Ask HN: The internet is getting worse every day. How do we fix this?

[electrodisk]

Outrage, addiction, shallow engagement... this is what much of the modern internet is optimized for, with younger users especially vulnerable.

This is vastly different than the internet’s original promise: a global system that allowed access to knowledge, creativity and collaboration no matter who you are.

The internet feels increasingly broken every. single. day.

How do we fix it?

[amatecha]

Probably stop using platforms/sites that exist to make money off you. I know it sounds ridiculous, but... the vast majority of the crappiness on the web is due to greed for money. If platforms didn't care about making money through ad revenue they woudln't be manipulative attention-harvesting outrage-bait.

You can actually engage in the trash platforms by using unofficial methods - I browse "youtube" by searching on Invidious and then either viewing on there, or when it doesn't work, download with yt-dlp. Or if someone links an "x" post I view it with xcancel (if at all). I don't care how inconvenient it is. For social media, fediverse (mastodon). Every other platform is for-profit and it shows in its respective design. I contact friends and family through texts and email. I've gone so far that I literally block all Meta-owned domains on my Pi-hole. I'm hoping to upgrade that to blocking Google domains but I'm not there yet.

I generally try to opt out of the psychologically-manipulative world that hyper-capitalistic greed tries so hard to force on me. It's kind of impossible to do completely, and social connectivity is made a LOT more frictional/tedious, but.. I try to "walk the walk".

Oh yeah, I still use IRC and XMPP. Hotline and KDX occasionally too.

[BoneShard]

I wonder how long till wiki is poisoned beyond salvation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing.

The internet is dead as we knew it, long live the internet.

[bigyabai]

+1 for this. Reject Dropbox, embrace a shitty NAS with pirated Evangelion OVA and YouTube backups.

You'll really be surprised how quickly YAGNI kicks in for like 99% of the internet.

[al_borland]

Stop trying to make massive platforms with the goal of having millions or billions of users.

Once sites get too large and the mainstream enters, they seem to go downhill quickly. I think the old internet seemed better, because this didn’t really happen. There were pockets of like-minded people, not general platforms trying to be everything to everyone.

In addition to this, get the stuff off the phone. Having these things in your pocket and available all the time doesn’t seem to be good for people. Make the sites painful to use on mobile, to select for users who are willing to engage only with a proper keyboard and mouse, which will drastically reduce low-effort posters, trolls, and excessive engagement.

Of course these things are counter to everyone’s dream of getting rich on the internet. We have to choose. Do we want a healthy, collaborative, and functional internet… or do we want to make a lot of money. It doesn’t seem we can have both.

[mlmartin]

The thing is - the 'old' internet is still there. IRC is there, despite slack and discord making closed privately hosted versions. NTTP newsgroups are still there, despite reddit and stackoverflow etc. All that infrastructure still there that doesn't algorithmically keep you in a perma-outraged state for engagement. If I have some sort of spiritual or scientific awakening that I just have to share with the world - The web still lets you self host. I can hide that behind onion routers if I need to.

Not to say that the modern alternatives don't fix a lot of problems, particularly with accessibility to end users, but whats to stop us from going back and creating a new branch from that base that tries to solve the problems without the toxicity? And more importantly, engaging only with that network? (the sad probable answer: Because we're collectively lazy).

[cjs_ac]

Content and services on the web provide this problematic content precisely because there's a monetisable audience for it. It won't go away until that audience decides it doesn't want that content any more.

The content you want is still out there.

[lurk2]

Your only two comments on this site are: “Chat are we cooked?” and “Genuinely a serious problem.”

Look inward.

[MrVandemar]

How to fix "the internet" is a largely insurmountable problem. It is a particular specimen of "The Tragedy of the Commons" in many ways.

One approach is to simply disappear into a parallel universe designed to somewhat resemble the old internet, but also guard against what it turned into.

The Gemini Protocol was a remarkable attempt at this, and while it isn't (and will probably never be) mainstream, it seems to me to be a little pocket of sanity (although its jettisoning of semantic HTML-like structures pains me greatly).

To forestall any unnecessary commentary on the design and choice of the GemText markup language: Markdown is difficult to parse and not standardised, and a subset of HTML is also not trivial to parse, and still potentially leads to the same problems as exists today with HTML. GemText was well-designed for its goals.

