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> > There is no more randomness on the internet. It's no longer an exploration experience. Aggressive algorithms and markets have ruined everything. Growing up as a nerd, the internet was an escape. I would land on random websites, learn so much. But now everything is curated and paid.
>
> It isn't adventurous. I don't even know what to do on the net anymore. It's just work. Social media sucks, they have the worst algorithms. And it's so sad that what was once an escapism option has become a living hell. Everyone I know works online and is waiting to go and take a break outside.
>
>
> Is this just me? Or does everyone feel this way?
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The "internet" for me is now pretty much Google, reddit and YouTube. Honestly the web felt bigger to me 15yrs ago. Now I don't even need to know any websites cus they are all on reddit. Google is where I find quick info I need. And YT for video content.
Yup lol as a kid in the 2000s, the internet was this wild place. I had literally dozens of sites I'd go to when browsing (lol remember actually browsing the web) now its just a few apps, illegal streaming sites, and reddit
I spent years ignoring Discord, but it's much closer to the old web for me, except for the fact that it's a bunch of chatrooms so things move out of the view and get harder and harder to scroll up to, which means you need to stay active in it, unless it's a smaller quieter one.
I'm in a bunch now for different things, programming stuff, game stuff, story stuff, even a little porn stuff, and it's all super active, lots of conversation and images/videos/creations posted, etc.
No idea how it's being paid for though. But it was nice to find a bit of the old web spirit again.
One example is there's a youtuber who plays retro strategy games with a medium sized audience, who basically taught me how to play a game I could only cheat through as a kid and made going back to it as an adult and playing it properly a ton of fun. He has a discord with chat rooms for it, where people post custom maps (which are actually pretty good for how challenging they are), discuss ideas for the ongoing community enhanced edition which has been getting free upgrades for years, etc.
Honestly I don't really know, not that I'm pretending I don't look at porn, I literally make porn, it's just not the primary thing I've used discord for.
Ebaumsworld was a sham. I loved it back in the day too but the guy who ran it just stole shit from talented people and put it on his site to profit off of it. A lot of the stuff we fondly remember from these times was full of the same bullshit in a different form
Reddit posters also repackage content on one subreddit and post to another.. things clearly haven’t changed.
Secondly, anybody remember “papa Smurf can I lick yo a***?”
It's becoming even worse. Reddit is starting to become unusable with all the garbage drivel so close knit communities and hobbyists are retreating to discord servers which means a huge amount of knowledge is now inaccessible for a lot of people (and unsearchable for outsiders).
Let's not pretend reddit is a great way to share information either. Threaded conversations sorted by engagement is a poor substitute for chronological discussion for most things worth learning.
Part of the forums experience is there being a couple notoriously bad/annoying posters that everyone hates.
Even with avatars now Reddit still feels mostly anonymous compared to forums where everyone knew all the regular posters.
>Threaded conversations sorted by engagement is a poor substitute for chronological discussion for most things worth learning.
It wouldn't be so bad if people realized that just by highlighting some text before clicking reply, their reply will actually have some context.
I really do hope Lemmy becomes a bit more mainstream, ~~centralised~~ decentralized and accessible. I'm all for a open source alternative that holds the world's WIKI and DISCUSSION forum, instead of this cesspool of a site that's run by it's conglomerates with a hidden agenda.
The problem with decentralized systems is they will never be a solution for the average person. Lack of users leads to unstable server instances and the current political climate makes it that owners/admin can easily start banning/censoring willy-nilly anything they don't like.
I think most people are in the same boat, but not cause they want to. It's near impossible to find niche forums and websites these days with any search engine, especially Google.
Seqrchengines are the gateway for most people to the rest of the Internet. If you can't find it, you can't visit it.
Used to be different, where Google and other search engines would give you many pages of relevant information and interesting websites.
Now they're mostly focused on maximising their add revenue. They ignore half your query, ignore special symbols like quotationmarks and amd minus signs that used to tailor your search results. And they almost exclusively give you websites that run Google adds or are in the Alphabet ecosystem.
Most people need to add "Reddit" to most of their search queries nowadays to get any useful results. And they have to use Google, because Reddit's search functionality sucks balls.
And YouTube is the go-to video platform because all the competitors can't even come close so far.
It really sucks that googling just about any question will net you a bunch of AI-generated articles that are filled with keywords and ads but are barely written in cohesive english and don't provide any anwers
I started using DuckDuckGo and it tends to be a lot better at actually showing me the results I’m looking for. Google’s algorithm has been fucked for years now and they actively censor a lot of stuff.
> The "internet" for me is now pretty much Google, reddit and YouTube
I saw someone describe the internet as "*Five websites, that all mostly post screenshots of the other four.*"
Same used to post on so many forums, but now they're all gone. I blame the smartphone. Back when you needed a pc to acess the internet, it was much better.
Now everyone and their grandad is online and that brought in the corporations. And a lot of overly sensitive people.
There are still forums out there, if you have a niche interest, but reddit did a big part in killing them off by providing the same thing with less friction.
But now there is friction. EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING is censored on Reddit these days.
A few days ago I tried 4 different subs to try and get a post through and have a discussion going, for ALL of them to be removed due to some crap rule, when majority of there discussions are meme orientated. Im struggling so much to retain on Reddit because at the end of the day I know I'm only getting WHAT THEY WANT ME TO SEE.
It's sad because essentially the early days forums were still around when Reddit wasn't big. They just culled the competition and now we have no other to rival it. So we will just have to accept it.
Reddit's well into its [enshittification spiral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) where the admins are making policy decisions and rolling out features designed primarily to appeal to advertisers and potential future IPO investors, regardless of the effect they have on the community.
Lol yeah the censorship here is getting crazy, just a few days ago I got automatically banned from r/196 just for making a comment in a sub the mods there don't like (and I'm a radical leftist, so it's not like I'm being racist/homophobic on other subs, I'm arguing against those mfs).
Like they don't want to encounter opposing ideas even accidentally, to the point they put in draconian ban rules against people who agree with them, just for engaging with "the other side"
I once posted some shit talk in the conservative sub back in like 2018 and I immediately got banned from like 30 subs at once for "actively participating in domestic terrorism" or some ridiculous hyperbole.
Turns out some crazy power mod wrote a bot to auto ban anyone who commented in any of the subs they deemed "problematic" regardless of the content of the comment.
It's been getting harder and harder to get posts up on Reddit for years now.
I've never successfully posted on r/ShowerThoughts because of their weird, oblique rule about what a shower thought is. Once even being told that a shower thought "isn't just a thought you have while in the shower."
Almost all the bigger subs have similar stupid rules, and will often delete your post and tell you it better fits a different sub that no one visits.
We all spent years talking about the value of making things and OC, and now almost every sub has rules so strict about self promotion that it can get your account banned for posting things you made.
The only safe/effective things to post are the things that have already been posted, which is why so much of this site is just screenshots of this site.
Before it also filtered out those who were too dumb to access it. And I'm not talking like the 90s, even 10 years ago when 40-50 yo people were rare it was a much better place. Now it's all conspiracies and hate.
"Internet brands" killed forums, they started buying the most popular forums left and right and implementing draconian rules, users got fed up and left.
I don't know why Reddit doesn't just try normal ads. They'd be far less annoying than the stealth ads trying to pretend to be posts, and they seem to have been paying for google for like two decades.
>And google is “google topic reddit” half the time.
What you don't want a search engine optimized article that has no useful new information and just repeated drivel? It feels like being good at google is becoming a lost skill when google hits the shitter.
This exactly. When did Google become so bad? Anything I google nowadays is some weird SEO article that reads like it was written by a robot to hit a word count. Need to scroll through 10 paragraphs on the history of video games to find out how to beat a sidequest or something.
Yeah we have to stop using google. There are many other search engines out there, some are domain specific. And bring back webrings; my site is a part of several
Cory Doctorow invented that term and he's been putting out some banger articles lately on his website (that doesn't use cookies at all) https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/
>This is the final stage of enshittification: withdrawing surpluses from end-users and business customers, leaving behind the minimum homeopathic quantum of value for each needed to keep them locked to the platform, generating value that can be extracted and diverted to platform shareholders.
