It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.
Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
That makes my old hacker heart smile.
There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1]
(Admittedly I was also pretty drunk).
Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies).
TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people.
The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other.
> A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze.
Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.
Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though.
Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?
When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.
There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on.
YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
That you knew of.
I see the effect with my father, he never got much into it in the first place and now he is completely lost when he need to order stuff. So many scammy website featuring first in Google result thanks to seo optimisation or just advertisement.
Then he is completely oblivious to the fact that people can make deepfake video and believed one to be true when it was shown to him on someone else phone.
As much garbage there can be on the internet, you have to force yourself to keep up with it and overall technology otherwise you're just left behind at the mercy of those who adapted.
Being elderly, the frustration must be unbearable.
IMO, the apps are quite nice actually and I enjoy not having to ever run out to a meter anyway, but requiring a phone should not be considered meeting accessibility requirements.
Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.
I recall in the 2001 time period being so annoyed by each individual spam note that I would respond to the appropriate "abuse@" email. By 2004, it was a torrent and totally impractical, and I don't think it was because of my own notes to administrators.
[1] https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-trends-2001-2012/
He's completely useless these days, particularly around social media, but increasingly around everything else. I worry about him.
It's difficult to imagine what it would look like, but I'm increasingly of the opinion the best way forward is a hard break with tech. Minimal engagement outside of what's needed for the daily basics.
It's transparently wrecking our brains and societies. We can't build a better Internet, we need to escape it.
Why not? Simpler life like back in the 80s.
redraw
redraw
This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the intelligence of content on the internet.
However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and spam would stop internet use.
And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.
It turns out it was an AI generating responses to every single thread linking to this test.
Here’s one example:
> In my experience, I found skipping grades to be challenging initially due to the abrupt environmental and academic changes. It took me a few weeks to adjust to the pace and social dynamics, but it eventually became rewarding. It's important to approach it with openness and patience. By the way, if anyone is curious about their potential for advanced learning, the Gifted Test at [redacted] can provide insight - it's been validated by licensed psychometricians.
Every comment was like this. You can see the mod’s profile here: https://www.reddit.com/user/themightymom/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-da...
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...
This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn't a gated community, but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and "old web" nostalgists need to recognize why these services are popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the openness they care about.
> Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners. There are three chief factors motivating owners to walk in their networks: Preventing rivals from scraping content or user data, encouraging users to sign up so that their activity can be monetized, and keeping content platform exclusive (most platforms will penalize content that has a competing platform’s watermarks on it).
This is true, but the implication that therefore there are no benefits for the users is false. If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web. (At this point, usually some implicit argument is made that users are foolish and misguided. I'd urge you not to go down that route.)
Eventually some of them (of more similar thought) will leave for greener pastures. Perhaps naively so as it involves a lot of work or perhaps working on something together brings people together. If these few heretics succeed others will follow until the new place truly becomes as wonderful as imagined. More and more will follow, even people who don't want to be there will show up until eventually everything blurs out again and the process continues.
Besides the new place where interesting people gather there is the old place left behind where the interesting is undesired or made illegal. Meanwhile they also want to bring back the old days.
There are countless examples of this process from IRC and the USA to TV and Facebook. The Moon and Mars colony will also start out stupid then turn into something wonderful... for a while :)
This will be the only thing I write on the internet today eventho I shouldn't bother. The point use to be to get some useful intelligent response to refine or correct my perspective.
Solving world hunger costs only 35 billion per year. It's a great bench mark. If the internet is the sum of human knowledge we must be short of something else. Apparently we can type text into inputareas ad infinitum without accomplishing even this simple, cheap and easy goal. What a bunch of losers we are :)
I use it to read articles, trade equities, play chess, communicate with colleagues, and do market research for my company. Of course, I engage with a few communities, particularly HN and a few private Slack / Discord groups that align with my company.
I also try to get out a lot, touch grass, read physical books, and exercise. I try to avoid bringing my phone with me to places where I won't need it, such as to the gym or to the running track.
The crux is that we've completely surrendered ourselves to social media.
Just sad really.
This is why worldcoin may have a bright future: https://world.org/world-id
I think we are moving to gated communities again. The internet will split into several parts. Microsoft always wanted the internet to be a Microsoft thing. So maybe we move into this direction.
Systems that run on the Internet come and go: the open web, the siloed web, social media, private overlay networks, etc. All of those still exist but there's definitely been a progression of the ages in which these things have been dominant and then faded into the background. I'm sure this will keep happening.
I don't think the Internet is going anywhere.
Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.
An excerpt from Carmen Hermosillo (humdog):
"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself."