[AndrewKemendo]

Everything but the collective will is there for an open and decentralized internet to thrive as envisioned

what you describe emerged from open protocols and standards being intermediated by middlemen because “regular” people don’t want to learn how to run their own fiber.

All the “regular people” took over what was basically a communications experiment by scientists because attention and as a result commerce moved to that experimental space.

I lived through that as a early net user in 1992 and watched any possibility of the dream get eaten.

The crowding out of the “original intent” is an artifact of transactionalism being the driving factor behind the majority of human action.

Anything that would replace it would eventually succumb to the same fate because the constituent parts are still the same: humans who desire abstracted transactional convenience over coherence and sustainability.

[kjkjadksj]

You don’t. It’s over. Eternal September and all that. Same thing happens in all media produced for mass consumption. The incentives to capture, manipulate, and control the world’s mindshare are too high for this to ever not be the game.

[firecall]

>the internet’s original promise: a global system that allowed access to knowledge, creativity and collaboration no matter who you are.

This was not the case for the Internet or the World Wide Web;

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

[ivanjermakov]

The internet is a bunch if interconnected computers capable of TCP/IP, and network is growing and becoming more capable and resilient each day. From technical perspective, the Internet is best it has ever been.

I suspect you're talking about harm from "social" media and business practices that compromise user experience and wellbeing.

[impure]

I'm not convinced it is. But maybe that's because I just subscribe to things I like using RSS and don't doomscroll.

[a2fz]

Decentralisation.

Almost all the traffic on the internet goes to one of like, five companies. They're the ones psychologically experimenting on your kids and intentionally making their services addictive and mental illness-inducing. The other 99% of the internet is still mostly fine. If you simply blocked access to the top 1% most visited websites, I suspect that would solve most of the issues people see with "the internet".

Build wholesome small-scale services just for you and the people you care about. I run a little private photo-sharing/messaging service for me and my friends, along with other nice things like a Jellyfin server for media. There's just no incentive to introduce anything bad like you inevitably get with massive for-profit companies. And, these corners of the web are never realistically going to be subject to all the recent regulation like the Online Safety Act, if it's just a small invite-only space.

We shouldn't have tens of millions of people on one platform arguing over what sort of content should and shouldn't be allowed, ruled by big tech oligarchs. Build an area of your own that you can share with your friends!

Unfortunately I think the mobile app store model significantly increases the barriers to random people making their own things. You can teach a young teenager to make a little website that they can stick on GitHub Pages and show off to their friends in an afternoon. A mobile app? Not so much. Especially if it requires possibly buying a Mac to run XCode, and then an Apple Developer account (maybe not that expensive if you're in the tech industry, but if you're a kid who just wants to try it out and show stuff to your friends, it's a pretty big barrier + there's the id verification stuff). It's unsurprising that such a small amount of the software for iOS is free/open-source, compared to platforms where the costs to develop are lower.

[Night_Thastus]

You can't fix it, because it's a problem of incentives.

* Businesses want to maximize shareholder value

* Those running websites want to do as much SEO-slop as possible to appear first

* Content creators need to maximize views, which means rage-bait, clickbait, etc.

* Addictive content = more time spent, more ads seen

You can't 'fix' the internet. The internet, like many things, is a tool. Shareholders and individual actors are only interested in maximizing their own gains - and so use this tool to that purpose - regardless of any negative effects on the whole. That's how humans operate in general (with rare exceptions).

You may as well say "Human selfishness and greed sucks, how do we get rid of it?". You can't.

[Morromist]

I suppose people could try to make a non-monitizable internet.

Everything would have to be self-hosted. No ads would be allowed anywhere. No business would be allowed to build anything, just users. Some kind of super-admin would have to have to power to perma-ban any website or user that breaks the rules.

But you'd still have the problem of people who aren't directly monitizing things, like influencers. You'd have bots. You'd have subtle ads that don't quite appear to be ads, or users writing fake testimonials.

Still, despite its obvious flaws, it would be cool to see someone try to build such a non-commerical internet someday. I wish them luck.

[Night_Thastus]

Bots and influencers are minimal concerns if there's no money to be had - since that's ultimately the driving force between those.

But trying to make a 'non-monetizable' internet is an oxymoron. If it has the ability to allow people to communicate, then it can be used to sell things.