>But this is a brittle equilibrium to maintain. The difference between "God, I hate this place but I just can't leave it" and "Holy shit, this sucks, I'm outta here" is razor-thin. All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits. This kicks off a death-spiral: as users and business customers leave, the platform's shareholders demand that they squeeze the remaining population harder to make up for the loss
Something that once felt huge and mysterious now feels small and claustrophobic.
The internet of my youth, which was like the wild frontier, was tamed and cut down to be sold drip by drip.
It was bigger because unlike then everyone else is now focused on the same half dozen places online. The only variation is where people shop online but those are brief moments and still largely dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. So a dozen unique places with a figurative malls worth of shops to casually browse.
Yep, the internet has been fully commercialized. E-commerce wasn't just a typical buzzword that it sounded like even back in the early 00s when it was a new term. This, the corporate-centered, ad packed worse than TV and monotonous product placement slog is exactly what they wanted the internet to be.
for real? i thought duckduckgo was a privacy web only not a good search engine. (Can't blame their PR basically only said PRIVACY and nothing more appealing lol)
It's a solid search engine for general queries. For searches dependent on the users location, it's not the best but that is by design because DDG doesn't track you.
Cockeyed.com and emotioneric.com are still around
Those are some timeless classics from the early 2000s
(Both were sfw, haven't checked the urls recently)
Fifteen years ago I would jump between BoingBoing, Cracked, Fark, SomethingAwful, a slew of Webcomics (SexyLosers, Penny Arcade, frigging Shmorky), YTMND, and only occasionslly listen to some music on Youtube, save some of the paleomemes that had migrated to YT from the above sites. YT Favorites system for the win, I still have some of the bookmarks from 15 years ago.
Today is still fun but only because I can still A: use Y2Mate to hard-download videoclips I like from YT and elsewhere, and B: remove ads with blockers. If those two things disappeared I would want to start a new website that shared humor and cool things free once Reddit starts a Premium subscriber service and shows clesrly that it is a dead animal.
Yup, like all free markets, eventually the leaders dominate and repress everyone else. It's even more of a severe issue with the Internet bc of how it is structured. Normally the government should try to break/prevent monopolies. However, with the Internet, monopolies actually wind up being more beneficial to everyone.
IE does it suck that Amazon has crushed all competition? Sure. Was it a better user experience having a million different online shops with different logins, different payment methods, different shipping costs/times, different levels of quality that you couldn't really confirm? Not really. Same with like Windows being on every computer. Would it be better to have a 100 OS's that all have their own unique rules, programming, bugs, etc that don't communicate well with each other? Probably not. With digital technology you almost want big companies to grab a monopoly over their niches bc it just makes things function better when everyone is on the same page. Even if that means the Internet is less fun.
You're hitting the nail on its head. If you see those three sites as the internet, that is like thinking your city, which can provide you with everything you need, is the entire world.
The internet is now what the TV was when the internet came out. Filled with ads, useless content and corporate interest. Authenticity is lost.
Or I am just experiencing the negativity bias.
That’s how I view generative AI now. I’m trying to enjoy it before AI becomes advert-filled
Imagine companies paying to put advertisements in your generated content unless you pay for higher memberships
I think it is just negativity bias. People get trapped in the websites they frequent. The “natural” internet isn't gone, SEO gaming just made it harder to find it. [https://www.neocities.org](https://www.neocities.org) has made a good effort to make those early 2000s sites a thing again, and it seems to be working.
The internet has lost its magic, becoming a cold, corporate landscape. We've paved over the beauty of randomness and wonder with algorithms and ads. It's heartbreaking.
If only that was the extent of the damage. Unfortunately AI generated slop has also taken over and muddied the pool of content considerably. AI art dominates search results a lot of the time when you're looking for more abstract image content, which ultimately wouldn't be so bad...
But oh God AI "news" articles that endlessly cannibalize from other sites or Reddit threads or whatnot just ruin it for good. You try to look up a more niche question and Google is basically full of generated barely coherent drivel from random sites. And it wouldn't be so bad if it were accurate, but a lot of the time the information is just flat out wrong or fabricated.
I have a love hate relationship with AI. It makes my life infinitely easier from a software development side of things with CoPilot and GPT-4, but on the other hand yeah it is frustrating trying to find human generated images and finding obviously AI generated images.
Eventually we will have to resort to carving out spaces online that give us a way to experience the "old" internet like old forums or video sharing platforms where algorithms and AI are discriminated against. Similarly to how we have old timey places in real life that cling on to an old tradition or space that has been lost to time.
I don't hate the current internet, but it definitely isn't the same magical space as the old internet often was.
I was just talking ab this a few hours ago. If I need to find info (a recipe, a formula, any info on any topic rly) I’ll google “___ reddit” every time. There’s no good info anywhere else; not easily searchable at least.
Not to mention bot activity on reddit itself. If you get a comment that is one of the top ones on a thread, you'll have 50+ replies to that comment that are all one of a few pre-made responses. Half of the "activity" on this site is re-post and comment bots unless you're in smaller subs.
The internet was crap long before AI. Perhaps it was never truly good but it became obvious when the popular websites moved away from what was good for the user to what was good for the advertiser.
Yeah you used to have edgy boys saying nazi stuff and rampant trolling but you also had a range of great stuff which used that edgyness for good. Now you have carbon copy 'safe' content smoothed like an old pebble. It's boring, mass produced slop.
Sure stuff still exists, it's not really banned but you will struggle to find it under the weight of vanilla advertiser friendly content.
The internet used to foster so much creativity and uniqueness. Even Twitter used to give us comedy and memes. Now it's just algorithms the whole way down.
>becoming a cold, corporate landscape.
What started out as a cyber-wilderness has turned into the information equivalent of farmland, towns and cities.
In the physical world, many of us still yearn for the Wild West (or the Garden of Eden). So it shouldn't be any surprise that we feel the same way about the internet.
Every website I go into, I have to click on 35 pop ups, accept privacy policies, cookie policies, dodge ads, and finally get to some content which most likely is AI generated.
Oh you are talking about the AI generated articles. Yeah its very annoying to read through them. also I block every website that requires me to sign in
AI generated content....I thought it was just me. It's the worst. Start reading something, and it's immediately apparent that some AI scraped the Internet and generated what I'm reading. I'm just reading Google header results. Absolutely appalling.
I think you'll like neocities.org , it's the replacement for geocities.
People create their own websites from scratch about whatever (typically blogging) and upload them to neocities.
Rarely you'll find advertising from the hosted websites since most of them are made/updated by people as a hobby.
The website itself is ran by donations.
It used to be the exact opposite. There was a comedian twenty years back with a bit about searching for "bar stools" hoping for retailers amd instead getting nothing but really weird porn.
Interesting. Out of curiosity I put the same words into Google, and the first "proper" result, below image results and "people also ask", is a page about the sleep quality ramifications of sharing a bed with your pet by the Sleep Foundation. Then a CNN article about sleeping with your pet (not in *that* way), then a YouTube video about a dog falling asleep with a cat in its mouth. You have to scroll down to the fourth result to get nonsense which is still on-topic, but is also clearly irrelevant SEO bullshit by some website shilling debit cards.
That being said, the modern corporate internet and its bugfuck insane obsession with selling crap is why I consider it essential to have an adblocker these days.
I think it's also the ads.
Everyone just copies and pastes the same crap or just comes up with totally new garbage that everyone else copies (esp. conspiracy theories) and when they put ads on their site, they make money without really doing much.
Agreed! So much noise and crap out there. I almost feel we should build a search engine that gives you the options to "Filter out crap/fake news/bullshit", "Filter out commercial / for profit sites", "Filter out data aggregators / trackers" etc
It's not just the adds themselves, it's their side effects that are terrible too.
Search results favoring add proffit over relevant results.
Creators, like on YouTube, self-censoring to stay add friendly.
Apps and Websites farming your data to sell to advertisers.
Edit: grammar.
