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- Hacker News
- Social media is a subset of the web, and the web is a subset of the internet. Don’t lump the entire internet into your hatred of social media.
- Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.by rayiner
- That internet and almost all the people from it still exists.by sneak
- There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet.
It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people.
Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t.
https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_By...
There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself.
One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope.
We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them.
What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything?
But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.
by t43562 - Its the not internet, its bad incentives (profit) making once ok platforms shitty. But there are alternatives
Whatsapp - https://signal.org / http://element.io
Instagram - https://fotoapp.co/ / https://glass.photo
Twitter - https://joinmastodon.org/
Substack - https://tuhat.net
Facebook - maybe replace it with a mix of the others
by 8by3 - I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.
On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.
Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.
I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
by Gareth321 - Internet and 24x7 connectivity is like humanity collectively having a seizure.by lolakutty
- I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)by JKCalhoun
- I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was.
There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier.
In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.
by BirAdam - Is the implication here that it’s cheaper to build a house with lead, asbestos, and radium? I cannot see how those have any causal link to home prices, which seem to be much more heavily influenced by broader socioeconomic factors (area desirability, gentrification, housing supply, etc.)by mplanchard
- > There has been a massive disintermediation of information,
How do you figure? Information is gatekept differently, but editorialized harder than ever before.
I also question whether "better optimized supply chains" is in fact a benefit. Optimizing a supply chain has meant just-in-time inventory etc; I'd argue an optimized supply chain is a fragile supply chain.
by stonogo - Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it.
Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
by alexgieg - Same - WhatsApp has become mandatory in many nations like India even though I despise it with a passion. I wish the United Nations made a resolution to standardize messaging protocols and develop open-source common messaging libraries with no data given to advertisers.by lenkite
- You know why? Because Acton and Koum arranged the carrier deals prior to the acquisition. That's what Zuckerberg bought, to enlargen his war chest. It's not his product, it's something he effectively stoleby alex1138
- The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.
Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.
It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
by hypfer - And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up).
It's perhaps why I loathe it so much.
For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
by JKCalhoun - You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web.
The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.
An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible.
I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.
- What's to stop this nu-web going the same way?by Steve16384
- >The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.
People are working on this: https://geminiprotocol.net/
And the fediverse and other decentralized protocols have yet to entirely succumb to the rot.
by krapp - What seems more likely: There are literally zero people working on a web alternative, or all existing alternatives and forks are so unpopular that you have never heard of any of them?by seanclayton
- Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:
> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.
But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.
But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.
I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.
This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
by arjie - Are you kind of implying that you can have a bank account without internet access in 2026? Extremely disingenuousby jesucresta
- > I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist.
It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?
People consistenty act like they have no agency.
- I wouldn't disagree if in-person service was even comparable, but nowadays, for the banks available to me in the area, opening hours are even worse than they were in the 00s, there are way less branches still opened than there used to, and there's barely any staff, most are just a room with a branded ATM. I wouldn't call it gracefully degrading so much as them keeping minimal service (legal reasons, maybe, I don't know).by folkrav
- I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.
Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.
A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.
Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.
Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
by derbOac - > The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...
There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.
Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].
Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
by roenxi - Roads are neutral, social networks are not. Twitter is run by white supremacist openly trying to stroke racial violence. Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side before the genocide. And it continues to favor outrage stroking groups.by watwut
- But social media is like a car that drives faster if you’re racist.
Their algorithms promote the wrong posts for the wrong reasons.
by croes - I don't understand. Your comment seems to imply that the Internet has no effect on the ability of groups to organize?by beej71
- Fritz_Haber, his inventions killed millions and his invention (Haber–Bosch process) helps to produce food for billions.
" It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
" Ammonia production is a highly energy intensive process consuming around 1.8% of global energy output each year (steam methane reforming accounts for over 80% of the energy required) and producing as a result about 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (about 1.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions) "
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-...
by leonidasrup