You can't have an exchange of information without that information potentially containing garbage designed to make someone else money. You can only eliminate spam calls if you decide to get rid of the invention of the telephone.

[Morromist]

Heh. True. The saga of r/art this last few weeks is a good lession in how trying to demonitize things can be difficult.

Still, with intense moderation it is sometimes possible. Wikipedia has a vast amount of information passing through it and has stayed pretty free of monitization - although, certainly some companies have written themselves some pretty positive wiki-pages - in general I would say it is a success.

[Night_Thastus]

Intense moderation eventually breaks down. Ultimately, the people doing the moderating are driven by the same selfishness as all humans. Even if a you can find a handful who won't bend for their own gain, they will be forced out by those who do and see an opportunity.

This is the same problem law has, even at the global scale.

You can't moderate when almost every single person in the chain is a bad actor. Individuals will chip away at any structure or organization day by day, year by year, until they are eventually rewarded.

[electrodisk]

Genuinely a serious problem

[bigyabai]

I dunno, seems super profitable.

[Morromist]

I agree its bad and it should be fixed but...

I think AI is going to greatly decrease the quality of the internet in the coming years. What we have now, as bad as it is, will be remembered as being very good in 2035. AI will clog this place up.

Eventually there will be a serious attempt to make an internet where each user is a verified human person, to sieve out the AI slop, but I don't think that will succeed and anonymity is part of what makes the internet good.

One solution for some - but not all - of the problems we have is to go back to small communities, where each user knows one another, talking in their own servers, like BBSes often used to be. Discord leads the way here.

[amatecha]

quality of the web*

[sys_64738]

Time machine back to Sept 1993?

[electrodisk]

Curious, why sept 1993 specifically?

[sys_64738]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[moontide2]

sometimes I think about starting a social media platform that is better than the current stuff, but countries keep adding more and more regulations and liabilities, so I guess it isn't for those who don't wish to brave breaking the law.

The old internet feels like it is increasingly illegal to run. I mean, youtube circa 2013 basically is. You wouldn't get away with just letting people upload disney movies there anymore, or just letting anyone join the adsense program.

The whole pervasive censorship problem on youtube is downstream of various scandals where a big newspaper wrote a hit piece blaming youtube for letting the wrong people say the wrong things or letting the wrong people see them.

So in this cultural and legal climate, I going to try to avoid any business where people talk to each other, since I don't want to get in trouble if I didn't do censorship hard enough, or didn't know every regulation globally.

if you choose to, good luck. I am just frustrated that people observe that social media is bad, and thus pass laws that raise the regulatory burden and thus stamp out competition.

[kennyadam]

I don’t think it can be fixed. When the internet was used only by people who were geeky enough to find chatting on IRC exciting and set up websites and blogs simply for the fun of it, there was a thrill in doing all this stuff for the first time and you had to organise IRL meet-ups just to find like-minded people. Once everything became about clicks and ad impressions and content was created to make money, not just because you wanted to share something you thought was cool.

Obviously, this is still possible and many people do maintain blogs and websites for the love of it, the overwhelming amount of internet users are happy using a handful of giant social networks.

Heck, internet dating used to be looked down on as something so pathetic only complete losers did it. The world and the internet has evolved and as much as I miss the wild west days where it felt like anything was possible, the giant corps have taken over and people are too scared to say the word suicide on YouTube lest they be demonetised, so everyone trembles and mutters unalived and everything gets a little bit worse.

I’m rambling, sorry,

[mingus88]

I’m old enough to remember when blogs were bad news for the culture at the time, which was forums, IRC and static sites (you know, with under construction banners)

It seems the prevailing pattern is that removing barriers to entry means things get worse. In 2025 there are no barriers left and everyone is online all the time. It’s the end stage of the internet we loved.

In fact the barriers have been destroyed so utterly that we are awash in AI generated content now. The dead internet theory is real. Why are we still here?

[markhahn]

by not conflating "internet" with "social network / doomscrolling".

no, seriously, that's the main thing. nothing about "internet" says you have to let ad-motivated recommendation engines fill your gullet.

let's call it "mindful internet": you deliberately choose what to read, even if that means, gasp, seeking out a few quality sources, checking in with a few worthwhile people. "influencers" are so ick precisely because they are an gross side-effect of doomscrolling.