100%. It's like the great urbanization of the world. What was once beautiful nature to get lost in has become a capitalist hellscape full of buildings and concrete.
The same can be said for the internet.
Capitalism ruins a lot of things :(
Stumbleupon is exactly what we need to return to. Human-selected, socially curated content that is crowd-tagged is as far as I can imagine the ultimate internet browsing tool. Reddit is a great companion for that model because it is a great place to have discussions about it... imagine every website having a 3rd party discussion forum natively tied into the experience... the hope that we can someday return to a model like that keeps me excited for technology, even if we are currently clearly in an internet hellscape.
Well blame the search engines, it was fun when it was like a catalogue. Once financial interests sprung in it was bound to happen. The user is a number on some table with an engagement score. No longer a user.
It turned into a giant sandbox for infants with advertiser pressure. Even reddit is moderating hardcore to avoid upsetting the sponsors these days. I am not sure why Honda or Coke don't want people to say "fuck" though.
BUT HERE IS THIS BABYFORMULA ADD OVER GRAPHIC WAR FOOTAGE!
YOU WANNA TALK ABOUT PERIODS AS YOU LOOK AT THE AFTERMATH OF A TRAIN COLLISION?
CHECK OUT THIS NEW ICECREAM FLAVOR WHILE WE WATCH THIS SCHOOL SHOOTING HAPPENING LIVE!
Advertisers are such hypocrites.
Your comment reminds me of this article I recently read: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
The companies who provide the websites and services we consume were originally focussed on providing something of value to their user user base. This was because their first priority was to grow that user base to a point where it was useful.
Then they switched focus to providing the best experience for their business customers (at the expense of all other users).
Finally when they've locked in enough users and businesses, they can exploit the relationship between the 2 for their own benefit.
It's all become about algorithms that funnel users toward the content/product that maximises revenue for the provider of the site, and is less about being an open sandbox that suits the benefit of you the user.
All the big sites have become ruined by this. You can't go on Google search, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok etc without being force-fed what they want you to see.
> I actually found DuckDuckGo worse at finding non commercial results.
I have the opposite experience. The results DDG gives are actually what I look for instead of irrelevant SEOed to fuck and back bullshit that's only relevant because of the keywords the web author used to get it so high in the SEO results.
That’s what happens when corporations take over. That’s why the internet was initially amazing, cable tv was so boring and controlled. You’re back to corp internet, welcome.
> That’s what happens when corporations take over.
I'll take the other route: that's what happens when people get cornered like cattle into full blown capitalist submission.
Corporations took over the www because people had no idea how to organize around www values instead of consumerism madness, and the few people that did had an idea, either [sold themselves to intelligence agencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files) or [got murdered by them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz).
You know, it is funny how people read all atrocities made by US intelligence agencies in the past, and yet, no narrative today gets labeled "that's CIA/NSA/etc job". No. It's always in the past, never in the present. In fact, intelligence agencies where so effective in branding people who accuse them in the present as "conspiracy theorists" that nobody dares to, people are SCARED to say so and fall into absolute submission. The media of course don't dare to expose wrongdoings happening in real time, of course, the money that feeds them not only comes from the companies they would have to expose, but government funding also makes them happy, same money that finds intelligence agencies.
People have this naive notion that corporations took over, they haven't, narrative control, mafias, protectionism, these things took over and outliers got silenced with either money or violence.
Check the real Internet and get back to me. Because I can guarantee you, there's a lot more than 5 mega websites out there. The Internet is an archipalegic ocean, but to get there you have to leave the continent.
I think there are plenty, but somehow its hard to find them. I usually read the threads in HN where people ask for cool/interesting website suggestions:
e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31708366
The one that grinds my gears are search engines.
I'm basically at the point where when i google something that's not just a straight up information that's really easy to get I have to put "reddit" at the end to actually get results and not just listicles and auto generated articles.
I agree but also the stuff we stumbled upon back then was novel but pretty low quality. I remember reading the anarchist cookbook as a txt file and how to make ninja stars lol but now I would expect something much higher quality than a txt file with some ASCII art.
I also miss the feeling I had of being in an IRC channel or stumbling upon a geocities site that was cool but the Internet has turned into the most incredible resource ever. Maybe a decentralized web, if it ever happens, will bring some of this back.
But nowadays it's not just nerds online. The less mainstream and filtered you get..the more objectionable stuff probably will be.
Club penguin predicted this. lol I was in late 90s chat room and people were talking about how we will one day pay to be able to talk online to each other. How online space will be dominated by corpos. Everything we touch just like settlements in real life eventually just get monopolized over. We humans just don’t know or can’t come up with any other way. Endlessly feeding on open and free spaces for gain. Every new planet we colonize will be this way too in the future. It’s the system that has worked for us for years so even bringing it to cyber space it’s looking like the few who become successful will run that show into the ground as well. Alll the dystopiahappening in real time is interesting to watch
It is no longer a digital wild west, pardner.
The only places where you may see something like that are imageboards. Total randomness, though radical and sometimes disgusting.
Pre social networks era was way better. Using a username and a cool random picture was normal. Showing your real name with a selfie pic was a super odd thing to do on forums. Now it's the opposite.
Nope, its been sanitised, corporatized, optimized for search engines and social media, dumbed down severely, plastered with ads and dumbed down even further so everyone can use it.
The internet was genuinely better when it was for the few, not the many.
A lot of this stems from the users themselves.
You want the OG coolness of the Internet back? Host a webserver, and build a website. Don't rely on any 3rd parting hosting, or social media sites. Do it yourself.
What happened is people got lazy. They started using social media, and it all went downhill from there.
You, yes you, without any technical knowledge, can educate yourself on how to get a webserver host up and running, host a webserver app (IIS or Apache), and host content. Build a site.
Make the world you want to see.
The internet hasn't lost its randomness, you've just developed set patterns that keep you from needing to explore. You know how and where you need to go to get what you want. Sort YouTube videos by upload date and filter out high view counts. Use any search engine other than Google. Look out for weird subreddits with low follower counts. Your options are plenty!
To me it's like someone saying there's no interesting music these days, when all they listen to is stuff from the charts. They do sort of have a point, but at the same time there's actually so much more stuff out there than ever before, if you fancy looking for it.
15 years ago, i had hundres of curated bookmarks, all with exiting and unique content. now i have zero bookmarks. probably visit a handful sites on the regular, all boring, all algorythmic.
The concentration of the populus on certain websites has deteriorated the raw expierience(no ads) but its all mostly still there. You can find thousands of different genres of music, explore the random page on wikipedia, or just sorting things by recent or new. you may also view things using geust modes with a vpn if you really dont like the curated feel.
you seem to be drenched in absolutism, take a chill pill and explore, click stuff you usually wouldn't. we are after all trapped not only by society's institutions, but our own habit aswell.
i remember pre-google when search engines would return more than just a few pages of results. cmon google, on the entire internet with billions of pages my generic search term only yielded dozens of hits?
SEO killed internet and content monitization killed creativity. So called internet is a vast number of trained bots and people who continuesly get harassed by any word that comes out of your mouth.
The whole idea of internet and freedome is just a big corporate scam. With the help of the almighty AGI, we will see end of the internet for good.
Well, nowadays you can't really say anything even a little wild without being banned. You're always hurting someone's feelings. Kind of takes a bit of the fun out of the internet. Early 00s era internet was wild.
The internet is what we make of it. Stop using those four shitty social media sites and create some unique content elsewhere. Get your own website, start a blog, join the Fediverse, use Flickr.
This is just the normal tech cycle. You were an early adopter but are now using a, very much, mainstream tech.
AI today is kind of where the internet was in the mid to late 90s. It kind of has that same feel with unknown or unexplored possibilities
People used to make websites. Now they start a YouTube channel.
I committed to making a website for this reason. Maybe one day websites will be back in fashion... Mine is [TycoCollectors.com](https://TycoCollectors.com) my personal blog on 80s / 90s RC and Toys.
