The internet is already over (2022)

The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either.

A few things affect this:

- Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The internet experience is getting gradually worse.

- Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s.

- Artificial intelligence. The situation will only be exacerbated by letting AI loose on the internet. Whatever humans can do online, AI can do much, much better—or worse, depending on your perspective.

The outcome of these things will be that countries will have a more restricted and censored version of the current internet. We'll follow China's example, and have a European internet, US internet, etc.

The internet will survive. It will just be very different.

This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably on the endangered list. TikTok is probably the last big social and has an increasingly negative reputation, meaning it'll probably be "out" pretty soon.

The public Internet is probably dying, a victim of spam and over-commoditization.

It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.

But then once it ended, it feels like being stuck online with nothing else to do all day burnt a lot of people out on the internet and online activities. Perhaps they decided it was best to make up for lost time once real life 'reopened'. Or perhaps they took one look at the online panopticon, and realised it wasn't adding as much to their lives as they thought.

Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.

This article has a tone of a giant, unacknowledged fear of passing that is using some notion of "the Internet" as a demonstratory puppet. "The Internet" too shall pass[0], and it should be the most obvious and neutral thing in the world; the overdramatizing part of this article does makes no sense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass

Facebook and microblogs use the same infra and can be accessed via the same means (web browser, etc).

At least from anecdotal experience, the really good stuff has been getting easier to find through IRL-ish means, like asking a colleague for the invite link.

I haven't really seen behind the invite veil much, since I'm about as far as it gets from someone cool you'd want in your group chat, but from what I've seen, "good" things are happening and thoughts are thought. It's just happening in private.

There were comments or an article somewhere about someone being sad about "very deep technical discussions being held on discord servers and that knowledge being ultimately lost". I don't think it's that bad of a thing though since that knowledge was never intended for the public and being ultimately lost and forgotten is what the people writing said messages are expecting of it. Certainly, as a person, I care more about myself having less of a digital papertrail than someone in the indefinite future not being able to solve their nieche non-essential problem.

I could elaborate more on the "onlyfans has replaced sex" and the such, which are, IMO, while somewhat true, are conclusions to which the author arrived to from a wrong place, thus continuing to think in that direcion would get them further from the truth, not closer to it.

In the end, just as human brain is a sort of general purpose multimodal input-output machine, the internet can be used for all sorts of purposes. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will fall out of fashion, without getting a solid cultutal foothold. The test of time works as well as ever.

As the centuries went on, many people decided that the time it took to read a pamphlet was almost always worth more than what they were getting out of it. So, we got book publishers and newspaper proprietors whose key value added was their guarantee that what they were publishing met a minimum standard of value, and people were willing to pay for that because it was better value than reading self-published books or pamphlets, even when free.

If the mainstream Internet follows the same path, it might come to have more in common with MSN of 1996 than with Facebook of twenty years later.

All the doomerism is gone if you avoid it.

You can take back your life if you just go for it

The companies that built what we think of as the modern internet, they tried to build perpetual motion machines. They've built unsustainable businesses chasing investor money, based on the idea that they can sell people things better, give them more of what they want, entire environments built around interaction and engagement. And then, like the foresight lacking Rube Goldberg engineers they are, they created a thing that can do all the engagement for them and unleashed it. I have no doubt in my mind that when the last user deletes their Facebook app from their phone, engagement will be at an all time high.

I remember reading something about how most internet bandwidth usage is not people sending things to each other, but machines mindlessly sending nonsense, and what we see is a fraction of the total. It appears that that is the fate of the visible internet as well, and coming very soon.

- People will use it drastically less. I got rid of my smart phone ~2 years ago and it's been a huge life improvement. Still on the computer a lot, but when I leave the room I'm in the real world again.

- When they do use it it will be drastically higher quality. I'm working on building the World Wide Scroll as a successor to the web (https://wws.scroll.pub/), an idea I first had 12 years ago (https://breckyunits.com/spacenet.html), but took a while to figure out all the infra.

Individual incentives have also shifted substantially. Having a post go viral or be of some help to someone else used to be enough of an incentive to post on the internet. Now people want to make a job out of it, which shifts the nature of the posts due to different incentives requiring different optimizations. Also people aren't hosting their own websites that they support out of their own pocket that often anymore. People would rather post their content on other people's websites that are ad supported and therefore have incentives that bias what is posted there or gets traction on that platform.

This whole article reads as "i expected things to stay the same and they are"

There are still tons of great films being made, and new concepts spinning up - just in non-traditional places or ways - netflix, apple tv, etc. So they're not in theaters? Miniseries are the new movies. Your streaming box is the new theater.

Bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style? Stop reading best-sellers, and focus on more curated and genre lists, such as Goodreads. Again, you expected the new york times bestseller list to be the arbiter of "good" and that is no longer true.

And "all our pop music sounds like a tribute act"? Lmao. If you listen to the same top 40 pop crap, sure! There's tons of great pop acts that are way smaller - but again, if all you do is look at "most played" and listen to the radio, you're going to hear the same monoculture bullcrap

Broaden your horizons or slide beneath the static.

To be fair, he was talking about big iron mainframes. He envisioned everyone having a dumb terminal in their home rather than a microcomputer (which we effectively call "the pc").

All had one thing in common: interesting creators.

Previously Google connected you with interesting pages, now Google is answering machine. Now you are not connected with people, but with Google algorithm. You are connected with amazon deals, news outlets. You will not find XYZ blog on it that easily.

Previously Facebook was designed to connect you with people, now you are connected with memes, ads, bots, and companies, news outlets.

