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[–] 115 points 1 month ago* (22 children)

I feel like there has been waves of losses.

  • Web 2.0 upgrades made everyone feel like they had to have a shiny polished site. We lost a lot of fun amateurs.

Once apps started getting pushed websites started to get abandoned/empty. everything from shopping to small games. I shouldn't need an app for the coffee shop.

Bots and bad search operators made looking and finding a chore.

Insta killed blogs, suddenly everyone wanted a insta or YT brand rather than a blog/rss

  • Everything became sponsored =- say i wanted to find out how to polish my boots, the first 3 pages and everything everywhere suddenly tries to sell me boots.

This is why i no longer enjoy the internet. I know i sound old man yelling at cloud.

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  • [–] 45 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (11 children)

    as a former web developer, you nailed it.

    I essentially taught myself how to build sites from Geocities. Back then the internet was awesome because finding a new site that was cool was like finding buried treasure. Things weren't condensed. there was no central hub for news, media, socializing, etc. it was all spread out. you had webrings of similar interests, different forums you'd go to for different topics. different chat rooms like IRC, or The Palace, or Yahoo/AOL chat. It was better. it was easier to make friends online.

    now it's all condensed and boring. you go to less than a handful of sites a day, maybe only one or two, to get content. Forums are all but dead and social media killed them. We know too much about each other now, the "penpal" aspect is gone. blogs and livejournals don't provide interesting and personal content anymore...they all have hidden agendas of essentially the author trying to get a job. Webapps killed creativity.

    The internet is boring now and you really have to dig and dig deep for that "old school" content. because regardless of what search engine you use be it DDG, Kogi, Startpage, Google, whatever NONE of them are going to point you to someones Neocities or SpaceHey or blog anymore. They need to sell you something instead.

    it's like sites like this: https://www.manuelsweb.com/ THIS is what the internet used to be like. personal sites that just had links and posts about whatever was special in someones life.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 month ago

    It used to be so much fun mooching around and stumbling on things, like a site covered in rainbows that told you about a the best walks on a local mountain and then had a random ice cream recipe and some happy person taking a silly photo of themselves, followed by a review of their fav spoon and some instructions on how to fix a vacuum.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    Same, taught myself HTML over a summer in high school. Literally went to a library and printed out a tutorial I found on the Internet.

    I will say though, if you haven't heard of it, there's a small movement to get back to more organic web content. There's the Fediverse for social media that isn't algorithmically-weighted. There's NeoCities for web pages. There's Mojeek and Marginalia for search. (Marginalia is all non-commercial, so its search index is interesting.)

    There's still a lot of good out there.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Check out wiby.me for old-school stuff too. Clicking on 'surprise me...' is my favorite way to "surf the web" in modern times.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    wow thank you! I absolutely LOVE wiby.me and I had no idea it existed. I've just been clicking on surprise me over and over all day. it's great. reminds me of old webrings. easily my new favourite site/search engine.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    You kinda are yelling at the cloud, dude

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

    Just because people remember a measurably better time doesn't mean they're yelling at clouds.

    This wasn't even that long ago.

    Are you 12?

    Edit: I have been regretfully informed that I have in fact, missed the joke lol.

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    [–] 58 points 1 month ago (13 children)

    2nd to last paragraph:

    And this isn’t some anti-AI screed — I’m all-in on agentic software engineering!

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  • [–] 38 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    To be fair the internet was already shit before 2023

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  • [–] 32 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Not to the extent it is now courtesy of AI.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago*

    I dunno man, in 20-23 all the ravings about Covid being fake or crafted by china and released on purpose and vaccines being a conspiracy to track you by bill gates were by almost all real people, it was pretty shitty even before ai built all the websites, all the posts, all the comments.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    IMHO using ai to automate tasks is not the same as using ai to generate sloppy content

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago

    Using AI to automate tasks that could be automated with a script is awful. And if the endpoints are there for AI to trigger actions, then a simple script could use those same endpoints to do the same thing.

    Using AI to help write the script? (Strong emphasis on "help") Ok, maybe in some scenarios.

    But just constantly running AI to do shit is like firing up your big diesel pickup to go down the block to visit your neighbors, except in this case the diesel truck can't even be trusted to reliably take you to your neighbors every time you want to go there. There's always the chance it's going to decide to go somewhere else.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (4 children)
  • [–] 21 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Emdash is useful punctuation — I use it all the fucking time.

