i remember growing up I’d literally get a buzz off a good thread or from reeling off a good post. it felt so incredible being able to communicate with people across the world and be taken seriously, evaluated on the merits of my words rather than dismissed due to age or race or anything. and most of all, it felt like this special secret between you and other dorks. now everyone has phones in their pocket. going on twitter is like going to mcdonals.
Well, at least we have Lemmy.
I dismiss this comment because your age and race are ambiguous and everything else! /S
Seriously though I kind of feel like Lemmy has at least some of that nostalgic feeling. Surfing through instances, finding that one semi-active obscure interest community you fit right in with. It’s definitely not the same but nothing stays the same.
Smaller communties vibes.
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We need something that isn’t THE internet, and is only accessible if you have the patience and knowledge to connect to it.
That kinda does exist it’s just that you and I lack either the knowledge or patience to connect to it.
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If that’s what you want, it does exist. It is called Usenet and it predates the world wide web. There are still active discussion communities, though most of its bandwidth is used for file-sharing nowadays.
Knowledge gating was the reason the internet was great to begin with, only more educated people knew or cared about it, and the quality of discussion was better
*glowing on Twitter like a fly to a zapperX
I imagine you’re probably talking more about content, but you’ve uncovered a pet peeve of mine having more to do with the structure of web pages.
The original vision of html was to have this beautiful format that flows text and graphics elegantly over whatever space you give it. I remember thinking this is great! One day we will have pocket-sized displays and the web is already future-proofed to work seamlessly in that world.
Then fast-forward to smart phones. By now, web pages were so rigidly formatted that they had to design special mobile versions of every site.
This one is actually good. The second one kinda sucks IMO.
Marketing ruins everything.
I think that’s too generalized. Marketing finances the Internet just as it has always financed print media (including the good, even inversitgative journalism).
I would definitely prefer a world in which sources of content are often paid-only instead of ad-supported, but the main thing needed for such a world is a higher minimum wage so more people have disposable income to distribute to authors they appreciate.
This would mean that if someone posts a rage-bait article like “Is Former President OBAMA Stealing Opium Money OUT OF YOUR POCKET?” then maybe people will click it, but the author won’t gain anything out of it.
The only way this would work is if you paid for a subscription to many news sources a la Netflix. No one will buy subscriptions to each individual author or publication. But of course Netflix now has ads too, so greed really has no bounds, especially once they’ve got you roped in.
Patreon has pretty much already taken that spot.
Yeah how about no? Knowledge should be free, I’m not gonna pay 5c every time I want to open Youtube or some shit. In a utopia you’d pay some small government tax that’d go towards keeping the web ad and paywall free, so the people get happy and the greedy corporate rats get their dirty money.
That assumes either all sites on the web deserve equal compensation for their acts, or some body can decide what the relative value of each is and compensate each creator accordingly. You’d go back to having click farms, but they’d claim the government owes them a billion dollars for their high traffic.
Even the government would usually prefer that citizen money go directly to the systems that they prefer to support, rather than go through taxes to a government program that sponsors them (that’s why you get tax deduction for transit usage and charities). That second route is just needlessly complex.
There’s also better models for payment than microcharges. No one wants to consciously spend 5 cents in an online action. YouTube could require users to be subscribers to view or upload certain forms of content, or each individual creator would integrate some form of Patreon setup. A really simple solution would be to divide someone’s monthly subscription fee based on who they watched most that month.
I think that’s too generalized. Print and written media existed for literally thousands of years before marketing finance.
Touch some grass.
What does touch some grass mean?
Also, what kind of print and media existed for thousands of years? I thought it was just religious scrolls and cave paintings
Just saying they’re a bit terminally online.
The oldest consumer complaint is from approximately 3800 years ago and is a clay tablet complaining about the copper they received from Ea-Nasir. (A meme you might have seen around, even if you didn’t know that context)
Ancient Egyptians were around long enough they were doing archeology on Ancient Egyptians. There’s plenty of science and engineering in China and Africa that predates Pythagoras’ weird cult. (Srsly, if you’re not familiar with the cult of Pythagoras, highly recommend)
I’m talking about modern print media of course, cmon. Also Printing does not date back thousands of years - it was invented (in the west) by gutenberg in the 15th century. What are you saying?
