Very well written piece. I like his perceptions about the speed of how we access the internet being shaped by content being constantly pushed at us by feeds. I think it's having a profound effect on people's whole thought process. He mentions exploring a new website and an hour goes by - but that hour ends and he's done, at least for now. You never get done with a feed, it's an endless, self-refilling "in" basket. I think we perceive and handle feeds the same as a stack of work items we're supposed to get through. We want that sense of completion, so we try to process each item as fast as possible - taking in minimal information, making a superficial value judgement, and swiping left or right on it ASAP so we can scroll to the next item. Then we apply this same false sense of urgency to how we process the real world, which lowers the quality of our decisions and even our enjoyment of life.
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My first real 'community' online was mp3.com. When I joined I was like the 132nd person on that site. It was such an incredible thing back then. People could post their own music, get feedback, promote, find a label, and get paid for streams/downloads.
I actually earned money from my music while chatting with future mega stars like Darude and Dido.
I got some real world tracks out there, had my stuff played from Australia to Canada, and there was a time I could walk into a club and hear my music being played.
Surreal thinking about it now.
I've never had that kind of connection or sense of belonging online since.
There are people who work late into the night creating something for the benefit of humanity or just for their own pleasure in creation. There are other people that take those things and bleed them dry to make profit to the point of ruination. There are yet others who use them to spew out hatreds that eat away everything good inside themselves and those that will seek out depravity. What we are getting in this is not the loss of any promise of the internet or the coming of AI but an uncomfortably clear reflection of what, in the mass we actually are.
Is it though? Its always far easier to be loud and obnoxious than do something constructive, even with the internet and LLMs, in fact those things are amplifiers which if anything make the attention imbalance even more drastic and unrepresentative of actual human behaviour. In the time it takes me to write this comment some troll can write a dozen hateful ones, or a bot can write a thousand. Doesn't mean humans are shitty in a 1000/1 ratio, just means shitty people can now be a thousand times louder.
Humans do indeed contain multitudes, but I think this gives too much credit to the influence of corporate (and their political interference) interests. Enshittification is an active choice made in board rooms. Disinformation is an agenda. They're not inevitable grassroots outgrowths.
Lemmy, curated to avoid AI, curtail corporate news, and where the admins and community are fighting bots and trolls is an example of the reclamation attempt.
And you know what? It's kinda nice here.
Enshittification is an inevitable consequence of the economic system we're living in
I think the thing you are missing is probably the community sense you had though. In your youth you went online to talk about x-files instead of going to the mall; people on IRC probably recognized your username, probably knew your opinions on scully and moulder. You can derive some self-worth from feeling like people know you, or feeling like people are interested in what you have to say. Now you have to scream at the top of your lungs while masturbating on camera to have a chance of being heard. Discord exists for now, you can find some small fandom to engage with there. You can accept the fact that your ego is not adapted to measuring yourself against all of humanity at once and find a smaller pond to swim around in; or start screaming and masturbating.
418 - I am a teapot
So... no coffee then?
Aside: I'm still annoyed with Mark Nottingham for trying to assassinate 418.
I am glad that he tried to assassinate 418, because the massive outcry that led to 418 being saved is something wholesome that I love.
Link with context for anyone unfamiliar with the context: https://save418.com/
30 years ago creating content was hard but also destroying it was difficult. Now it's very easy to post shit online but internet is also full of bots, scrapers, malware, scam and spam. I don't think you can separate those two. We can keep the internet private and free but full of shit or make it safe and "fun" but difficult to access.
I've been thinking a lot about webrings lately. Now that Google is basically cutting off traffic from the indie web.
I feel like everyone's kinda having the same idea at the same time, which gives me some hope, but... it's difficult enough to find a ring to join, that I think most people will give up?
I don't know what I think the solution is. Centralising it and having a big, user-friendly "webring platform" is just inviting more enshittification. But the handful of webring directories I've found are really lacking.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Or, does anyone want to team up and make, like, a Gaymers Webring? (That's pretty much what I'm looking for.)
domain cliques, webrings, forums, and guestbooks were wonderful and they should come back
For the first time strangers were meeting other than face to face, and without any of the social context clues that would have previously guided us in person.
The suggest this was the 90's? More like the 80's. BBS were doing this for quite a while.
My blazing fast 26k baud modem had my friends and I connecting ....(mom, I'm on the computer!)....connecting... (BeepBongBoobBeeereREEEEEEEEEEEE Pingping ding eoooohhhhh bding) connecting to the greatest BBS with color ascii to play the newest text based space trade war adventure games !!!
As a 10 year old, though, it was never about meeting people. It was just cool and fun.
Limitless opportunity comes with limitless opportunities for corruption
Seems obvious but people don't ever learn that till we see it happen over and over. . I have.
Rediscover is a good word. Discovery depends on the entry point.
We start with the entry points designed for entrapment.
Should just avoid them. That's hard, because their creators use all the casino-style and other means possible, since their power and profits depend on them functioning.
I've recently realized that all things I blamed on the Internet as it's designed being obsolete, they are not caused by that. It's not obsolete. It's a system that can function well into the next millennium, even.
And even the Web as in year 2000.
Encryption, hashing, signatures, all the cryptography are the only qualitatively new thing.
But they can be applied to the old model, and it's simple - we use a reserved range of v6 addresses and we map identifiers to them. An identifier is derived from person's public key. Overlay networks are a thing.
We can do other things, say, publish user contacts and public keys in DNS. That allows secure store-and-forward communication over any service, not just trusted one, with encrypted messages.
The model itself allows bloody everything, people just don't use it to the full extent.
This is probably a bit "I'm 14 and this is deep", but I was thinking the other day about how "pull down to refresh" is weirdly similar to pulling a slot machine handle. 😬
I don't think that was ever part of its design (didn't the Tweetie dev invent it?), but still.
The people who create for the sake of creativity are not doing it to be flashy or attract anyone or anything. The internet had a groundswell of people who want to make money, so here we are
The internet has plenty of people who don't want to spend their effort for others' moneymaking.
All we need is a transparent and simple process of using the real system.
Registering a DNS record is still cumbersome and done only by technical people, just like making a simple webpage. Or hidden someplace hard to find in Yandex/Google/other web interfaces. Despite it not being hard.
Maybe some simpler tools are needed too - say, Geminispace is an example of one such.
But in general what's hard is as hard as things that are now easy were. Just the same effort didn't go there.
Say, it's not a common thing now to register a DNS record like one person's "internet identity" (just personal websites maybe), but if it were, would it be harder than registering an e-mail account or a phone number? And then, if the system were used as it should, the rest could be done without users troubling themselves. Navigating that "internet contact directory" like you do in Facebook, sending DMs like you do in Facebook, but over an Internet protocol (say, XMPP or something new using that contact functionality) by a native application, having forums and feeds and e-mail and filesharing without platforms. All via native applications just as easy to use as the social media we have.
OK, I'm sleepy. Just - it's technically possible.