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- Hacker News
- Already has.by mumbisChungo
- What do you mean by "We" Kimosabe?
For dipshits who think aggregating ad-based websites, and hate filled doom-loop algorithmic feeds, are "the web", this may be true.
But the rest of us, who aren't part of this "we", will still be here...
by johnea - > The next interface for many tasks will be conversational. Not necessarily one chatbot. More likely a layer of assistants across devices, apps, operating systems, browsers, cars, TVs, glasses, and whatever strange object Silicon Valley convinces us to wear on our faces next.
There is also that famous legacy application: other people.
The bad news about AI is that I am now the product.
This will seem fine for a vast swath of the population.
But watch the Luddism thrive.
by smitty1e - none of these platforms exists without the people and the content they produce. I’m less worried about the platforms and more worried about the contributors , what they are contributing, and which ones are favored, and why.by tonymet
- > Not megabits. Not gigabits. Not fiber.
...
> Not BBSs. Not CD-ROM encyclopedias. Not isolated digital islands.
...
> Artists had websites. Musicians had websites. Game developers had websites.
...
> People want answers. People want connection. People want tools.
This is just impossible to read.
by reconnecting - It’s not impossible to read, just… pointless.by mcphage
- It is already gone. Actual content has been flooded out by millions if not billions of affiliate ad listicles where, completely coincidentally, the top ten best $product are also the first ten $product on the Amazon search page.by plagiarist
- There is more content than ever before accessible. It's just harder to find. If anything, this is a total failure of Google (and other search sites)
I wonder what this will mean for the future, both of Google and for finding information on the web.
by spwa4 - When people ask "What are the AI tells that you notice?" the "rule of three" comes to mind immediately:
"Our modem was 14,400 bps. Yes, bits per second. Not megabits. Not gigabits. Not fiber."
"It was not massive. It was not scalable. It was not "cloud native."
"Every business would have a BBS. Every community would have one. Every company would run its own small digital place"
"The Web was the future. Not BBSs. Not CD-ROM encyclopedias. Not isolated digital islands. The Web."
by mdrzn - I don’t know how to have a conversation at this level. Slinging around these doomsaying words when people are more online than ever, and with the exception of police states you can gain access to the world network. So what if the medium is text, or video or whatever. Just so long as someone can share their information freely to the world only for the cost of hosting. It’s like a conversation with a stock trader—buy, sell.
Here. I’ll predict the future, too. If the UK law requires ID to create social media account on fb/x/whatever behemoth, then private blogs are the way to go. Long live the self-hosted blog!
by xtiansimon - > Maybe this article will be read by humans. Maybe it will be summarized by an AI into two polite lines for someone curious on the other side of the planet.
Maybe it was generated by an AI in the first place.
by senderista - Yeah I thought the same. The short sentences, like "The Web may become like IRC, FTP, Gopher, or BBSs. Not dead. Just smaller.", kind of gave that impression.by lbrito
- I get the impression a lot of people use ai to clean up writing when English isn’t their first language, which unfortunately means they can’t see the robotic generic tone it creates. E.g. the references to user groups in Buenos Aires.
One way they could maybe counteract it is approach it like code golf - can you use an LLM to make it much, much shorter? Because being overly verbose dilutes the handful of points you’re trying to make.
by alabut - The web from the 90s was so much more fun. I have a vivid memory of a website from some guy dedicated to Liverpool FC and his favourite dinosaurs, you would never get that kind of random fun any more.by raychis
- Definitely still exists. You just can't find it amidst everything else.by mdotk
- The web as I knew it is already dead. It has been dead for years. I don't understand why the blog owner had the AI that wrote the article focus on technology like Flash vs HTML5, those had no bearing on what actually mattered, which were communities.
What killed the web was the rise of social media and social media-like sites like Reddit. No one makes a website for their hobby or game/book/movie they're a fan of, and a forum and/or IRC channel for their site, anymore. They just post about it on Facebook or Twitter, or maybe on a subreddit for it, but the sense of community that used to be part of it is totally gone. You don't really get to know people like you used to on a forum. Niche Discord servers don't have this problem as much, but they suffer greatly in terms of discoverability.
AI has made it even worse, because now you can't even be sure you're talking to a person, but in my opinion the centralization around social media was far more damaging.
- > No one makes a website for their hobby or game/book/movie they're a fan of
This is just not true. We even have a dedicated web search for that: https:// wiby.me
by fsflover - What the article's prompt wanted to warn of, has already happened. For a decade at least.
Personal blogs aren't going to disappear, there's right now more of them than ever! And there will be more! But the preponderance of sheer cruft will reduce their percentage.
Discoverability of the content you want has always been the problem, and it still will be.
- Yeah it does kind of suck where you have to go to someplace like reddit to get content and people have to "low-key" drop a link to their source blogby ge96
- > Personal blogs aren't going to disappear, there's right now more of them than ever!
I'm not at all convinced. The personal blog, as it existed in the 2000s/2010s, is essentially dead. There are certainly still some sites which operate on that model - most commonly, in my experience, ones operated by professional authors or artists - but those, too, are increasingly rare.
In fact, I think this is an aspect of a broader trend - having a personal web site is increasingly uncommon. The default nowadays is to post your creations or experiences on social media, and to create communities within hosted services like Reddit or Discord.
by duskwuff