I’m saying you’re responding incoherently to people making fun of you because you can’t tell they’re giving you shit for your bad take.
I’m saying you’re pick and choosing your battles so you can feel bad about the modern world while ignoring the fact that you’re a part of the growing movement against the corporate web.
The corporate hatred you have isn’t new. Infinite growth isn’t sustainable and the awareness of that is growing.
Newspapers, books, music, TV, aren’t dead, they’ve continuing to evolve and independent creators are producing more worthwhile works than I’ll ever make it through. And all of those were “dead” before the internet. “Video killed the radio star” after all. But, we’ve seen several newsrooms destroyed as not-profitable enough, only to get restarted as employee owned newsrooms. There’s never been a better time to be a patron of the arts or a music fan.
Even so, the world doesn’t exist online. Talk to people in your community. You’ll feel better and the work and art they’re creating is more impactful than “content”.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I honestly didn’t realize anyone was making fun of me (the joke is on me I guess, I just don’t get it). I don’t have a problem with the current times tho. But I know the content business. I don’t call it that because I have no appreciation for art, writing or other creative arts, but because that’s the term used in business. And from this environment I also know that profits are unfortunately placed above good content, which is why creative people, aka content creators, are not paid appropriately imo. I have also recognized this spirit, which I do not approve of at all, in many Lemmy posts. Only in disguise, so to speak: namely with people who think that intellectual property only helps large corporations like Disney. In my experience, that’s not the case at all. People make a living from their creative work and patreon donations are simply not enough - at least not for a regular and secure income. What I was getting at with my comment is that it doesn’t make sense imo to complain about a content creator signing marketing contracts - that has always been part of this business, even in the days of print media.
And I guess my main point is that focus on defeatism.
You also couldn’t make money as an artist at basically any other point in history either. But now you have more opportunity to try and make a go of it either in the corporate space (although we’ll see if AI kills those positions) or as an indie. If you care, don’t give up and watch whatever the algorithm is feeding you. Consume indie art from the people who want to make a go at it. They exist in your local community and there are several coops have sprung up in the last couple years focused on music and handmade crafts with the enshittification of the existing platforms.
Yes, I’m mainly concerned with the content. HTML certainly gives you all the possibilities, but it has ultimately led to boring but easy-to-use and correspondingly restictive UIs. I think anyone who wants to reach a lot of people today will do so via social media (original Myspace unfortunately didn’t work out, tho).
actually made my own site https://sandwich.sh/ you can do quite a lot with just html, I just don’t know what. the archive section is html generated with a bash script. sending it here because I think it’s cool
One of the early utopias was that people would no longer debate about things because the internet would bring people together and provide them with information about anything and everything… well then algorithms and social media happened, and now we’re stuck with echo chambers of anti-vaxxers and flat earthers.
Other than that, it’s been nice in many ways nobody could have anticipated back then.
Social media empowered narcissistic self-publication, which is one of the main things that ruined the Internet.
The problem is that the subject of discussions was moved from objective topics to the self. Every topic being discussed is now tainted with the insertion of the self as part of the topic, for the purpose of garnering attention to the self. Instead of the topic being discussed, now it’s “Look at what I’m talking about, isn’t this interesting what I’m telling you?”
Facebook and Xitter are very user centric platforms where you care about the person more than the topic. Meanwhile, in (formerly) Reddit and (currently) Lemmy I rarely even look at the usernames. I care about the topic, and that’s why I’m here in this thread.
I think the Internet really did make people more knowledgeable overall, but my personal theory is that, as a collective, we are in the area of knowing that dunning-Kruger effect takes place. With our current collective intelligence machines really crystallizing that to me, where if ask an LLM something it doesn’t know, it will act like the average person on the internet and make shit up and assume it close enough.
The information age really speaks to the idea that information is not knowledge, but knowledge can be formed from information. I think the next major revolution and why social media algorithms, AI, data science, etc are so hot is because they are attempts to enter the knowledge age. To take all of this access to information and truly learn something from it, at the same scale.
Well said. In many cases we’re riding the highest peak of the DK-curve, and you can tell by the massive aura of confidence radiating from some comments.
Reading the Covid discussions was absolutely wild. Suddenly we got all these people who seemed to know things about epidemiology, virology, biochemistry, statistics and what not. Plenty of confidence, little bit of information, but hardly any knowledge, let alone humility.