It's not your average Chrome-with-no-adblock user that's ruining the web. It's the "slumlords" if you will. For those slumlords it's all about the money and they've already invested into building a slum on the web. They already have all the users on that platform. They're happy to milk them. They don't care about capturing profit from techies - if they did, we would see companies do a much better job of providing hacker-friendly services. If the hackers all move to some other platform where they don't have ads, trackers or JS bloat the slumlords will ignore it like they ignored the internet in the 80s and 90s. Only if there is potential to bring the non-technical users in droves on that platform will they care, but those users already have the current Web, so why would they bother?
Unfortunately so far it seems like everybody wants to try their own take on the "next" platform. Experimentation and diversity of opinion is great and all, but ultimately we can't leave the slum until everyone agrees on one place to go instead. Best I can think of is Gemini that has some traction, but in its current form I doubt it will succeed - the creators put too much of their idiosyncrasies into it.
I wonder how much of VC thinking skewed this way, encouraging Facebook and others to try and become AOL-like walled gardens, and eventually lobbying governments to make exceptions for them.
Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise.
Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.
Like you, most people want to take the narrow bits of the internet that are useful to them and ignore the rest. Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time.
Over time this will mean leaving the web entirely for new and better interfaces that block out the toxic sludge and return control to the user.
What a bizarre thing to say. It's true, in some sense, but it's still bizarre.
Maybe I'm committing a No True Scotsman fallacy, but to me "the web" is, at its core, the thing made of web pages — pieces of human-authored content that very intentionally and manually hyperlink to one another. And these "web pages" themselves are almost always static files — though they could maybe be served by a wiki or CMS backend.
But HTML5 web apps that deliver walled-garden social networking experiences? Not "the web", per se. Loosely affiliated with "the web" at best.
My rubric for what constitutes "the web":
• Does each piece of content have a readable, human-friendly permanent URL, that can 1. be search-engine-indexed and 2. through which the public can access the content, without signing up for the service, or being nagged to sign up for the service? (Remember that? That's the web!)
• If you click on hyperlinks in the content, does the page just send you directly to the link destination — implying that the author of the content is the ultimate arbiter of where they want their links to go? (Oh, that's definitely the web!) Or does the page do tracking things? "Warning, you're leaving the platform" things? Embed-unfurling things? "Trying as hard as it can to make you forget there's an outside world" things? (Definitely not the web!)
• Does accessing content at its permalink URL deliver server-rendered HTML containing the content — such that anyone with an HTML-parsing library could write an "alternative User Agent" to render that content? (That's the web I know and love!) Or is the page a template/skeleton that gets populated with the content via an XHR? (Not the web at all!)
• Are there tags in the preloaded HTML with appropriate fragment identifiers, allowing people to hyperlink to specific relevant parts of the content? (That's extremely "the web.")
Under this definition of "the web", there's no real ability for "the web" to do anything like "drawing you in and wasting your time." The worst it can do is to offer you endless opportunities to explore and educate yourself on trivial topics.
But of course, under this definition of "the web", there's only so much "web" — and most of it was created before the year 2005! (Other than the online arms of traditional-journalism news websites — many of which carry on putting out real new "web" pages every day.)
If you disagree with my definition of "the web" — well, I still think the concept is valuable, so maybe keep the concept but choose your own name for it. (Maybe "the intentional web"? "The artisanal web"?)
But I would argue that this is, explicitly, what "the World Wide Web" originally meant, to anyone who lived through the birth and growth of it. That any other, more expansive definition of the term, has been driven by a process of co-option by the very cathedrals to which "the web" functioned as bazaar. That we shouldn't respect this co-option; that we should continue to use "the web" as a reference to that core of good stuff, while considering all the rest of the stuff as "not the web, just using web technologies."
(This distinction used to be easy, because all that platform-y not-the-web stuff used to be built using Java/ActiveX applets, or Flash, or Silverlight. Now it's all HTML5... but does that matter? It's still, on a semantic level, not "the web.")
Most people are stupid, and having the internet available to the masses was a mistake. When accessing the internet required money and knowledge, it was by definition a community of above-average people. At the time it seemed like the internet was enabling the worst part of humanity, but those were actually the good times. Actually, not all people have internet access yet, so buckle up, it's going to get even worse.
> You are an elitist
Correct.
in real life and online
What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person. Americans won't understand this but many European countries are already primed for it.
If you want to go slumming you're free to do so, but I want a stable and safe social media as an alternative.
I would love to go back to people not using their real name and an internet that is wild, free and maybe even a little bit dangerous.
But we also need a place where we can make sure everyone is a real person, and where everyone stands for what they say online.
If you don't, then you risk having a police officer show up at your door.
Back to the issue of overweaning government power - if you think the above is fixed by some sort of pseudo-anonymity online which is heavily tilted towards governments ( they know who people are, it's just you that doesn't ) - then I think you are sadly mistaken.