    On the other hand, "it's not foo; it's bar," once a quirky rhetorical flourish, now scans lazy and sloppy as shit.

    Also, swearing like a motherfucking sailor helps establish one's humanity. So fuck off. No offense. Have a lovely day!

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    [–] 42 points 1 month ago

    The internet is in small communities we shitpost in along the way

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  • [+] 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)
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    [–] 31 points 1 month ago

    The internet isn’t the internet anymore. It’s walled off, corporatized, and exclusionary.

    The internet used to be for people.

    Now it’s for profit.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge.

    Just don't consume it. Same for blogs.

    It's like junk food. It's not going away, so just don't consume it.

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    [–] 22 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    The undernet is growing as the overnet is bloated and dying of it's own poison.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    And what would the undernet be? This Lemmy here?

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  • [–] 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    Check out Neocities, it's a revamp of the old Geocities platform.

    All individual small sites, in the style of the late 90's-early 2000's web. Tons of animated gifs, sparkling cursors, hand-crafted HTML and CSS, web rings, shrines and fan pages, etc.

    Very fun to just click random pages and explore, just like back in the day before search engines and algos curated our feeds and content for us.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago

    Everything gets enshittified - Capitalised, and nothing good ever comes out of those leeches and parasites.

    The Capitalist religion crushed a new global, free and open digital community landscape. Say loud and proud: 'thank you Capitalist believer', for how it looks and works today..

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago

    Humanity may never see anything like the 90s-2000s era again. That was a distinct milieu of nearly unbound creation and discovery. Not only did corporations remained skeptical of the internet. People were highly averse to being manipulated because the internet was untrustworthy. Paradoxically that's what made the internet trustworthy. Once trust was established of course. It was a perfect mix of factors that made it a unique period in history.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 month ago

    Maybe all this bullshit is a needed step to bring back old internet

    We need forums back.. the fediverse is a good start in my book.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    I only enjoy very specific hobby subs\forums. Beyond that you can't find anything because all the search engines rank to by ads. Looking for a real review is a joke, its all AI\bogus.

    YT is getting worse w/ all the AI slop. I just stick to my channels that again are hobby/interests I have that haven't gone AI (yet).

    I haven't been on FB for over 10 years, no IG, no tic flop, or other social media because its a nightmare.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago

    I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

    We won’t unless we stop the source perpetuating this “culture.”

    Big Tech.

    Unfortunately, they kinda have a grip on everyone’s information sphere, so I think our chances are low :(

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Can we make a new internet?

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    [+] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)
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    [–] 7 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    The only thing that feels akin to early internet to me is the chat in video games. I miss being able to moderate things with my own brain thx.

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    [–] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    It's a good post, I agree with it. And I guess The Pale is a good description of what we are noticing.

    I got to experience the internet before it became like this, so at least I have memories of greatness. But the desire for great profits ruins everything. Not only the internet but the world.

    Greed for excessive amounts of money is the root of evil, the bible got that right. But humans are not aware enough to see a future where greed is not the driving force of society.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    Me either. Feels weird to be complaining about it on the internet though. It's almost like the solution is self-evident. Oh, well. It'll come to me.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    I've long thought that we need a web 3.0 that uses a different protocol entirely and is techie and difficult like getting on bbs'es was in the 80s . For a good 20 years until that one gets enshitified too we have another chance.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Check out project Gemini:

    https://geminiprotocol.net/

    "Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That's not a new idea, but it's not old fashioned either. It's timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We're not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth."

    No auto playing media. No cookies. Nothing tracking you. And they built it, as I understand, to be deliberately difficult to add new features to, to prevent enshittification.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    I don't know who are they, but they could just curate their online experience by looking for something that is actually organic and genuine, and drop their anchors on that.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Same... I tried Kagi small web which kinda promised to fix it but so far every page is a hyper-focused version of everything I hate. It somehow made it even worse.

    I think it can't really solve the problem because the people that want that tight nit free and open. Internet are already retreating from engaging with whatever this is.

    People have repeatedly called things "Web 3.0" but I think we've legitimately made it finally and I hate it.

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