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  • Hacker News
  • I like duckduckgo, I find the search assist to be useful, and afaict it doesn't harvest your data.

    Why can't the post-ai internet include personal agents that work for you or at least don't make you the product?

    by m463
  • I don't know where this nostalgia is coming from. "The Internet" has never been this super perfect place on a pedestal some people make it sound like. The Internet is what you make of it. Not more, not less.
    by harladsinsteden
  • Agreed.

    Also, it is not a monolith. There are parts of the internet (arguably like HN) that are off the charts when it comes signal-to-noise ratio, for me personally.

    by curious_cat_163
  • If people are being honest, the nostalgia comes from a time where people only had to interact with other high-income, high-education, broadly-cosmopolitan technology enthusiasts similar to themselves. The moment the internet become used by everyone, including the riff-raff, it suddenly become "not fun".
    by Analemma_
  • I was there in the early days (90's, early 2000's)

    It was categorically, undeniably better--that's where the nostalgia is coming from.

    There are lots of reasons why this happened (and those are interesting questions.) But simply denying that it was better doesn't seem particularly reasonable to me.

    by thejash
  • Depends on what you define "internet" as, and what you expect it to be. So if it becomes a garbage, probably that's the equilibrium state it could get to, due to the forces around it. There are no isolated phenomena.
    by zkmon
  • While I disagree with The Dark Forest hypothesis, the way AI and LLMs interact with the internet validate the theory in this specific instance. Individuals hosting their own slice of the internet have to deal with crawlers DDoSing them into oblivion and other islands retreat into privacy to avoid them entirely.
    by fzeroracer
  • I'm beginning to wonder if one resolution to the Fermi Paradox is an Ouroboros loop of personalized content tailored to be exactly what one craves. No need for hunter killer robots, or global pandemic, just a gradual painless decline into virtual solipsism ought to get the job done. Brawndo for the mind.
    by LogicFailsMe
  • The same people who would petition against ZKP Internet IDs complaining about the unregulated internet.

    You can't have your cake and eat it too...

    by keel-control
  • ZKPs (as well as C2PA and similar user attestation systems) are quite literally a DRM scheme for the web, fraught with all the usual control and accessibility issues while still being relatively easy to circumvent by a sufficiently motivated and funded actor. Given the huge number of shady companies that run "phone farms" for purposes ranging from social media spam to Spotify royalty farming, I doubt they would even put a dent on this kind of automated abuse. They would however be very effective at locking every Linux and GrapheneOS user out of the internet.
    by spicyjpeg
  • Slop is awful, but I've found networks like Mastodon and Bluesky where most users are actively antagonistic to still be enjoyable. Beyond that I've taken to leaning on RSS, private chats and automated filtering where it makes sense. Folks are setting up blogs again too. Most of the bigger platforms are flooded with slop, but their owners are encouraging that. Those spaces weren't healthy to begin with and they aren't now, but the reasons are different.
    by cdrnsf
  • There is Gemini (the real gemini) and gopher, so far there is a lot of interesting items. Some Links:

    gemini://gem.sdf.org/

    gemini://sdf.org/

    gemini://gemi.dev/

    gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/

    gemini://cdg.thegonz.net/infrastructure/search/

    gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/cia-world-factbook/

    gemini://geminiprotocol.net/

    gopher://sdf.org/1/

    gopher://magical.fish/1/

    gopher://gopherpedia.com/1/

    gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/overbite

    by jmclnx
  • I love Gemini but god their SEO is awful, it's very difficult to look for anything related to it. They should consider a new name
    by goldenarm
  • The real gemini has always been https://www.gemini.com/, the crypto exchange founded by Mark Zuckerberg's twin nemeses, the Winkelvii
    by woah
  • Pay attention to what you consume. Find sources you trust, creators you enjoy, and communities that are real. Participate.

    Not sure what else to say. Yeah, if you consume the "internet" like some firehose of information you spray at your face hoping for the best then, yeah, even today you're going to wind up gargling mostly shit.

    The "internet" being a small group of well-minded people who largely shared a similar outlook on things was the anomaly, not what's going on now.

    by chasing
  • The Internet began to break at the same day you gave it away to Jeff Zuckermusk.