Ultimately the sunlight of transparency is much better than the murky darkness of anonymity - as comfortable as the blanket of anonymity is ( and yep I'm using that pseudo-anonymity right now ).
I can see on the one side that police should only ever investigate crimes, not non-crimes. and that "a member of the public" is possibly committing a crime if they make false allegations.
on the other hand, we definitely need someone "official" who will investigate allegations, as a public-safety matter. for instance, if someone suddenly starts combing (hah) beauty-supply places for certain chemicals, it should attact some form of scrutiny.
It doesn't really fix people being gullible (so will spread spam/scams or fall for phishing) or angry about some polarizing topic. Conceivably it could encourage civility, but if anything I feel I've seen arguments turn ugly far more often due to the personal nature.
In a form like this, if someone is insulted, it is just the idea and words that have been insulted.
When using your last name, it is the real person's identity that has been insulted. Then it goes both ways in a feedback loop involving two real people's real identity without the constraint that face to face confrontation would impose.
The only way to make that worse then would be to have ML algorithms running on top trying to nudge people to but heads for engagement.
Maybe we could design a system that is worse that in order to join you have tell someone using both real names that their newborn baby is ugly and instead of collecting a list of friends you collect a list of enemies. Short of that though we seemed to have really done a great job figuring out the worst possible form of communication.
This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-dox or be silenced.
I have 2 fake accounts, one is named, in translation, Secret Dontknow, the other got hacked at some point and after recovering it it had a nice fake attractive asian woman persona on it. I just changed the location and ran with it. Both have yet to face any issues and they are at least 10 y/o accounts. I don't use them all that often but still.. Secret Dontknow is pretty obvious..
"That is when we present our solution. Mandatory digital identity verification for all humans, at all times."
(This video is a pitch-perfect parody of MGS2 but also prescient commentary on modern trends)
I want social media to disappear.
The main issue with social media are the recommendation algorithms, and I don't want the government or private companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want anyone except myself to be in control of them.
Quit being friend in real life with people who have a social media account on one of the "big" platforms (yes, I do know quite some people who do this!).
Speak for yourself, please, would you?
I (a Europeean) don't need this. I dont want to have everything I write archived forever and linked to my identity, so when an extremist political Party gains Power I'm fucked because I have expressed opinions that dont align with their world View.
No thanks. I feel whenever people express thoughts like yours, you completely ignore all the damage this may cause to individuals and democracy alike.
There is no need for social media, a ten thousand idiots does not make one smart man.
Obviously that's not what it is any more and would agree you could argue that its not really needed any more - but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
I don't need to link letters to a government issued ID to use the postal service. Why should government provided social media or email or whatever be any different?
So, Facebook? "Real-name systems" are all, unequivocally, bad.
When you get down to it, what's our real minimum requirement for curbing scams and spams?
We do not need to know someone's legal identity, in fact we don't even need to know if they're a person rather than a person-with-a-program, we just need to know that they have a person-sized footprint of "skin in the game", as opposed to sockpuppets in a botnet.
Then when you sign up to a site like HN, the administrator has a policy: "New accounts must supply proof from the last year which hasn't already been used on this site before."
There's a lot of technical detail we could go into about how to maximize user privacy (so that you can't be tracked across sites) and prevent a site from "stealing" and reusing things that were shared with it... but the key point is that 99% of sites do not need identity-information to accomplish their moderation goals or personalized block-lists. Such a system could actually be cheaper and more equitable than one based on permanent government IDs.
What you’re advocating for is making a bad system worse. Your suggestion won’t solve any problem and will introduce new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier. You’re advocating for an authoritarian’s wet dream (and a treasure trove for data miners). Right now, including in Europe, that’s the last thing we need.
I vote a hard no on your proposal. I’m opposed to it like I am to Chat Control.
Signed,
A European
- do you think it is so hard to track people by their other behavior? that is, do pseudonyms actually work?
- isn't harrassment by realnamed actors a failure of the (out-of-band) legal system?
This is absolutely untrue for manipulation. Currently, private (both American and Chinese) social media platforms have become mouthpieces of authoritarian propaganda and misinformation. Russian bot farms cooperate with American billionaires to push destabilizing extremist propaganda and suppress moderate voices.
And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here: the proposal is to provide an alternative, which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world. If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
We are in agreement on "chat control" and similar anti-encryption political schemes, but the social media question pertains to public, not private, communications.
Signed,
Colin Emonds (of Cologne, Germany)
A European
I await the new AOL or whatever.
That has already happend. Though the algorithm(s) trained the lonely humans to do it. Happening right here, right now.
If it is the case, I will leave to greener pastures.
