[dougmwne]

I suspect, but can’t prove that the entire internet is rotting. I get the feeling that organic user contributions are plummeting and being swamped by bots. HN is a small life raft. Many of the niche subreddits I’ve been following for years are seeing their post frequency drop, from dozens a days to a few a week. All the other forums are gone. Maybe there’s something going on in the apps, but they aren’t searchable. The internet is becoming a cold dead place. There’s not much for Google to find these days.

Case in point: I was just trying to find some information about TGV rail routes. Standard Google searched yielded nothing but spam. Appending “Reddit” game me posts more than 5 years old with out of date information.

[DethNinja]

I think something is off with the internet too.

It feels as if internet is sharded just like MMORPG servers. Nowadays there are more humans than ever with access to internet but organic creations are getting harder to find and everything is swamped with SEO spam.

I still can’t exactly point my finger on what’s wrong.

[vidanay]

Personally, I think we are in some sort of technological uncanny valley in between pervasive and ubiquitous.

[internet_user]

The internet died in 2016.

https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

[thevagrant]

The impact of walled gardens and "use our app for a better experience" has accumulated.

The constant moving of communities is also a problem. We dropped irc, join us on slack. Crickets.. er we moved to discord. Each move must impact engagement negatively.

[D13Fd]

I feel like so much has moved to Discord. That’s great for immediacy and back-and-fourth interaction but it puts all of that information that used to be Google searchable into a black hole of Discord searches.

[WaffleIronMaker]

You might be interested in Linen (https://www.linen.dev/) which aims to make Slack and Discord communities Google-Searchable. I cannot attest its effectiveness, but I figure it seems relevant.

[ghstcode]

Could you elaborate a bit more about everything moving to Discord? Is this a thing generally or just a side effects of being in a team that uses discord for work?

[Brian_K_White]

Many communities have moved to discord. Where once there might have been a web site on geocities and an irc channel or mail list, now there is just a discord server.

geocities and all those little sites are gone, and what replaced them are a sequence of less-googlable less-preservable things like myspace pages, facebook pages and groups, blogspot/blogger pages, and now discord servers and youtube channels.

There isn't a good platform for individuals and small communities that aren't profitable businesses to host their resources and documents and communications. There are only companies trying to capitalize on people's desire for it, providing something that only purports to provide that platform but really doesn't.

In some ways, there is nothing stopping people from making niche topic sites, but something seems to have changed that makes it just less likely. Maybe there used to be free tiers (was tripod and geocities free?) and now there is only cheap ($5 for a vps), or maybe it's that now you have to do more work yourself setting up a vps vs a premade site host, and the current equivalents of free and fully managed are discord & facebook?

Something is definitely different and somehow the aggregate result is a lot less of the old plethora of niche topic sites. Maybe just that everyone got jobs and has no time to make those sites any more, and now all we have are developers personal blog sites which are really just promo for themselves not really of any value to you or me.

Maybe also the passing of the innocent initial window of time where an individual or small group could run a phpBB on the public net without it getting hacked or overrun by spam or sued or in legal trouble for the member-written content etc, without an income stream to pay moderators and lawyers.

Probably it's a combination of those and even more other factors I'm not thinking of.

[solarkraft]

But it would've been the same thing with IRC. Worse even, since that has no history (by default).

[jtode]

I have also noticed a kind of implosion happening - an emptying-out of real human-generated thoughts and content. I have hypotheses but they would be considered highly "ideological" in this forum.

[internet_user]

>highly "ideological" in this forum.

now you got my attention?

[jtode]

Eh, I'm left wing, that's all, and let me say that I come here to get points of view that are not my own as a way of not existing purely in echo chambers. So I'm not saying this place is bad in any way, in fact it's one of the few places I still come to find links to read and so forth. I barely touch Reddit even, anymore, cause it seems like every subreddit has become captive of one viewpoint or another. Matters purely technical soothe my mind at this point, because there's really no way to cram politics into a manual on network programming, for instance. I was probably feeling gloomy when I posted that last comment.

That said, in the comments here I see a lot of people doing great systemic analysis of the problems of the current internet, which nonetheless (as a Marxist in the real sense of the word) fails to probe deep enough to identify the fact that the internet with these problems is the internet dominated by sites with a profit motive first and foremost.

I got here in the early 90s and hung out on irc and usenet, and I watched the internet become how it is. Way I see it, we had a set of community rules that worked fine as long as we were all people enjoying our spare time here. Once people came wanting to make money, things started going bad and they've only gotten worse and worse. We always had shitty trolls, but now you can actually get rich by being a shitty troll, and that is a much worse situation.