But you could actually learn and grow via the internet then. Information was free, available, and tools actually helped you find it.
I think that is still true. It isn’t that hard to immerse yourself in the free web. There is a ton of high quality and user-friendly FOSS software these days, much more than in the old days. I actually think we are living in a golden age of FOSS software right now. Other than games, I don’t have much need for commercial software anymore.
The same is true of information. There is a spectacular amount of free information available online now compared to 30 years ago. You can leaen to fix damn near anything nowadays just by watching free YouTube videos. Not to mention high quality, well-produced free videos, free podcasts, free databases and reference materials, journalism, etc. about any subject you can think from history to computer science, math, biology, literature… the list is endless. It wasn’t like that 30 years ago, that’s for sure.
Even on the commercial side, $15 a month for my whole family to access almost any music, anywhere, anytime? Shit, I used to pay $15 for one CD and the only way to get music on the internet was to pirate it! Cheap, high quality, comprehensive music catalogs availabe everywhere at the touch of a button is what we used to dream about and now it is a reality. And video? I remember the first video I ever watched on the internet. It was a tiny, grainy, 20 second video of a Shuttle launch being streamed over the internet… and we sat in awe with our mouths hanging open watching it over and over, lol.
That isn’t to say that the internet is perfect. The tracking nowadays really is horrendous. But, damn, it is much better now compared to the old days in terms of content.
You’re absolutely right about learning stuff online. Once I bought a mango, but had no idea how to cut it without making a huge mess. Well, there are also lots of videos about it, so now I know what I’m doing with delicious mangos.
I’ve been saying this for years. The internet was better when you had to be a little bit more intelligent than the average person to access it.
Back when you needed knowledge of computers and software, modems, anti-virus, hardware etc, it kind of meant you needed a brain in your head to gain access. I’m not saying that made the internet an overtly-intelligent space, but it was more intelligent and measured than it is today.
As soon a smart phones and data plans entered the game, you could be as dumb as a second coat of paint and gain access with a single button. That opened the flood gates for the stupid. Now the stupid are here en mass and internet is just a dumpster fire full of retards.
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The US is using 40% renewables, China a bit more, many smaller countries are testing 100% renewable days, ozone was mostly fixed iirc. Progress may be slow, but to say it’s not happening is factually very false.
Also the rate of change is accelerating.
No sign of slowing down yet. Except maybe for wind but hopefully floating comes into its own in the next couple of years.
Wow, I’d never heard of floating solar panels before. Very cool!
I actually meant floading wind.
I think floating solar will come to nothing. Too much added cost for little benefit.
All probably true, but all the technological progress has done little to change the fact that we continue to destroy the world we live in with our eyes open. This is my point: technology is generally not used for the good of humanity, but for monetary gain. If we wanted to, the world could be a better place, but we don’t use our resources that way - they are not managed by the general public, but by people who don’t have the good of humanity in mind. I think the Internet is a good example of this: Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the www protocol, didn’t earn a cent from a patent or something like that - he was just interested in scientific exchange at the time. In my opinion, that’s a true hero, not Steve Jobs (he was a great businessman tho).
This is a very pessimistic view, and with a fallacy. The fallacy is to consider that greed will always win and yadayada. The fact is that it is a product of liberalism, it makes states resign from doing things to the profit of companies. Even in liberal countries liberalism is being contested though, and power countries are opposing it (for better or worse).
Internet is still there. And in some places, it won true victories against liberalism, like in Europe where net neutrality did won some battles and big Internet companies are being contained, if only to fight US espionage.
My opinion is that Internet companies are incapable of sustaining their tools, because they’re too greedy to provide a good service long term. Free solutions will appear, and ultimately they will prevail. Lemmy is a example that is at a baby stage yet. Most of the innovation and infrastructure relies on free softwares today. It’s just in the background. Computer and Internet technologies are still in their infancy, it will evolve.