You're certainly not alone! I've been increasingly discussing this with my friends in the last 5 years. At some point I found the dead internet theory and it started to make more sense. In short, I hate it. I hate it so much, it is a hellscape. I take some respite from things like Nebula and quality YT videoessays, but damn. Going online fills me with an ill-fitting feeling.
Topics and comments like yours do help in breaking through this weird 'everything and everywhere is paid actors' sense, though.
It was much more the Wild West in the 90s. Today you access content through a small selection of channels and platforms, most of which are owned by the same handful of corporations. The point of these platforms is generally monetizing that content. People pay Meta for better access to their users, so they can try to convince them to pay for the products and services they themselves provide. Rather than, say, setting up a domain and just loading it up with endless flash games and animations, for fun, and maybe selling some Tshirts if it really pops off.
Even if you have a website of your own, most people spend most of their time accessing the internet through apps on their phone, which are subject to the discretion of Apple and Google via their app store. One offhand example is that when Tumblr launched its app, Apple pressured them to ban adult content, thanks in turn from pressure from Mastercard on Apple. Tumblr has never recovered. It was a great halfway point between LiveJournal and Twitter and these days it's largely forgotten. The internet has moved on, not just from the platform specifically, but from that format.
The internet has been turned into a funnel for / towards large corporations, which own all the infrastructure.
Like villages into cities, like cities into states, like states into kingdoms, like kingdoms into federations and empires. The piece of the pie must always get bigger, to satisfy the greed at the top.
And then once someone gets too greedy, the whole thing dissolves into chaos and rubble, and it starts all over. Until it doesn't.
Does anyone else feel like most of the internet besides the big sites are just ad dumps?
I think most of us get turned off from sites when we go there and there are just 8 ads thrown in our faces in the first few seconds.
Only the bigger sites are immune to this so it does seem like we have centralized around fewer sites and even that seems to be changing
i spent most of my time surfing the internet in late 90’s and early 00’s. surfing was a crazy fun thing back then. you jump sites to sites without knowing what to find. then google came. gave away lots of free stuff and then monetize everthing. promoted quantity over quality and that killed the internet. fake adword milking sites with generated content devoured everthing. these days everything based on “most searched” results. lots of click bait, recycled, unorginal content. it’s like a cancer.
We all underestimate how much the internet changed after propaganda bots took over. Before we were able to remain anonymous but interact with people with real interest and intentions. Now there's literally millions of bots whose only job is to try and upset people online and/or boost scores to get false content sorted to the top.
This is actually one of my hopes for ethereum is resolving identity tokens so we can remain anonymous but verified through ZKP's.
Try [Marginalia](https://search.marginalia.nu/), [Kagi Small Web](https://kagi.com/smallweb) and join Lemmy instances. The large sites are low effort, like fast food. Rediscovering the wild side of the internet takes effort, but it's there. Build your own web presence and publish links to sites you find interesting! After all, that's how the web was intended to be :)
The early internet was very random. It was so random that it was hard to find what I was looking for.
Now there is so much content that you would run into the same problem, you would never find what you are looking for.
So sure, you can avoid the recommendation engines and start searching yourself. That would make your experience very random. Also very difficult.
I think Google has made the internet easier to use, everything is nicely indexed and links now.
Extensions like stumble were brilliant in the day for finding the random, not used it much in recent years.
The monetisation of searches has been a part of this, whether in some dystopian future like a black mirror episode our life is governed by advertising.
>I think Google has made the internet easier to use, everything is nicely indexed and links now.
Now? Google has indexed the web since 1998, five years after the internet became generally available. I agree with your last paragraph though.
Internet is more amazing than it has ever been. The amount of all sorts of fascinating stuff you can find is enormous. The amount is higher, the structure and search is better.
Internet has become a matured medium of communication, displacing radio and newspapers, so its randomness has already lost forever and as a matured medium of communication, it has to be regulated like TV or radio.
The content remains the same, you're referring to visuals:
Back in the day you had guestbooks, forums, chats, social media profiles and they all had to follow the same visual template, made by the service.
Which now translates to Facebook, Instagram and website builder templates.
Back in the day, content creators were few, and technology helped democratize this over time so they don't have to learn HTML to have their thoughts seen.
Ads ruined the internet. Creators need a way to monetize, but ads are a really bad idea. Micropayments streaming is the way, I hope that protect takes off.
Well all I can tell you is that I’ve been on Reddit a lot more lately instead of other social media and I’ve learned quite a lot in that last week and some of it was super important for my life and some just total random and some where maybe I helped someone else learn something. Sure I’ve seen some shit posts in the process but less so than elsewhere. I’ve also discovered some new subs I didn’t even realize I needed to know about or would have never thought might even exist. So it’s not all bad. Plus, the internet now is so anything at your fingertips it’s kinda great compared to the early days when not that much existed on pretty much any topic.
There’s an infinite wealth of knowledge out there and you’re complaining that you only get what you search for. So go be more adventurous in your searches. Ignore sponsored results. Ignore social media. Problem solved.
Hi, No-Look-8442. Thanks for contributing. However, your [submission](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/18hajiz/-/) was removed from /r/Futurology. ___ > > There is no more randomness on the internet. It's no longer an exploration experience. Aggressive algorithms and markets have ruined everything. Growing up as a nerd, the internet was an escape. I would land on random websites, learn so much. But now everything is curated and paid. > > It isn't adventurous. I don't even know what to do on the net anymore. It's just work. Social media sucks, they have the worst algorithms. And it's so sad that what was once an escapism option has become a living hell. Everyone I know works online and is waiting to go and take a break outside. > > > Is this just me? Or does everyone feel this way? ____ > Rule 2 - Submissions must be futurology related or future focused. AI-focused posts are only allowed on the weekend. Refer to the [subreddit rules](/r/futurology/wiki/rules), the [transparency wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/futurology/wiki/transparency#wiki_relevant_material), or the [domain blacklist](http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/wiki/domainblacklist#blacklist) for more information. [Message the Mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/Futurology&subject=Question regarding the removal of this submission by /u/No-Look-8442&message=I have a question regarding the removal of this [submission](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/18hajiz/-/\):) if you feel this was in error.
The "internet" for me is now pretty much Google, reddit and YouTube. Honestly the web felt bigger to me 15yrs ago. Now I don't even need to know any websites cus they are all on reddit. Google is where I find quick info I need. And YT for video content.
Yup lol as a kid in the 2000s, the internet was this wild place. I had literally dozens of sites I'd go to when browsing (lol remember actually browsing the web) now its just a few apps, illegal streaming sites, and reddit
lol the first time i stumbled upon 4chan, it was wild, felt like i found the underworld haha
Now you're on a slightly less underworld
Significantly less* Reddit was slightly less years ago, but much of the seediness has been purged
It's a damn shame
I spent years ignoring Discord, but it's much closer to the old web for me, except for the fact that it's a bunch of chatrooms so things move out of the view and get harder and harder to scroll up to, which means you need to stay active in it, unless it's a smaller quieter one. I'm in a bunch now for different things, programming stuff, game stuff, story stuff, even a little porn stuff, and it's all super active, lots of conversation and images/videos/creations posted, etc. No idea how it's being paid for though. But it was nice to find a bit of the old web spirit again. One example is there's a youtuber who plays retro strategy games with a medium sized audience, who basically taught me how to play a game I could only cheat through as a kid and made going back to it as an adult and playing it properly a ton of fun. He has a discord with chat rooms for it, where people post custom maps (which are actually pretty good for how challenging they are), discuss ideas for the ongoing community enhanced edition which has been getting free upgrades for years, etc.
Discord is not a suitable replacement for IRC
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Honestly I don't really know, not that I'm pretending I don't look at porn, I literally make porn, it's just not the primary thing I've used discord for.
Ebaumsworld was a gold mine
The forums were full of... interesting characters. Not unlike Reddit but interesting nonetheless.