    NOW people start to complain. And it's quite transparent why. ;)

    by pino83
  • Don't romanticize the internet. The modern internet has torn society apart at the seams. It's made the world less tolerable and made civic discourse impossible.

    If AI forces people to re-weight their priorities (i.e. be less on the internet), perhaps that's a good thing?

    by postalcoder
  • be careful for what you wish for. if you take away our drug/escape/safety. The people will switch from #revolting to 1800-1900s revolting.
    by xyst
  • >be less on the internet

    you might as well expect people to drink less water.

    by vlyan
  • I have had this thought quite a bit, that the silver lining of the slop-ification of the internet could lead people to spend less time online, which in my mind would be a positive development.

    But unfortunately I just don't think that will happen. For some people it might, but I think the mass of people will accept the slop as it's given to them. Nothing in the history of communication technologies makes me think otherwise.

    Perhaps I'm too cynical.

    by phainopepla2
  • The problem is AI and the internet's leakage into everything else. Marketing copy, prose in public spaces, even books... I really hope that society as a whole accepts that human-written text is more valuable than AI-written.
    by arrowleaf
  • > Don't romanticize the internet. The modern internet has torn society apart at the seams. It's made the world less tolerable and made civic discourse impossible.

    Pretty much the same thing the printing press did. Breakthrough communication technologies force underlying societal problems to the surface. It will end up being a good thing long term as long as we survive it.

    by eikenberry
  • I don't understand why people talk about "the internet" as if it was a static thing. The internet when I grew up using it prior to the dotcom bust in the late nineties and early two thousands was a set of GeoCities websites where people made their own content. I remember reading the green "great websites" HTML book with examples of beautiful websites (with backgrounds that looked liked notebooks etc).

    The modern internet has just become privacy scraping and adverts if you visit websites that do such things and serve such content, but that doesn't stop anyone setting up and running their own domain, which is what the old internet was? If anything, it's easier than ever to "be on the Internet" with your own VPS or Pi at home. Far easier than it ever was. Just stop putting all your content into someone else's locker.

    The lack of discoverability has always been a problem on the internet, which is why Yahoo had their category pages and why search engines exist.

    People keep talking as if "the internet" is a thing that came and suddenly disappeared. But it hasn't. The only thing that has appeared are apps that use specific domains, where the services behind those domains are colossal vacuums of data. A lot of people use those apps, but it doesn't mean I need to. And it doesn't mean I can't go and search for some specific website holding specific data about a given topic. People keep talking as if that was lost? Am I missing something?

    As for it "tearing society apart", society has always been fractured. It just means more people can speak now, and more people can listen; if they're not choosing who they listen to or weighing concepts in their own mind, that isn't the "internet's" fault - that's their own, any more than someone writing a newspaper article in the 1980s would be held responsible for "tearing society apart"?

    by 72deluxe
  • You're describing the 2010s era of algorithmic social media, I think OP is referring to the earlier internet
    by goldenarm
  • That's what happened to me and I'm happier than ever.

    For the past five years I made an effort to seek out and finish long posts or videos that seem interesting at first in the name of exercising my attention span.

    I'm now quick to bail on anything when I don't know the author, and bail on authors if their quality starts slipping. When the daily fire hose started running out, I realized I was mainly looking for distraction and spent more time being healthily bored.

    by hwebs
  • It's not just the internet, it's everything.

    Every document I read at work has been AI generated at some capacity. It's becoming so annoying that I have to use AI to create a summary.

    I don't know if anyone agrees, but AI generated documents are so verbose and explain things in an overcomplicated way that makes me exhausted after reading. Sometimes I don't even understand what AI is trying to explain

    by gonzalohm
  • It's happening everywhere. We have people using AI to generate documents, then using the same AI to read/summarize them. What is the point? The writing itself, especially with recent Claude models, is often incredibly awkward.
    by icedchai
  • It's still very early days. I have no doubt that etiquette and norms will be established that alleviate these issues.
    by marknutter
  • This can be improved. As AI grows it will be better at explaining. For sure people working on frontier models have identified this as a problem.
    by threethirtytwo
  • For too long we have used length of document as a measure of quality.
    by OptionOfT