the corporate-owned part, hopefully. and I think we’re actually witnessing the renaissance of the small, users controlled one.
Lemmies unite!
lets just hope we are not caught in the bot shitstorm.
The internet, no. The world wide web, yes.
Habsburg AI? My sides went into orbit. I didn’t know that I needed to know this expression!
I don’t fully agree with the author but that was an enjoyable read. The initial chunk about Reddit is mostly there to provide context for the general trends and directions that the internet is following; the “core” is the impact of generative models into the internet.
Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.
If that’s correct, the impact of those generative models was only to speed up the process, not to cause it. At the end of the day the main concern is that it works a lot like spam - as undesired content avoiding being detected as such, and tweaked to steal your attention from the content that you actually want to consume. And spam is not something new for us (or the internet), what’s new is GAFAM and their vassals (Twitter, Reddit etc.) eating it for lunch.
The author does have a way with words lol. I love this paragraph in particular, emphasis mine:
As we speak, the battle that platforms are fighting is against generative spam, a cartoonish and obvious threat of outright nonsense, meaningless chum that can and should (and likely will) be stopped. In the process, they’re failing to see that this isn’t a war against spam, but a war against crap, and the overall normalization and intellectual numbing that comes when content is created to please algorithms and provide a minimum viable product for consumers. Google’s “useless” results problem isn’t one borne of content that has no meaning, but of content that only sort of helps, that is the “right” result but doesn’t actually provide any real thought behind it, like the endless “how to fix error code X” results full of well-meaning and plausibly helpful content that doesn’t really help at all.
And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, “content that only sort of helps” that “steals your attention from the content you actually want.” Even moving from Google to DDG has only mitigated this problem, it hasn’t fully gone away.
But yeah, one of his conclusions seems to be the Death of the Hyperlink? Which, I mean, not even LLM’s can kill that. I doubt
<a hrefis going away any time soon.Yup, he does. And what he is saying in this excerpt is great (insightful) too, not just how it’s said.
Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.
It is definitely feeling like this is a trend, we are moving back to more curated ways of sharing information.
The Fediverse feels like a return to the old, open Web before it was captured by Big Tech, just with new bells and whistles attached. With all the enshittification, it seems like it is well-placed to be the solution to the problem. It’s not there yet but it’s a start.
Let’s hope that the new bells and whistles* increase its resilience enough against Big Tech control over the internet. Otherwise we’ll get into a cyclical situation.
*namely, federation and other anti-centralisation aspects of design.
The aspect that makes the fediverse and in particular reddit-likes uniquely adapted to growing in this harsh corporate hellscape has everything in my opinion to do with the critical early seed phase of communities.
When you make a website with its own forum, you have huge friction to overcome with the network effect… but if you are plugging into a federated network than all of a sudden being a tiny community on lemmy with 2 or 3 people becomes an invitation to users passing by who already have an account to start a conversation and create that spark that will grow (slowly) into a real community.
Consider the minimum viable population of users in a community, how many people does there need to be in a room before that warm feeling of a gathering sets in with comfortable conversation naturally occurring? For federated lemmy communities (and similar Reddit-likes) federation effectively lowers that number by a significant amount since it puts doors everywhere that people can spontaneously wander through and contribute small amounts to help kindle a spark and get the community going.
This changes the paradigm of “social media platform metabolism” if you will, it facilitates much more organic early growth in communities.
Yup - federated communities grow specially well in a corporate landscape. However my concern is if they’re able to stay dominant enough to prevent a cycle like:
- Corporate landscape.
- You got a few federated alternatives growing.
- Federations grow enough to become the main landscape.
- Corporations do something [I do not know what] better than federations.
- Corporates grow to the point of dwarfing the federations, into a corporate landscape.
For example, it’s possible for me that corporations are specially able to exploit a federated landscape through EEE. I’m just conjecturing though.
Betteridge’s law of headlines answers this succintly: no
The headline is 6 words. The article is 3,606 words. Expressed as a percentage, the amount of content you have decided to address comes to a grand total of 0.16%.
If you have no interest in interacting with the content, it would be simple enough to state that. But to dismiss the entirety of the article based on 0.16% of the content seems rather short sighted to me. Do you have any thoughts to share about the article?
Nah, I’m allergic to clickbait. If it had a better, more serious title, I’d read it.
If you’re the author of the article, you have to find that line between interesting and clickbait. Sensationalist titles like that are like smearing a distasteful substance on the cover of a book. No matter what you write in that book, I’m not picking it up.
Possible titles (without even reading the article) that would make me click with an open mind
- Threats to the open web
- How much has the web changed since $date?
- Where does the web go after $event?
- The future of the web - an opinion
- How do monopolies affect the internet?
That’s more like it, this is a discussion that people can actually interact with! I am not the author, and I agree with you that the title isn’t great, but I am interested in discussing what they wrote and appreciate that you’ve now at least opened the door to a discussion on clickbait titles rather than just leaving a one sentence “gotcha”.
Dude. The 4th sentence of the page you linked says it doesn’t apply to this type of open ended question.
The only possible answer to this (admittedly silly) headline is, “it depends what you mean by die”. An answer yes or no could easily be rebutted.