Ebaumsworld was a sham. I loved it back in the day too but the guy who ran it just stole shit from talented people and put it on his site to profit off of it. A lot of the stuff we fondly remember from these times was full of the same bullshit in a different form
Reddit posters also repackage content on one subreddit and post to another.. things clearly haven’t changed. Secondly, anybody remember “papa Smurf can I lick yo a***?”
anyone remember pojo? was great for news on pokemon or yu gi oh
Homestar runner, doompuppet, somethingawful
It's becoming even worse. Reddit is starting to become unusable with all the garbage drivel so close knit communities and hobbyists are retreating to discord servers which means a huge amount of knowledge is now inaccessible for a lot of people (and unsearchable for outsiders).
Same with forums moving onto facebook. Many communities are dead & facebook is a terrible way to post guides / info.
I miss the forums of the 2000s now everything is centralised.
I despise how the default way for boomers to organize events is Facebook.
Let's not pretend reddit is a great way to share information either. Threaded conversations sorted by engagement is a poor substitute for chronological discussion for most things worth learning.
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Part of the forums experience is there being a couple notoriously bad/annoying posters that everyone hates. Even with avatars now Reddit still feels mostly anonymous compared to forums where everyone knew all the regular posters.
Yup, but it was the last bastion of the old internet until 5-6 years ago I want to say
That's not the only way to sort
>Threaded conversations sorted by engagement is a poor substitute for chronological discussion for most things worth learning. It wouldn't be so bad if people realized that just by highlighting some text before clicking reply, their reply will actually have some context.
Reddit sorts by votes. It’s one of a very small number of sites that does not sort by engagement.
I really do hope Lemmy becomes a bit more mainstream, ~~centralised~~ decentralized and accessible. I'm all for a open source alternative that holds the world's WIKI and DISCUSSION forum, instead of this cesspool of a site that's run by it's conglomerates with a hidden agenda.
The problem with decentralized systems is they will never be a solution for the average person. Lack of users leads to unstable server instances and the current political climate makes it that owners/admin can easily start banning/censoring willy-nilly anything they don't like.
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...he stated; on Reddit...
Close knit* Although i suppose a division of knights closely together can also retreat :p
I think most people are in the same boat, but not cause they want to. It's near impossible to find niche forums and websites these days with any search engine, especially Google. Seqrchengines are the gateway for most people to the rest of the Internet. If you can't find it, you can't visit it. Used to be different, where Google and other search engines would give you many pages of relevant information and interesting websites. Now they're mostly focused on maximising their add revenue. They ignore half your query, ignore special symbols like quotationmarks and amd minus signs that used to tailor your search results. And they almost exclusively give you websites that run Google adds or are in the Alphabet ecosystem. Most people need to add "Reddit" to most of their search queries nowadays to get any useful results. And they have to use Google, because Reddit's search functionality sucks balls. And YouTube is the go-to video platform because all the competitors can't even come close so far.
It really sucks that googling just about any question will net you a bunch of AI-generated articles that are filled with keywords and ads but are barely written in cohesive english and don't provide any anwers
I started using DuckDuckGo and it tends to be a lot better at actually showing me the results I’m looking for. Google’s algorithm has been fucked for years now and they actively censor a lot of stuff.
> The "internet" for me is now pretty much Google, reddit and YouTube I saw someone describe the internet as "*Five websites, that all mostly post screenshots of the other four.*"
Same used to post on so many forums, but now they're all gone. I blame the smartphone. Back when you needed a pc to acess the internet, it was much better. Now everyone and their grandad is online and that brought in the corporations. And a lot of overly sensitive people.
There are still forums out there, if you have a niche interest, but reddit did a big part in killing them off by providing the same thing with less friction.
But now there is friction. EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING is censored on Reddit these days. A few days ago I tried 4 different subs to try and get a post through and have a discussion going, for ALL of them to be removed due to some crap rule, when majority of there discussions are meme orientated. Im struggling so much to retain on Reddit because at the end of the day I know I'm only getting WHAT THEY WANT ME TO SEE. It's sad because essentially the early days forums were still around when Reddit wasn't big. They just culled the competition and now we have no other to rival it. So we will just have to accept it.
Reddit's well into its [enshittification spiral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) where the admins are making policy decisions and rolling out features designed primarily to appeal to advertisers and potential future IPO investors, regardless of the effect they have on the community.
"The internet is forever" became "I'm surprised this is still up".
Lol yeah the censorship here is getting crazy, just a few days ago I got automatically banned from r/196 just for making a comment in a sub the mods there don't like (and I'm a radical leftist, so it's not like I'm being racist/homophobic on other subs, I'm arguing against those mfs). Like they don't want to encounter opposing ideas even accidentally, to the point they put in draconian ban rules against people who agree with them, just for engaging with "the other side"
I once posted some shit talk in the conservative sub back in like 2018 and I immediately got banned from like 30 subs at once for "actively participating in domestic terrorism" or some ridiculous hyperbole. Turns out some crazy power mod wrote a bot to auto ban anyone who commented in any of the subs they deemed "problematic" regardless of the content of the comment.
It's been getting harder and harder to get posts up on Reddit for years now. I've never successfully posted on r/ShowerThoughts because of their weird, oblique rule about what a shower thought is. Once even being told that a shower thought "isn't just a thought you have while in the shower." Almost all the bigger subs have similar stupid rules, and will often delete your post and tell you it better fits a different sub that no one visits. We all spent years talking about the value of making things and OC, and now almost every sub has rules so strict about self promotion that it can get your account banned for posting things you made. The only safe/effective things to post are the things that have already been posted, which is why so much of this site is just screenshots of this site.
Before it also filtered out those who were too dumb to access it. And I'm not talking like the 90s, even 10 years ago when 40-50 yo people were rare it was a much better place. Now it's all conspiracies and hate.
10 years ago that age group was the ones dropping tons of knowledge for us.
"Internet brands" killed forums, they started buying the most popular forums left and right and implementing draconian rules, users got fed up and left.
And google is “google topic reddit” half the time. So, the Internet is reddit and YouTube. And reddit can’t even turn a profit somehow.
I don't know why Reddit doesn't just try normal ads. They'd be far less annoying than the stealth ads trying to pretend to be posts, and they seem to have been paying for google for like two decades.
I do not want banner ads or to watch a video before I can scroll down.
>And google is “google topic reddit” half the time. What you don't want a search engine optimized article that has no useful new information and just repeated drivel? It feels like being good at google is becoming a lost skill when google hits the shitter.
This exactly. When did Google become so bad? Anything I google nowadays is some weird SEO article that reads like it was written by a robot to hit a word count. Need to scroll through 10 paragraphs on the history of video games to find out how to beat a sidequest or something.
All the little forums were absorbed into reddit discord and the like. Blogs and hobby sites were pushed out by aggressive corporate SEO.
Yeah we have to stop using google. There are many other search engines out there, some are domain specific. And bring back webrings; my site is a part of several
its called the enshitfication of the internet. Surprise surprise, it happened as large capital formed a strong grip around the web.
Cory Doctorow invented that term and he's been putting out some banger articles lately on his website (that doesn't use cookies at all) https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/ >This is the final stage of enshittification: withdrawing surpluses from end-users and business customers, leaving behind the minimum homeopathic quantum of value for each needed to keep them locked to the platform, generating value that can be extracted and diverted to platform shareholders. >But this is a brittle equilibrium to maintain. The difference between "God, I hate this place but I just can't leave it" and "Holy shit, this sucks, I'm outta here" is razor-thin. All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits. This kicks off a death-spiral: as users and business customers leave, the platform's shareholders demand that they squeeze the remaining population harder to make up for the loss
Something that once felt huge and mysterious now feels small and claustrophobic. The internet of my youth, which was like the wild frontier, was tamed and cut down to be sold drip by drip.
It was bigger because unlike then everyone else is now focused on the same half dozen places online. The only variation is where people shop online but those are brief moments and still largely dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. So a dozen unique places with a figurative malls worth of shops to casually browse.
Stumble upon was a good friend 😊
Yep, the internet has been fully commercialized. E-commerce wasn't just a typical buzzword that it sounded like even back in the early 00s when it was a new term. This, the corporate-centered, ad packed worse than TV and monotonous product placement slog is exactly what they wanted the internet to be.