But I think change is coming nonetheless at this point - back in the 90s there was still a lot of middle class affluence here in North America, and GenX was either doing well, or else believing the hard work mythology, the "hustle culture" thing, such that along with the collapse of communism (which was never my jam, though I have tankies in my family) the 90s and aughts were basically Capitalism's victory laps.

But these days American streets are not safe, my own quiet Canadian prairie hometown has shantytowns that spring up all over the place and get cleared out by the cops only to reappear down the street. We call stabbings "The Winnipeg Handshake" now. I grew up there, it was not like this even twenty years ago, let alone when I was a kid and rode my bike all over town, even through the bad neighbourhoods, and rarely got hassled by anyone.

Basically they've got this unsustainable economic system that requires constant steroid shots to keep going on the one hand, which they are simultaneously claiming to be the strongest and best system we can have, and you know how it goes with steroids - at first you get big and strong, but pretty soon you're randomly breaking things in public fits of rage, and eventually your heart explodes and you die.

Capitalism is in its "public fits of rage" stage of its abuse, and the surveillance capitalism internet is reflecting the weakness in that their endlessly gameable algorithms have snuffed out the old internet and simultaneously been seized by bad actors, which is also a good description of politics around these parts (we have fascists up here too, it's not as bad as it is for Americans but we've got our Trump wannabe taking over the Conservative party as I type this).

My remedies would be socialist in nature, and seem like complete nonstarters to me in the current sociopolitical environment: The Internet was conceived by governments, military and universities as a public good. My first Internet access was through my local university, not as a student, just as a public yahoo using their (not actually) paid service - in theory I owe them $1/hr for thousands and thousands of hours, but they never attempted to collect a single one of them, from me or anyone else. The old internet was not about money, and money coming to the internet is what has caused the near-complete societal collapse we are currently facing in just a few years, because the internet is indeed an amazing way to connect lots of people together and democratize things.

So, kick the capitalists off the Internet, I say. Nationalize the fibre system and bring it to everyone free of charge, it's just a bunch of wires and switches in the final analysis. Hire public service workers who do things like build and moderate a site that does the same (good) purposes of facebook (Mastadon, for instance - we already have the solutions available, we just need server capacity and code maintenance)... but with no algorithmic manipulation of users' feeds. Show them what they subscribe to in chronological order. Privacy vis-a-vis government is not an issue when you're talking about public posts, as I see it. Social media is what you do for everyone, government included, to see.

At this point, I've probably lost most of the forum. Pay for free internet with my taxes? I mean, we're paying to drone attack weddings right now, is cheap, free internet really so obscene in comparison to the US military budget?

I'm also not saying that removing the algorithmic leeches from our social media lives is going to solve everything, but it will certainly prevent another Cambridge Analytica. I have no idea how big a problem bots are currently, but I'm positive they're gonna be a much bigger problem in years to come, with Machine Learning well in play. As long as people with profits to worry about are deciding what happens on the internet, we're screwed, man.

The internet, like medicine, needs the profit motive completely outlawed. That's the bit that I'm pretty sure is a non-seller to a lot of the folks around here. But that's ok, like I said, I'm here as one part of my attempt to not live in an echo chamber. Mostly I just try to read and soak up what gets said, because I am aware of my bias. But I do love the internet, and even before the internet I was a BBS kid, I have used modems to socialize basically my entire life, and this place is just no fun at all, anymore.

I just get grumpy sometimes, I guess, when I watch people get 99% of the way there, but won't take the name of Capital in vain. Profit must not be interfered with. This is the Ferengi timeline.

Cheers if you made it this far. :>

[internet_user]

“Profit” isn’t always measured in money. Influence and control are also profit, even if do not increase your bank account size or improve your geopolitical strategic position.

Someone posted a timeline above in years, amusingly it lines up quite well with this hypothesis: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

[jtode]

I dunno man. Like I said, back then, we were all just occupying our spare time on MUDs and whatnot. Pretty sure everyone I interacted with could pass a turing test, back then. Bots were things we used to maintain our irc channels and get ops from.

I miss my eggdrop. Schnauzer, I called it.

Rest In Power Schnauzer, guardian of #Spatch

[Brian_K_White]

I have no problem with any of what you said. For what that's worth.

[jtode]

Cheers. I actually think that we all agree a lot more than not on most things, but the algorithms make line go up when we're fighting. Line must go up.

[ironmagma]

Do we need some kind of decentralized chat app? This is what the dweb exists for, right?