In Europe, legislation is like this because it was enforced by institutions (meaning the state(s)). This is an achievement of a still halfway functional democracy. The source is myself, a European. However, I can also tell you that things like the GDPR don’t actually matter in practice. I am also the source, who has implemented both tracking and corresponding opt-in solutions for several companies - nobody gives a fuck; neither the companies nor the institutions. It is actually more expensive to comply with the legislation: There are no adequate penalties whatsoever. If you hear in America that meta/facebook had to pay a substancial fine, you can assume that meta/facebook has gained that many times over from the infringement. Greed rules the world, I’m afraid. That’s the reason for my pessimism and also one of the reasons why I think the merits of neoliberalism are a fairy tale.
I meant 2 things: first, companies don’t have complete free reign in Europe, that’s just wrong, and you’re mistaken if you think rgpd has no effect. Second, Internet cannot be killed, and companies only take over it because liberal states ask them to do so.
Liberalism is highly contested everywhere. I would argue that it is actually collapsing. Even in the US, as Trump shows, it’s showing cracks and weaknesses. In Europe, most parliaments have 30 to 60% of the representation against liberalism (although fascists tend to be elected to be against liberals, but actually l’y with them when they take decisions).
Things are changing. Things will change. When it comes to Internet and computers, no innovation comes from companies anymore. Innovation comes from free softwares. Linux usage is rising. Iot will further push this. That’s my bet at least. You could say I’m optimistic.
I essentially agree. I just come to a different, admittedly pessimistic conclusion. I simply don’t believe that things will change for the better on their own. In my opinion, this requires regulation that is actually enforced so that the powerful of this world cannot do as they please. The GDPR is of course a step in the right direction. In practice, however, it is unfortunately nowhere near as effective as it could and should be.
Before any Americans get upset at this comment, keep in mind that liberal ≠ progressive for much of the world.
I’m French. Liberals are very conservative here.
The prisoners’ dilemma explains why people prefer personal profit over benefitting mankind.
Do you really believe that?
It was meant for porn en now the biggest part of it is porn. I’d say a success.
As far a I know the porn industry has actualy driven innovation in various web-technologies including streaming, e-commerce, VR…and now probably AI, I guess.
We should put porn on climate change
The Internet is really really great 🎶
I’ve got a fast connection so I don’t have to wait 🎶
I feel like it’s still mostly fine for individuals who are savvy and know where to look. In summation, though, I think the abundance of mis/disinformation spammed on social media combined with a lack of media literacy is socially corrosive.
Social media is a huge part of the problem…
Stop using social media and 90% of the internets issues stop affecting you.
Search is still fucked tho
Hopefully we can use AI to filter out AI articles at some point in the future lol. Or at least find better sources using Search.
Content-wise, I think we aren’t in a bad spot. There’s a tonne of information available online that wasn’t accessible before. Wikipedia is a pretty great example, but the millions of howtos scattered across Instructables, YouTube, and other sites are also pretty amazing. Yeah, there’s monetization and SEO crap, but I think (hope?) it’s a net positive.
Application-wise, I think we’re also in an okay spot. Almost anyone can publish videos, text, and opinions on corporate publishing tools. If you want, you can spin up a private server with just a credit card, and do whatever you want with incoming traffic. Web browsers aren’t quite Neuromancer/Shadowrun decks, but they do allow anytime to run untrusted code safely on a local machine.
Did all this free information bring us together? No. Not yet, at least. But I think that’s what the early tech utopians got wrong. We aren’t insufferable jerks because we don’t know any better, we’re insufferable jerks because we know better and choose to do it anyway.
That’s true, of course. I didn’t mean to say that the internet doesn’t also have very positive effects. It’s a blessing that knowledge is now much more accessible. But on the whole, it seems to me that people don’t really make use of it - quite the opposite. It seems to me that many more people are now confusing their uninformed opinions with scientific knowledge. There is no other way I can explain this strange hostility towards science that a not inconsiderable number of people are displaying - this is a phenomenon of the recent (internet) past, or is my impression wrong?
It seems to me that many more people are now confusing their uninformed opinions with scientific knowledge. There is no other way I can explain this strange hostility towards science that a not inconsiderable number of people are displaying - this is a phenomenon of the recent (internet) past, or is my impression wrong?
I don’t know. My bias is that human nature is constant over time. As such, I think we’re using the Internet the way we used other resources in the past: cherry picking statements that confirm our existing beliefs, and dismissing statements that challenge them.