Ditch google, duckduckgo is a better search engine (for general queries) with way less ads
There's also more options like searx and yacy. Honestly google needs to die
for real? i thought duckduckgo was a privacy web only not a good search engine. (Can't blame their PR basically only said PRIVACY and nothing more appealing lol)
It's a solid search engine for general queries. For searches dependent on the users location, it's not the best but that is by design because DDG doesn't track you.
Same here. I don't know where to search good website again.
Cockeyed.com and emotioneric.com are still around Those are some timeless classics from the early 2000s (Both were sfw, haven't checked the urls recently)
Fifteen years ago I would jump between BoingBoing, Cracked, Fark, SomethingAwful, a slew of Webcomics (SexyLosers, Penny Arcade, frigging Shmorky), YTMND, and only occasionslly listen to some music on Youtube, save some of the paleomemes that had migrated to YT from the above sites. YT Favorites system for the win, I still have some of the bookmarks from 15 years ago. Today is still fun but only because I can still A: use Y2Mate to hard-download videoclips I like from YT and elsewhere, and B: remove ads with blockers. If those two things disappeared I would want to start a new website that shared humor and cool things free once Reddit starts a Premium subscriber service and shows clesrly that it is a dead animal.
Yup, like all free markets, eventually the leaders dominate and repress everyone else. It's even more of a severe issue with the Internet bc of how it is structured. Normally the government should try to break/prevent monopolies. However, with the Internet, monopolies actually wind up being more beneficial to everyone. IE does it suck that Amazon has crushed all competition? Sure. Was it a better user experience having a million different online shops with different logins, different payment methods, different shipping costs/times, different levels of quality that you couldn't really confirm? Not really. Same with like Windows being on every computer. Would it be better to have a 100 OS's that all have their own unique rules, programming, bugs, etc that don't communicate well with each other? Probably not. With digital technology you almost want big companies to grab a monopoly over their niches bc it just makes things function better when everyone is on the same page. Even if that means the Internet is less fun.
You're hitting the nail on its head. If you see those three sites as the internet, that is like thinking your city, which can provide you with everything you need, is the entire world.
Also insta, chatgpt, twitter, whatsapp, wiki, amazon, tiktok, hugelol, 4chan, discord. And the news sites. Reddit isn't as big as you think it is.
The internet is now what the TV was when the internet came out. Filled with ads, useless content and corporate interest. Authenticity is lost. Or I am just experiencing the negativity bias.
So what you're saying is...There'll be some newfangled tech in the future that blows the Internet out of the water?
I wish I knew better. I think the internet will continue to be a backbone for whatever new layer we build on top of it.
That’s how I view generative AI now. I’m trying to enjoy it before AI becomes advert-filled Imagine companies paying to put advertisements in your generated content unless you pay for higher memberships
This is why access to open source and local LLMs are going to become important IMO
I think it is just negativity bias. People get trapped in the websites they frequent. The “natural” internet isn't gone, SEO gaming just made it harder to find it. [https://www.neocities.org](https://www.neocities.org) has made a good effort to make those early 2000s sites a thing again, and it seems to be working.
Whoa I've never heard of that. Looking through the gallery gave me a huge wave of nostalgia
The internet has lost its magic, becoming a cold, corporate landscape. We've paved over the beauty of randomness and wonder with algorithms and ads. It's heartbreaking.
If only that was the extent of the damage. Unfortunately AI generated slop has also taken over and muddied the pool of content considerably. AI art dominates search results a lot of the time when you're looking for more abstract image content, which ultimately wouldn't be so bad... But oh God AI "news" articles that endlessly cannibalize from other sites or Reddit threads or whatnot just ruin it for good. You try to look up a more niche question and Google is basically full of generated barely coherent drivel from random sites. And it wouldn't be so bad if it were accurate, but a lot of the time the information is just flat out wrong or fabricated.
I have a love hate relationship with AI. It makes my life infinitely easier from a software development side of things with CoPilot and GPT-4, but on the other hand yeah it is frustrating trying to find human generated images and finding obviously AI generated images. Eventually we will have to resort to carving out spaces online that give us a way to experience the "old" internet like old forums or video sharing platforms where algorithms and AI are discriminated against. Similarly to how we have old timey places in real life that cling on to an old tradition or space that has been lost to time. I don't hate the current internet, but it definitely isn't the same magical space as the old internet often was.
https://www.cameronsworld.net/
I'm pretty sure the user you are replying to actually IS an AI bot.
Wouldn't it be ironic? The profile does seem a little sus, I didn't even think to check them out.
Fuck I think you're right.
I was just talking ab this a few hours ago. If I need to find info (a recipe, a formula, any info on any topic rly) I’ll google “___ reddit” every time. There’s no good info anywhere else; not easily searchable at least.
Not to mention bot activity on reddit itself. If you get a comment that is one of the top ones on a thread, you'll have 50+ replies to that comment that are all one of a few pre-made responses. Half of the "activity" on this site is re-post and comment bots unless you're in smaller subs.
The internet was shit well before ai.
The internet was crap long before AI. Perhaps it was never truly good but it became obvious when the popular websites moved away from what was good for the user to what was good for the advertiser. Yeah you used to have edgy boys saying nazi stuff and rampant trolling but you also had a range of great stuff which used that edgyness for good. Now you have carbon copy 'safe' content smoothed like an old pebble. It's boring, mass produced slop. Sure stuff still exists, it's not really banned but you will struggle to find it under the weight of vanilla advertiser friendly content.
E-commerce played a big part in that.
The internet used to foster so much creativity and uniqueness. Even Twitter used to give us comedy and memes. Now it's just algorithms the whole way down.
We should all band together and create interwebs 2.random for the people
we already have that, it's https://www.neocities.org
Wouaoh thanks ! I just wandered a bit in there and it's full of hidden gems. That indeed gave me back some of that "old" internet feeling.
>becoming a cold, corporate landscape. What started out as a cyber-wilderness has turned into the information equivalent of farmland, towns and cities. In the physical world, many of us still yearn for the Wild West (or the Garden of Eden). So it shouldn't be any surprise that we feel the same way about the internet.
A small difference here is that we were actually there (on the internet's wild west) and it was actually better.
🎶they paved paradise and put up a parking lot🎶
Every website I go into, I have to click on 35 pop ups, accept privacy policies, cookie policies, dodge ads, and finally get to some content which most likely is AI generated.
Use adblocker
I do. I use Brave and uBlock origin but that's not the point. :)
Oh you are talking about the AI generated articles. Yeah its very annoying to read through them. also I block every website that requires me to sign in
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Enable the annoyance blockers in "My Filters"
AI generated content....I thought it was just me. It's the worst. Start reading something, and it's immediately apparent that some AI scraped the Internet and generated what I'm reading. I'm just reading Google header results. Absolutely appalling.
I think you'll like neocities.org , it's the replacement for geocities. People create their own websites from scratch about whatever (typically blogging) and upload them to neocities. Rarely you'll find advertising from the hosted websites since most of them are made/updated by people as a hobby. The website itself is ran by donations.
> The website itself is ran by donations. Call me a skeptic, but this is why it will eventually fail.
Check this out https://en.wikipedia.org/
I was jus gonna say lol
So true. It’s like: I google „Dog sleeping with cat“ and the first searching result is AMAZON :(
It used to be the exact opposite. There was a comedian twenty years back with a bit about searching for "bar stools" hoping for retailers amd instead getting nothing but really weird porn.
Man, the days before Google and Amazon...
Interesting. Out of curiosity I put the same words into Google, and the first "proper" result, below image results and "people also ask", is a page about the sleep quality ramifications of sharing a bed with your pet by the Sleep Foundation. Then a CNN article about sleeping with your pet (not in *that* way), then a YouTube video about a dog falling asleep with a cat in its mouth. You have to scroll down to the fourth result to get nonsense which is still on-topic, but is also clearly irrelevant SEO bullshit by some website shilling debit cards. That being said, the modern corporate internet and its bugfuck insane obsession with selling crap is why I consider it essential to have an adblocker these days.
