Are We Watching The Internet Die?
Are We Watching The Internet Die?
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
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Habsburg AI? My sides went into orbit. I didn't know that I needed to know this expression!
I don't fully agree with the author but that was an enjoyable read. The initial chunk about Reddit is mostly there to provide context for the general trends and directions that the internet is following; the "core" is the impact of generative models into the internet.
Unlike the author, I don't think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It's a lot like the internet before Google Search.
If that's correct, the impact of those generative models was only to speed up the process, not to cause it. At the end of the day the main concern is that it works a lot like spam - as undesired content avoiding being detected as such, and tweaked to steal your attention from the content that you actually want to consume. And spam is not something new for us (or the internet), what's new is GAFAM and their vassals (Twitter, Reddit etc.) eating it for lunch.
The author does have a way with words lol. I love this paragraph in particular, emphasis mine:
As we speak, the battle that platforms are fighting is against generative spam, a cartoonish and obvious threat of outright nonsense, meaningless chum that can and should (and likely will) be stopped. In the process, they're failing to see that this isn't a war against spam, but a war against crap, and the overall normalization and intellectual numbing that comes when content is created to please algorithms and provide a minimum viable product for consumers. Google's "useless" results problem isn't one borne of content that has no meaning, but of content that only sort of helps, that is the "right" result but doesn't actually provide any real thought behind it, like the endless "how to fix error code X" results full of well-meaning and plausibly helpful content that doesn't really help at all.
And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps" that "steals your attention from the content you actually want." Even moving from Google to DDG has only mitigated this problem, it hasn't fully gone away.
But yeah, one of his conclusions seems to be the Death of the Hyperlink? Which, I mean, not even LLM's can kill that. I doubt
<a hrefis going away any time soon.And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps"
Hello, my name's dgriffith. I'm a Fediverse Support community member, and I'm here to help.
Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.
If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.
Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.
Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it's probably more a case of "why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?".
That is, it used to be the case that you'd put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now 80 percent of it seems to be variations of my "helpful" text above, SEO'd recipe sites, or just AI hallucinations of stuff scraped from other sites.
Yup, he does. And what he is saying in this excerpt is great (insightful) too, not just how it's said.
Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.
It is definitely feeling like this is a trend, we are moving back to more curated ways of sharing information.
The Fediverse feels like a return to the old, open Web before it was captured by Big Tech, just with new bells and whistles attached. With all the enshittification, it seems like it is well-placed to be the solution to the problem. It's not there yet but it's a start.
Let's hope that the new bells and whistles* increase its resilience enough against Big Tech control over the internet. Otherwise we'll get into a cyclical situation.
*namely, federation and other anti-centralisation aspects of design.
The aspect that makes the fediverse and in particular reddit-likes uniquely adapted to growing in this harsh corporate hellscape has everything in my opinion to do with the critical early seed phase of communities.
When you make a website with its own forum, you have huge friction to overcome with the network effect… but if you are plugging into a federated network than all of a sudden being a tiny community on lemmy with 2 or 3 people becomes an invitation to users passing by who already have an account to start a conversation and create that spark that will grow (slowly) into a real community.
Consider the minimum viable population of users in a community, how many people does there need to be in a room before that warm feeling of a gathering sets in with comfortable conversation naturally occurring? For federated lemmy communities (and similar Reddit-likes) federation effectively lowers that number by a significant amount since it puts doors everywhere that people can spontaneously wander through and contribute small amounts to help kindle a spark and get the community going.
This changes the paradigm of “social media platform metabolism” if you will, it facilitates much more organic early growth in communities.
Yup - federated communities grow specially well in a corporate landscape. However my concern is if they're able to stay dominant enough to prevent a cycle like:
- Corporate landscape.
- You got a few federated alternatives growing.
- Federations grow enough to become the main landscape.
- Corporations do something [I do not know what] better than federations.
- Corporates grow to the point of dwarfing the federations, into a corporate landscape.
For example, it's possible for me that corporations are specially able to exploit a federated landscape through EEE. I'm just conjecturing though.