I grew up at the end of the Cold War. Without the Internet, people were able to convince themselves climate change wasn’t a thing, planetary annihilation with nuclear weapons was an ok risk, and smoking was yucky but got an unfair bad rap.
The Internet hasn’t caused people to be idiots, it’s just given idiots another platform.
I’m not at all sure either - it’s just a feeling. Perhaps those who make up the world to suit their fixed oppions have become more adept at using the media available to them and thus appear more influential than they actually are. It’s just that I simply can’t understand how people can cling to the most absurd claims and even aggressively propagate them when it’s actually easier than ever to check facts today. That’s just mind-boggeling to me.
“The trick is not to ignore the mainstream but to selectively raid it for things we can use.” -Mike Gunderloy, back in the 80s.
It’s almost as if something gets infinitely worse once the masses adopt it
Normies ruined the internet
theoldnet.com ftw
Well that was a silly 10 minutes lol
I recently played the video game Hypnospace Outlaw and one of the things that stuck out was there was a set of five “subverses” of sorts about nerd culture, and the parent company that runs Hypnospace wanted to get more of that sweet ad money, so they consolidated them into one space, and put it on a slower server. And when you visited these pages, they were noticeably slower compared to the new “sports” space which they did to chase that sweet new customer retention money, all in the leadup of, well, see for yourself (major spoilers).
What do you want? Do you want the internet to be for academics again? Because we’re past that. The moment you have to put a monetary value to something, it becomes about seeking monetary value either to 1) keep it going or 2) keep it going and make a bit of cream on top. This is how the world works now. I hate it, but i’m not pining for the old days either. The cycle continues from Geocities, to Social Media, to the Fediverse, and probably the Metaverse after that.
Nice try Zuck
What do you mean by “turn the tide for the better”?
Unshitify it.
Exactly.
I didn’t ask you and you didn’t explain shit.
For example, efforts in the areas of data protection, freedom of information, combating misinformation, improving working conditions in the online sector, creating fair digital remuneration models and so on and so forth. Pretty much things that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, NOYB and many other such organizations are committed to.
The EFF is great. Perhaps going a little bit off-topic, the EFF creates plug-ins, but I wonder why the EFF doesn’t create a privacy-based ecosystem similar to Proton?
A VPN provider or a system like Proton with encrypted mail, VPN, etc. is entirely based on trust and yet we trust our privacy almost entirely to for-profit corporations, which are inherently untrustworthy over the long haul. It would be cool if a non-profit with a long history of defending privacy, like the EFF, developed such a system. Mozilla seems to be moving in that direction, but it seems like a good fit for EFF too.
That would be great. Perhaps there is a lack of funding to make this possible. Or the EFF, as an NGO, simply does not want to become a provider itself in order to ensure that it remains neutral.
The thing is, for-profit doesn’t equal bad. There are a small subset of companies that aim to provide the best service for modest gain, and IMO, they are inherently as trustworthy as orgs like the EFF.
So you’re saying it’s hopeless to fix any of these issues? Why?
Major parts of today’s internet are controlled by extremely powerful corporations - that’s just a fact. Private individuals and even committed activists have very little to no influence on how these corporations shape their part of the internet. Hence the analogy with climate change: this problem, which threatens the whole of humanity, could probably also be solved, or at least be tackled in a meaningful way. However, a solution is only possible if those corporations that are largely responsible live up to their responsibilities. Of course, this is not to say that private individuals should give up all hope and not try everything they can. Look at it this way: every post or comment on Lemmy is the equivalent of a properly disposed plastic bottle - just a drop in the ocean, but a drop nonetheless. What I was getting at overall is that you can certainly make a contribution, but this small contribution will be of little use as long as those who are actually responsible do not live up to their responsibility, because only these players could turn the tide for the better; but unfortunately they don’t; quite the opposite, I think. Nevertheless, every contribution to improving the situation is important. So please don’t let my pessimism get you down.
Watch me.
Wow that a whole lot of several different things jammed together. This thesis would make a good article or book but as a shower thought it doesn’t really stand on its own.
Sorry, it was really just a shower thought. I was thinking of two things: 1. the hopes that were placed in the Internet have, in my opinion, not materialized at all. Of course, there are many positive effects, but on the whole, the Internet has by no means lived up to its potential. 2. we are now faced with a situation where large corporations control most of the internet used by the general public. This brings with it responsibilities that I don’t believe these corporations are living up to in any way. Hence the analogy with climate change: a change for the better would probably be possible, but there can be no solution as long as those who are largely responsible do not accept their responsibility. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this will never happen.