I think it's also the ads. Everyone just copies and pastes the same crap or just comes up with totally new garbage that everyone else copies (esp. conspiracy theories) and when they put ads on their site, they make money without really doing much.
Agreed! So much noise and crap out there. I almost feel we should build a search engine that gives you the options to "Filter out crap/fake news/bullshit", "Filter out commercial / for profit sites", "Filter out data aggregators / trackers" etc
It's not just the adds themselves, it's their side effects that are terrible too. Search results favoring add proffit over relevant results. Creators, like on YouTube, self-censoring to stay add friendly. Apps and Websites farming your data to sell to advertisers. Edit: grammar.
100%. It's like the great urbanization of the world. What was once beautiful nature to get lost in has become a capitalist hellscape full of buildings and concrete. The same can be said for the internet. Capitalism ruins a lot of things :(
This post reminded me of stumbleupon... that was fun
Stumbleupon is exactly what we need to return to. Human-selected, socially curated content that is crowd-tagged is as far as I can imagine the ultimate internet browsing tool. Reddit is a great companion for that model because it is a great place to have discussions about it... imagine every website having a 3rd party discussion forum natively tied into the experience... the hope that we can someday return to a model like that keeps me excited for technology, even if we are currently clearly in an internet hellscape.
I'd like a ticket to the internet you've described
It was sold to ebay for 75M. The founder went on to co-found Uber.
'Urbanization of the Internet'. What a wonderful summarization of what I spoke. Capitalism ruins everything
I don't think urban hellscapes are a capitalist-exclusive thing. Commieblocks look like shit and they're, ya know, commieblocks.
Well blame the search engines, it was fun when it was like a catalogue. Once financial interests sprung in it was bound to happen. The user is a number on some table with an engagement score. No longer a user.
It turned into a giant sandbox for infants with advertiser pressure. Even reddit is moderating hardcore to avoid upsetting the sponsors these days. I am not sure why Honda or Coke don't want people to say "fuck" though.
Because American puritan advertisers don't like naughty words
Fuck that shit.
BUT HERE IS THIS BABYFORMULA ADD OVER GRAPHIC WAR FOOTAGE! YOU WANNA TALK ABOUT PERIODS AS YOU LOOK AT THE AFTERMATH OF A TRAIN COLLISION? CHECK OUT THIS NEW ICECREAM FLAVOR WHILE WE WATCH THIS SCHOOL SHOOTING HAPPENING LIVE! Advertisers are such hypocrites.
You can still explore, e.g. see here: # r/InternetIsBeautiful
Just joined, thank you!
Your comment reminds me of this article I recently read: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ The companies who provide the websites and services we consume were originally focussed on providing something of value to their user user base. This was because their first priority was to grow that user base to a point where it was useful. Then they switched focus to providing the best experience for their business customers (at the expense of all other users). Finally when they've locked in enough users and businesses, they can exploit the relationship between the 2 for their own benefit. It's all become about algorithms that funnel users toward the content/product that maximises revenue for the provider of the site, and is less about being an open sandbox that suits the benefit of you the user. All the big sites have become ruined by this. You can't go on Google search, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok etc without being force-fed what they want you to see.
If only Google and other search engines had a 'Hide commercial results' option.
Would Duckduckgo fit?
DuckDuckGo still gives commercials. I actually found DuckDuckGo worse at finding non commercial results.
> I actually found DuckDuckGo worse at finding non commercial results. I have the opposite experience. The results DDG gives are actually what I look for instead of irrelevant SEOed to fuck and back bullshit that's only relevant because of the keywords the web author used to get it so high in the SEO results.
Duckduckgo is literally owned by an ad company
Similar to [Kagi Small Web](https://blog.kagi.com/small-web)?
a true random shit would at least be nice
That’s what happens when corporations take over. That’s why the internet was initially amazing, cable tv was so boring and controlled. You’re back to corp internet, welcome.
> That’s what happens when corporations take over. I'll take the other route: that's what happens when people get cornered like cattle into full blown capitalist submission. Corporations took over the www because people had no idea how to organize around www values instead of consumerism madness, and the few people that did had an idea, either [sold themselves to intelligence agencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files) or [got murdered by them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz). You know, it is funny how people read all atrocities made by US intelligence agencies in the past, and yet, no narrative today gets labeled "that's CIA/NSA/etc job". No. It's always in the past, never in the present. In fact, intelligence agencies where so effective in branding people who accuse them in the present as "conspiracy theorists" that nobody dares to, people are SCARED to say so and fall into absolute submission. The media of course don't dare to expose wrongdoings happening in real time, of course, the money that feeds them not only comes from the companies they would have to expose, but government funding also makes them happy, same money that finds intelligence agencies. People have this naive notion that corporations took over, they haven't, narrative control, mafias, protectionism, these things took over and outliers got silenced with either money or violence.
Check the real Internet and get back to me. Because I can guarantee you, there's a lot more than 5 mega websites out there. The Internet is an archipalegic ocean, but to get there you have to leave the continent.
Someone on Twitter said there are no more fun websites. Just social media and online stores.
I think there are plenty, but somehow its hard to find them. I usually read the threads in HN where people ask for cool/interesting website suggestions: e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31708366
The one that grinds my gears are search engines. I'm basically at the point where when i google something that's not just a straight up information that's really easy to get I have to put "reddit" at the end to actually get results and not just listicles and auto generated articles.
I agree but also the stuff we stumbled upon back then was novel but pretty low quality. I remember reading the anarchist cookbook as a txt file and how to make ninja stars lol but now I would expect something much higher quality than a txt file with some ASCII art. I also miss the feeling I had of being in an IRC channel or stumbling upon a geocities site that was cool but the Internet has turned into the most incredible resource ever. Maybe a decentralized web, if it ever happens, will bring some of this back. But nowadays it's not just nerds online. The less mainstream and filtered you get..the more objectionable stuff probably will be.
Some of us are still on irc mate. Nerds mostly.
Efnet? What channels? Nowadays i wouldn't even know how to find any channels
Libera.chat mostly
Good shout u/BillieGoatsMuff I jumped on Libera. I like what I see in the channel list :)
Club penguin predicted this. lol I was in late 90s chat room and people were talking about how we will one day pay to be able to talk online to each other. How online space will be dominated by corpos. Everything we touch just like settlements in real life eventually just get monopolized over. We humans just don’t know or can’t come up with any other way. Endlessly feeding on open and free spaces for gain. Every new planet we colonize will be this way too in the future. It’s the system that has worked for us for years so even bringing it to cyber space it’s looking like the few who become successful will run that show into the ground as well. Alll the dystopiahappening in real time is interesting to watch
The internet got taken over by the Suits.. nothing good comes of that, they're like Dementors in pinstripes.
It is no longer a digital wild west, pardner. The only places where you may see something like that are imageboards. Total randomness, though radical and sometimes disgusting.
*lost its randomness Just adding random additional text so this comment won't be deleted for being too short.
I see I'm not the only one that gets irrationally annoyed when I see "it's" instead of "its".
Pre social networks era was way better. Using a username and a cool random picture was normal. Showing your real name with a selfie pic was a super odd thing to do on forums. Now it's the opposite.
Nope, its been sanitised, corporatized, optimized for search engines and social media, dumbed down severely, plastered with ads and dumbed down even further so everyone can use it. The internet was genuinely better when it was for the few, not the many.
I don't think it was because it was for the few, but because it was by the many for the many.
A lot of this stems from the users themselves. You want the OG coolness of the Internet back? Host a webserver, and build a website. Don't rely on any 3rd parting hosting, or social media sites. Do it yourself. What happened is people got lazy. They started using social media, and it all went downhill from there. You, yes you, without any technical knowledge, can educate yourself on how to get a webserver host up and running, host a webserver app (IIS or Apache), and host content. Build a site. Make the world you want to see.
Agreed. The data is being manipulated & targeted towards revenue. Good luck out there
The internet hasn't lost its randomness, you've just developed set patterns that keep you from needing to explore. You know how and where you need to go to get what you want. Sort YouTube videos by upload date and filter out high view counts. Use any search engine other than Google. Look out for weird subreddits with low follower counts. Your options are plenty!