The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.
But this is a strict yes-no question
Did you not bother to read the 3rd and 4th sentence of my comment?
The question is open ended. It’s subjective, dependent on the definition of “die”. It’s not answerable with merely yes or no.
The current internet search is becoming obsolete. People are able to tell apart BS, though. This means, there’s a possibility for a smarter filter. Hard to tell whether we will see one in the near-future.
People are able to tell apart BS, though.
Please help me be optimistic. Why do you think this is the case? No matter where I go I see mostly confirmation bias and the lack of even the most basic level of critical thought.
you’re right. I should’ve written some people
Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/
LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/
That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.
Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?
This isn’t a new thing. It’s been a long time ago that the internet shifted from being a level playing field and a means of connecting people, to a place where the big companies make money. And it brought some of the currently biggest companies on earth into existence.
Things changed a bit. Harvesting private data and selling information about the users used to be the dominating business model. It still is, but now it gets mixed with selling their content to train AI. I’d argue that in itself isn’t a dramatic change. It’s still the same concept.
But I also always worry about centralization, enshittification and algorithms shaping our perspective on reality more and more.
Liked the article but the end was kind of a letdown for me. If capitalism-driven AI is ruining the web even further why would demanding that AI is better today already and not in the future help with any of the problems this article has described?
For me the solution is obvioisly rejecting corpo-spam social-networks and going back to the selfmade small-internet, the fediverse etc. Sure that’s not a solution for humanity as a whole but neither is demanding better AI now.
Are have I completely misunderstood something?
Personally I read it as a general “demand better”, “don’t accept crap wrapped in gold” as an offensive principle against (de)generative AI. Perhaps I’m inserting my own positive spin on their words, but it seems to me that their point is “don’t let the hype win”; if these companies are pushing AI, forming dependencies on bad tech, then we need to say “not good enough” and push back on the BS. Deny the ability of low quality garbage to ‘fulfil’ our needs. It’s not a directly practical line to be sure (how do we do this exactly?), but it does drill down past “AI is bad” to a more fundamental (and arguably motivating) point - that we, all of us, deserve better than to drown in a sea of crap and that’s still important.
Ok, yeah, but I still think that totally misses the point. At least for me even fully functional AI will still be a desaster and would be used for the most heinous stuff, eroding democracy worldwide even more and it obviously changes nothing of the social-media-silo capitalist hellscape most people live in comfortably (or less comfortably if it gives you eating disorders, depression and stuff).
I can’t disagree with you on that, you’re absolutely right - I suppose my read just gives the author the benefit of the doubt that it’s not ‘better AI’ that we deserve, but a better internet (i.e. with no AI whatsoever).
Corporate social media may be dying, but that’s only one small part of the Internet.
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insightful question,
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it isnt just the internet, in case you hadn’t noticed, it is ALL civil-rights that are being gutted, in the enshittocene.
“once the infection has moved the ‘fulcrum’, the balance between the involuntary-host & the infection, far enough, it can then switch from symbiosis to totalitarian rampaging growth-at-any-cost, excluding-all-vital-functions, enforcing its parasitic & fatal consumption, killing the patient”
A tipping-point is being crossed, though it’s taking a few decades ( planets are slower than individual-animals, in experiencing infection ).
It’s our rendition of The Great Filter, in-which we enforce that we can’t be viable, because factional-ideology “needs” that we break all viability from the world.
Or, to be plainer, it is our race’s unconscious toddler setting-up a world-breaking tantrum, to “BREAK GOD AND MAKE GOD OBEY” its won’t-grow-up.
Read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, & see how the imprint->reaction mind, Kahneman1 ( he calls it “System 1”, but without context, that’s meaningless ) substitutes easy-to-answer questions for the actual questions…
The more you read that book, the most important psychology book in the whole world, right now, the more obvious it is that Ideology/prejudice/assumption-river/religion/dogma is doing all it can to break considered-reasoning ( Kahneman2 ) from the whole world, and it is succeeding/winning.
“Proletariat dictatorship” the Leninists want, “populist dictatorship” the fascists want, religious totalitarianism, political totalitarianism, ideological totalitarianism, etc, it’s all Kahneman1 fighting to break considered-reasoning from the whole world, and the “disappearing” of all comments criticizing Threads from the Threads portion of the internet … is perfectly normal.
It’s simply highjacking of our entire civilization, by the systems which want exclusive dominion.
Have you checked your youtube account’s settings section, in the history section, to see what percentage of your comments have been disappeared??
Do it.
Everybody do it.
Discover how huge a percentage of your contribution to the “community” got disappeared, because it wasn’t what their algorithm finds usefully-sensationalistic, or usefully-pushing-whatever-they-find-acceptable.
I spent a few hours deleting ALL my comments from there, after seeing that around 1/2 of what I’d contributed had been disappeared.
There are a few comments now, but … they’ll be removed, either by yt or by me, soon.
No point in pretending that meaning is tolerable, anymore, you know?
Only fakery & hustle remains, for most of the internet, & that transformation’s going to be complete, in a few years.
1984, but for-profit.
Sorry for the … dim … view, but it’s been unfolding for a couple decades, & it’s getting blatent, fast.
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