I see it a little differently. I think the internet has lived up to and exceeded its potential. It’s done things we couldn’t even have thought of back in the beginning. Or course as it grew, it became no longer just the playground of academics, scientists, and creatives. It now has huge commercial regions and is as mainstream as any other medium. It’s no longer solely a cool place where cool people are doing cool things. It is now also playing a role much like television for a bunch of dumb masses to be shown commercials by corporations.
What’s worse is the unimagined downsides. Election misinformation. Hate group echo chambers. Terrorists using it to organize. We failed to imagine these things back in 1992 but maybe that really is just a failure of our imaginations, not the internet. I remember the heady dreams of democratization and universal access to quality information. It was all pretty naive. There were people who imagined television technology would be used for in-home education, too.
But the bad stuff doesn’t erase the cool stuff. It is still enabling creativity and science, arguably moreso than the halcyon days of HTML 1.0. Did any of us ever imagine in 1992 that thousands of scientists could use images from hundreds of locations around the world to construct an image of a black hole, sharing data, tools, code, and ultimately the image itself over the internet? It’s just wild. Remote surgeries, AI, self driving cars, tracker tags, home automation… it all runs on the internet. A lot of it is scary, but it’s also fascinating and far beyond what we imagined 30 years ago.
We used to talk about video conferencing like some far off future. Just because now we see it as mundane doesn’t mean the internet didn’t deliver on its potential. It delivered, and more. We just forget how cool a lot of it is, we were dumb to think it would be nothing but roses, and it’s changing life so much that it’s getting a bit scary.
But didn’t live up to its potential? Nah.
So I don’t really even see your posited problem, and this makes it hard for me to understand your point about a solution. I guess “corporations bad and no one will fix it,” is the bottom line? Well, that has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with capitalism. It’s the worst system there is, except all the others that have ever been tried. If you have any new ideas, we could sure use them.
You are of course absolutely right that there has been remarkable technical progress. I also completely agree with you that there have been wonderful developments in terms of the accessibility of knowledge, for example. Nevertheless, I still don’t think that the internet has, on the whole, lived up to its full potential. What brings me to this assessment is that instead of having an equalizing effect, I think the Internet has created global monopolies that are now managed by just a few, all the more powerful companies (Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, etc.). I don’t mean that all companies are bad or that it’s not legitimate to make money on the Internet, but that a few companies have become so powerful that they basically no longer allow any competition in their industries. In my opinion, this is a consequence of capitalist market logic (an unregulated market will always produce monopolies) - and this logic is in turn reinforced by the network effects of the Internet (once a platform is the biggest, it will become bigger and bigger because it has the most utility). So I come to the conclusion that the internet has become more of a dystopia: I think it has even increased the centralization of economic power and thus inequality in our capitalist system. This is not to say that I don’t see the good sides. But I think that technological developments should not be viewed separately from the logic in which they are embedded. And this is where I see the problem: the Internet is no longer a free medium with equal opportunities for everyone who can make use of it, but an (easier-to-use) platform economy, at least in the parts that are used by the masses. I don’t have a godfather solution for this, just as I don’t have one for effective measures to combat climate change. However, I think that nothing can change significantly in either case as long as the logic of excessive profit maximization continues to dominate. Or to put it another way: I fear that all the efforts of committed individuals will not succeed if we simply carry on as before - if it were otherwise, the utopia of the early Internet would have been realized long ago. That is of course a pessimistic view, but unfortunately I think it is also a realistic one. Nevertheless, I don’t want to say that it’s not sensible and worthy of all honors if everyone tries to do their part. After all that’s why I’m here on Lemmy and not on Reddit.
The internet probably offers more opportunity to a small solo operator than ever before. I’m not sure what your memories of the early 90s were but it was not easy to set up a website and forget about an online store. Nowadays there are incredible tools for this and a million flowers are blossoming. The fact that corporations also profit from this doesn’t negate it.
I grew up in a time when 3 companies controlled virtually all the news media. The fact that a tweet can now sweep the world literally IS the “democratized” future we always dreamed about.