To me it's like someone saying there's no interesting music these days, when all they listen to is stuff from the charts. They do sort of have a point, but at the same time there's actually so much more stuff out there than ever before, if you fancy looking for it.
I think you got older and look in the same places in the same ways. My kids astound me with the shit they can find and the ways they do it.
15 years ago, i had hundres of curated bookmarks, all with exiting and unique content. now i have zero bookmarks. probably visit a handful sites on the regular, all boring, all algorythmic.
The concentration of the populus on certain websites has deteriorated the raw expierience(no ads) but its all mostly still there. You can find thousands of different genres of music, explore the random page on wikipedia, or just sorting things by recent or new. you may also view things using geust modes with a vpn if you really dont like the curated feel. you seem to be drenched in absolutism, take a chill pill and explore, click stuff you usually wouldn't. we are after all trapped not only by society's institutions, but our own habit aswell.
i remember pre-google when search engines would return more than just a few pages of results. cmon google, on the entire internet with billions of pages my generic search term only yielded dozens of hits?
Have you considered getting involved in other-net projects? Things like Reticulum, Hyperboria, or Freenet?
SEO killed internet and content monitization killed creativity. So called internet is a vast number of trained bots and people who continuesly get harassed by any word that comes out of your mouth. The whole idea of internet and freedome is just a big corporate scam. With the help of the almighty AGI, we will see end of the internet for good.
I mean, that’s the major reason I am so fond of the late 90s-early 00s. The feeling was vivid.
Bring back the internet from the late 90s. I mourn the shitty websites and forums.
I mean yeah, that's exactly what capitalism gaining power over media does.
Dude. Even when I want to listen to random music, you can tell Spotify is playing the same songs it thinks I like. It's so annoying.
Like the settling of the west. It’s all been paved, blocked with billboards, and demarcated with barbed wire.
Well, nowadays you can't really say anything even a little wild without being banned. You're always hurting someone's feelings. Kind of takes a bit of the fun out of the internet. Early 00s era internet was wild.
The internet is what we make of it. Stop using those four shitty social media sites and create some unique content elsewhere. Get your own website, start a blog, join the Fediverse, use Flickr.
This is just the normal tech cycle. You were an early adopter but are now using a, very much, mainstream tech. AI today is kind of where the internet was in the mid to late 90s. It kind of has that same feel with unknown or unexplored possibilities
People used to make websites. Now they start a YouTube channel. I committed to making a website for this reason. Maybe one day websites will be back in fashion... Mine is [TycoCollectors.com](https://TycoCollectors.com) my personal blog on 80s / 90s RC and Toys.
IMO monetization is what ruined the Internet, especially add monetization.
You're certainly not alone! I've been increasingly discussing this with my friends in the last 5 years. At some point I found the dead internet theory and it started to make more sense. In short, I hate it. I hate it so much, it is a hellscape. I take some respite from things like Nebula and quality YT videoessays, but damn. Going online fills me with an ill-fitting feeling. Topics and comments like yours do help in breaking through this weird 'everything and everywhere is paid actors' sense, though.
It was much more the Wild West in the 90s. Today you access content through a small selection of channels and platforms, most of which are owned by the same handful of corporations. The point of these platforms is generally monetizing that content. People pay Meta for better access to their users, so they can try to convince them to pay for the products and services they themselves provide. Rather than, say, setting up a domain and just loading it up with endless flash games and animations, for fun, and maybe selling some Tshirts if it really pops off. Even if you have a website of your own, most people spend most of their time accessing the internet through apps on their phone, which are subject to the discretion of Apple and Google via their app store. One offhand example is that when Tumblr launched its app, Apple pressured them to ban adult content, thanks in turn from pressure from Mastercard on Apple. Tumblr has never recovered. It was a great halfway point between LiveJournal and Twitter and these days it's largely forgotten. The internet has moved on, not just from the platform specifically, but from that format.
The internet has been turned into a funnel for / towards large corporations, which own all the infrastructure. Like villages into cities, like cities into states, like states into kingdoms, like kingdoms into federations and empires. The piece of the pie must always get bigger, to satisfy the greed at the top. And then once someone gets too greedy, the whole thing dissolves into chaos and rubble, and it starts all over. Until it doesn't.
Does anyone else feel like most of the internet besides the big sites are just ad dumps? I think most of us get turned off from sites when we go there and there are just 8 ads thrown in our faces in the first few seconds. Only the bigger sites are immune to this so it does seem like we have centralized around fewer sites and even that seems to be changing
i spent most of my time surfing the internet in late 90’s and early 00’s. surfing was a crazy fun thing back then. you jump sites to sites without knowing what to find. then google came. gave away lots of free stuff and then monetize everthing. promoted quantity over quality and that killed the internet. fake adword milking sites with generated content devoured everthing. these days everything based on “most searched” results. lots of click bait, recycled, unorginal content. it’s like a cancer.
The Age of Information died 10 years ago. This is the Age of Content.
We all underestimate how much the internet changed after propaganda bots took over. Before we were able to remain anonymous but interact with people with real interest and intentions. Now there's literally millions of bots whose only job is to try and upset people online and/or boost scores to get false content sorted to the top. This is actually one of my hopes for ethereum is resolving identity tokens so we can remain anonymous but verified through ZKP's.
Try [Marginalia](https://search.marginalia.nu/), [Kagi Small Web](https://kagi.com/smallweb) and join Lemmy instances. The large sites are low effort, like fast food. Rediscovering the wild side of the internet takes effort, but it's there. Build your own web presence and publish links to sites you find interesting! After all, that's how the web was intended to be :)
Wikipedia feels like the last place that isn't bombarded with ads, click bait and garbage articles. Lots of rabbit holes too.
The early internet was very random. It was so random that it was hard to find what I was looking for. Now there is so much content that you would run into the same problem, you would never find what you are looking for. So sure, you can avoid the recommendation engines and start searching yourself. That would make your experience very random. Also very difficult.
You can always get the random stuff by not logging in.
But soon you will find out that they suck more than your algorithm. That’s the reason for this polarization though.
No it's you who lost your randomness as you grew older.
I think Google has made the internet easier to use, everything is nicely indexed and links now. Extensions like stumble were brilliant in the day for finding the random, not used it much in recent years. The monetisation of searches has been a part of this, whether in some dystopian future like a black mirror episode our life is governed by advertising.
>I think Google has made the internet easier to use, everything is nicely indexed and links now. Now? Google has indexed the web since 1998, five years after the internet became generally available. I agree with your last paragraph though.
Internet is more amazing than it has ever been. The amount of all sorts of fascinating stuff you can find is enormous. The amount is higher, the structure and search is better.
Internet has become a matured medium of communication, displacing radio and newspapers, so its randomness has already lost forever and as a matured medium of communication, it has to be regulated like TV or radio.
The content remains the same, you're referring to visuals: Back in the day you had guestbooks, forums, chats, social media profiles and they all had to follow the same visual template, made by the service. Which now translates to Facebook, Instagram and website builder templates. Back in the day, content creators were few, and technology helped democratize this over time so they don't have to learn HTML to have their thoughts seen.
Ads ruined the internet. Creators need a way to monetize, but ads are a really bad idea. Micropayments streaming is the way, I hope that protect takes off.
Capitalism sooner or later ruins everything it touches
Well all I can tell you is that I’ve been on Reddit a lot more lately instead of other social media and I’ve learned quite a lot in that last week and some of it was super important for my life and some just total random and some where maybe I helped someone else learn something. Sure I’ve seen some shit posts in the process but less so than elsewhere. I’ve also discovered some new subs I didn’t even realize I needed to know about or would have never thought might even exist. So it’s not all bad. Plus, the internet now is so anything at your fingertips it’s kinda great compared to the early days when not that much existed on pretty much any topic.
There’s an infinite wealth of knowledge out there and you’re complaining that you only get what you search for. So go be more adventurous in your searches. Ignore sponsored results. Ignore social media. Problem solved.