Previously YouTube connected users with creators, now it is full of corporations, big media. You cannot down vote, you cannot easily browse subscriptions. YouTube does not care about users, comment section has limited amount of moderation tools.

Dead internet theory. Bots create your feeds through algorithms. Bots comment threads through malicious accounts. Now Bots will also create content.

Manual labor is often more precise, more artsy. Moving to automation, to factories killed some of that. I think this is what happens with the Internet. We are living in a factory now.

There is a limit to enshittification, before users are tired and go elsewhere.

>They were wrong,

The fact that both Google and Facebook are based on precisely this suggests to me that it is not the theory that is wrong but the execution of the other examples. Uber - where you drive - just isn’t all that interesting to advertisers

I’d say the more important perspective is one of walled garden. The companies with tight walled gardens seem to succeed the best at hijacking these personal behavioural exhausts of data aka surveillance capitalism etc

The new generation doesn't know how boring a world without a phone in your pocket actually was. They can't comprehend it in the same way that we can't comprehend actually believing religion the way medieval people did. It's not coming back.

Perhaps, just like with civilization IRL, it will start with pockets of societies that have specific ideals for collaboration. And then the successful pockets grow to include more and more.

First of all, the internet isn't on the verge of imploding, it's just in flux, as per usual. It also isn't stagnating, at least not on such a grand scale. Though it does feel as though it's lost a bit of steam in the last few years. That could be due to the homegeneitiy of the current investment landscape.

The author tries to sell us a doom spiral by comparing the state of services. They attempt to connect different services as if they're representative of a pulse for the internet as a whole. But the differences between Facebook and Tik Tok are vast, between Twitter and MySpace, between forums and Discord. Declining numbers in any of these does not indicate decline in any other service, nor the internet as a whole. Not to mention most of these are controlled by monolithic entities who also don't contribute to the web outside their bloated bubbles, the performance of these services are largely based on the performance of these companies and their investments. If one dies, it's a largely isolated event.

All the most recent, negative changes were made by spurious investments into anything that even seemed remotely profitable by eager investors. These bubbles will burst, and when they do, some people won't even notice the change. Some, of course, will be forced to adapt, or to leave the internet entirely. That'll likely mean the www will lose a lot of its traffic, but that doesn't sound bad for the internet as a whole... in fact it sounds good.

Companies are only making the internet worse because they believe there's money to be made. That, as the author points out, is not really going to be true for much longer, at least not for the current wave of companies. And when that happens, new companies will have to step in and pick up the pieces if they want to profit off the internet. Unfortunately for them, there's just not enough lubrication to keep an aging population of users relearning all their old habits in new environments.

I believe the internet, as it is now, will not survive for the individual. However, every individual must make that journey on their own terms. The author clearly made their journey ages ago, or perhaps was always skeptical. Others, however still have to make that trek. I have a few younger friends still in the beginning of their internet obsession where they (somehow) can still find regular content that interests them on the www. This group is likely to be the last large wave for advertisers. So, when they're done, that's it; The internet won't be worth investing in, and everyone who only ever used it kill time will go along side the companies. Those that made the journey will stay if they have use for a post-corporate internet.

The article, of course, assumes that the internet is just for fapping and killing time, when in reality it's used for a lot more than just that. Fapping and killing time is just what's being subsidized by the numerous companies invested in the internet. The article doesn't consider this, it doesn't consider that there were points before the current one, or that there are even corners of the internet where people share software and ideas. No, it just assumes that once this fad dies, the internet dies. I personally believe the internet has uses outside what companies invest in, and it's not hard to use it for just those purposes. That's enough of a reason to keep coming back.

All that being said, I do agree with the author regarding causes on the internet. One essentially does nothing when they try to devote their time to a cause online. Unless one explicitly uses the internet to organize action with others in meatspace, the internet is essentially worthless as a medium for revolution. Actually, it's worse than worthless, it's detrimental as it encourages non-action. In most cases even supporting forces who would ostracize those that would push for more forceful and aggressive action against the status quo. The corporate internet has largely made revolutionaries into pacifists, a trait which makes them non-threatening to those in power.

Even calmly explaining all this is a bit mastubatory and counter-productive. What I should be doing is running in local elections, organizing meetups, or sabotaging power structures in a variety of ways. I should be speaking in plain language about all of this, and freely expressing myself. Instead I'm here, explaining the obvious flaws of an article, while simultaneously not-so-subtly advertising my views regarding the web like it matters.

Oh wait :\

Just train a LLM, your new search engine. Like-minded folks making the enshittified portions transparent.

E-mail spam used to be a thing, until one day it wasn't. AI just generalizes the process.

The internet age is over is correct. The age of being connected has started.

More and more people connected to the internet but not actually using it the way we saw it in the 90s and 2000s. Mid-2010s we started to see the paradigm take place.

Like the verbal equivalent of that one time I drank far too much Gin and my stomach finally said "no" all over the bathroom floor (missed the toilet — oops).

I'm glad to never have gone down that particular path. Stuck with my flip phone for ages, etc.

But for people who did, just know that there's room for moderation. There is plenty of space between "all day online" and "the internet is over."

I like this quote from "Mutant Message Down Under":

  My suggestion is that you taste the message, savor what is right for you,
  and spit out the rest; after all, that is the law of the universe.

"predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate."

To me it fucking wildly accurate. It did revolutonize a lot for me. Yes I know some people would get a heart attack if they could not show to the rest of the world what did they have for breakfast. Not my problem. I only had good from the Internet so far.