I'm simultaneously hearing that the internet is more addicting than cigarettes to the point where multiple states are finding success levying gigantic fines on companies for having too good of a product, and also that the internet is boring and drab. Are we on two different internets? Is the author simply immune from the hypnosis of social media?

Anyway, the real internet is and always has been/will be smaller forums brought together by a common interest. Think back to the MMORPG private server communities of the 00's/10's. Kind of hacker news fits into that bucket today but even still a lot of the brainrotted brigading and average takes from reddit I'm seeing more often here (not calling out this post in particular; referring to the comment sections mostly).

This is how I feel completely, having also grown up online all the way from BBSs onwards. I literally don't even have websites to visit any more. I get on my computer, scan hacker news for a bit, check twitter for a few minutes, scan some world news site, and thats it.

I still spend a lot of time programming (and thus a lot of time on the computer) but other than that, absolutely nothing appeals. Its a wasteland in my mind.

> Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge. It triggers our worst instincts in terms of tribalism and groupthink and makes us intellectually lazy.

I can't agree more with this.

A bottle of cool, hydrating water has been spilt onto dry dirt and soaked in, becoming mud, where the dirt and the water are not able to be separated back into their original forms. The water is the internet and the dirt is the real world. It was inevitable that the real world would absorb the internet into it.

I remember drinking the cool water and being greatly refreshed by it, but what I think is easy to overlook is what, in the modern real world, has been improved by its absorption of the internet into the combined normality. The things that have been improved we take for granted. Music, Movie, and TV streaming, instant messaging, working from home, online shopping, podcasts, webcams, smartphones. Not all of it is positive (but that's a tool usage choice conversation, which is a bit different).

The nostalgia, I think, is the "what could have been", with this new thing, and now we're living in it, it's a bit disappointing, but only in a way that anything that's 'normalised' is a bit disappointing. We're stupid, demanding, impossible to please humans; our imagined utopia will never be manifest.

I'm sitting here watching a webcam of a flock of pigeons drinking from a waterhole in the Namibian desert. That's cool! But I've still got to work, and work is still hard thinking and forcing myself out of bed in the morning and ignoring distractions of things I'd rather be doing - but I can have this extra screen showing me pigeons on the other side of the world.

We can still have this conversation.

What I have seen is that the Internet doesn’t attract interesting people anymore and such, the time they spend creating “content” is drastically reduced compared to, let’s say 20-25 years ago. And by “content” I don’t mean tiktok or youtube shorts, but code, blogs, demos or contributing to larger projects. The dynamic is different now, people are working disconnected and from time to time they might release ready projects that previously were seeing their development cycle happening online. Otherwise, there are many projects that don’t make it on the Internet anymore.

I think what made the internet in the 90s and early 2000s more enjoyable is that it was way smaller than now and (mostly) free of bots, and trying to find that in social media and mainstream sites is counterproductive, since they are just the opposite.

In comparison, I've found small net places such as Mastodon or smolnets much more enjoyable even though the population is much smaller (which is nice since they also don't generate more information than I have time for). As a rule of thumb: The less interesting a place is for companies, the more pleasant it probably is.

Stop absorbing everything. Limit yourself.

I with them on that. The internet is basically just infrastructure for email and some media like a podcast, otherwise the only reason I am here is because... well, I'm forced to be on a computer most of the week and not all of it is 'productive'. But after work, weekends, holidays I do not touch it.

I've been on the "internet" since before there was one, back in 1984-6 when bang paths were email addresses and DNS hadn't been invented yet. I was on one of the earliest BBSs (pre-FIDO) in Melbourne run by Peter Jetson and "Bear's Bull" running on a CDC-6000 at RMIT.

It's been an "eternal September" since Prodigy & Compuserve and then AOL joined the net, Usenet started degrading, people had more then 4-line sigs without a "-- " at the start of the sig, people top-quoted messages etc.

So the internet has been dying all that time. Lived through the dotcom boom/crash, growth/death of Yahoo Groups/Geocities/stumbleupon/slashdot/fark/etc.

I'm not sure whether AI/LLMs are really killing it more than the advent of social media and the endless slop that is time descending blogs.

I'm not sure whether the internet is just becoming yet another broadcast media, where small voices are drowned out by media conglomerates and the endless suck of advertising, or whether it really is "dying".

Either way, it will evolve, but whether it will evolve "well" is a very open question.

Greed ruins everything.It’s all about greed and cost keep going up & up. Hell you can even binge watch anymore unless it’s something old. I don’t even subscribe to Netflix anymore. It’s all garbage, nothing but garbage.

I agree, but if we're being very honest I think the reason is just nostalgia. And I think that you can still find what you're looking for, but it's less in-your-face (as in; it's not a url on altavista.com).

We're older now, being young was great, we had infinite time to roam and discover and have nice things (and our first real six-string, and trying different things and not thinking about tomorrow). The youth nowadays also has infinite time, and they fill it in their own way. They like how things are, even though we don't like it and yearn for the days of yore.

It is the way of things.

The internet is fine. It's the web that sucks now. It matters, because we can build a different web without throwing out the internet.

We'll have to walk away from the attention economy, that'll be a journey that each has to take singly, but we don't have to walk back to the 1980's. We can build something that works for communication, but that doesn't work for advertising: something structurally enshittificationproof. It will not attract investors, because there will be nothing to leverage. We'll have to build it because we want it, which has never been easier.

We can steganographically hide it in AI slop which no human has to actually ever see, and we can trick our enemies into hosting it for us for free. It might even be fun.

I always appreciate a good Disco Elysium reference.

Last week I finally deleted my LinkedIn account, the last social account I had. This week, I'm close to deleting my YouTube account. There's less content I want to see and more slop than ever. Apple Music is on the chopping block. These days, I only use it to preview vinyl records that catch my eye. Once my iPhone dies, I'm done with smartphones.

The internet had so much potential. Shame.

The problem isn't the internet but rather the sites that people use on it, and the monolithic nature of "social media".

Social media will be viewed as a failed experiment in the future.

As a counter position I enjoy the internet these days maybe more than before. Back in 1999 there was almost no good content. These days there's huge amounts of content from experts in any field you can think of, often in direct video form from top people in the field. There's also more crap - you have to be selective.

Even AI/LLMs I'm kind of fascinated by although I dislike their writing as much as anyone. But the singularity type stuff is a unique moment in history and interesting to watch.

I think it's time for people to have their own homepages. Building and customizing a homepage is more fun than you'd think. What's the main reason the internet feels less fun these days? I think it's because there are fewer people actually communicating. But wouldn't it be more fun if we communicated through homepages? Maybe someday there will be a community—a hub for people who have their own homepages—where only those with homepages can participate

i realized for me the convenience just isn't there anymore. the ads, surveillance, toxicity, misinformation, slop. it's just not worth being online anymore. read a book, meet with people, attend talks, go to a museum...

I am sick to death of the seemingly obligatory oh-but-im-all-in-on-ai disclaimer embedded in what is otherwise a (totally valid) critique of AI. Have the courage of your convictions already.

That's like saying "I don't enjoy the roads any more" and the solution is the same: go "off the beaten tracks" to find solace. The internet is the thing which binds many networks together, both the commercial drivel-pushing "AI"-generated haunts of sleezebags, propagandists, the-current-thing activists, influencer-ridden shitholes and more as well as the odd interesting thing which piques your interest. 99.999% of street addresses on the road network aren't of interest either but the 0.001% which are make it worth taking to the road to reach them.

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You should try chatting with a large language model—it's incredibly useful! The only thing is, I'm not sure if the answers it gives are actually correct.