hackernews bot spam on Lemmy, it can be one of those places. You need to find niche forums that interest you that are invite only and start talking to people. The future of the internet is human.
Renting a VPS was one of my best internet decisions TBH. I now have exactly this - my own website, XMPP server and an IRC bouncer) IRC forever, seriously.