The internet is slipping out of our reach
injuly.inSomeone once asked a question online about what each person's biggest fear was regarding the future of AI generated content. I thought about it.
While the fears of not being able to earn money for creative pursuits are a concern, my biggest concern remains around anonymity.
At some point, I fear that participating online with other humans will require "proof of self" and as AI becomes more and more able to generate convincing images/text/video/voice of being human, the systems will ask more and more of us to prove we are real humans which could lead to awful consequences in disallowing anonymity entirely.
That worry remains right up there in my list of AI related concerns.
The parallel concern to that are online communities become tightly gated with stringent requirements of relationships (i.e. invite only, possibly with multiple "referees") and proof of quality in order to participate. This outcome has its merits but can also lead to exclusionary environments which has many downsides, esp for newcomers. It could very well feel like participating in low quality ranked levels of a game for a long time before being allowed to climb out of the cesspool into higher levels where people take stuff more seriously. Not necessarily a bad thing but it's still an inversion of the idea of "participation allowed by default but you can lose the trust you are given if you behave poorly".
> I fear that participating online with other humans will require "proof of self"
I fear something worse: that it WON'T require proof of self, because the LLMs will be able to tell if you're human... and your age, wants, needs, everything else; that's the nightmare scenario for me: LLMs integrating all the little bits and pieces of yourself you shed online, all the information you leak, from the speed your mouse movements to how long you read an article -- and what articles you read -- and the words and style of your comments -- everything building into an accurate and detailed profile of yourself.
This is already happening and has almost nothing to do with llm, this is Google and Facebook business model because these are the marketable details.
Is it happening? Is there anybody who would claim that Google and Facebook are showing them better-targeted content now than before?
Google and Facebook care only about shoving monetizable garbage in your face, be it through tainted search results, mindless "recommended" IG Reels/YT Shorts or FB Pages. That has driven people away from these platforms. Maybe not at the levels where their bottom line is being hit, but that is a lagging indicator anyway.
> mindless "recommended" IG Reels/YT Shorts or FB Pages
Only these clearly do work for the majority of people. They're ubiquitous in popular culture (and in fact culture is often built within them) and are essentially the whole business model for those services. If they don't work for you, great, it means you've successfully avoided using those services enough that they can't profile you accurately, but that doesn't mean that they don't work at all.
> claim better targeted content
Any such claim is irrelevant. The personal opinion of the receiver of the content is not relevant, only that the content delivered somehow makes money for the sender.
> That has driven people away from these platforms.
Platforms? These entities do not derive profits only from visits to their own domains. Please inspect the source code of any random site you read next. On the majority of web sites in the Western hemisphere you will find either a Facebook script or a Google script, or both. Often more than these two.
I don't think the current systems used by Google and Facebook can integrate and infer new details as well as the LLMs can; LLMs can do more with less.
I know LLMs are pretty wild technology, but you're wrong about this. LLM's are just models of language. To some extent they can do some of the things you're talking about, but almost by the very nature of the problem other models could do the same better and with much less by way of resources.
What makes you think the details provided by LLMs would be accurate?
And if they know you better than you know yourself, they can control you better than you can control yourself.
> participating online with other humans
There is a more significant case of "the end of anonymity", that of doing any kind of sale or purchase. The more sophisticated the possibilities for fraud become, the harder the authorities that be will (need to) push for public non-falsifiable identification (e.g. linked to your biometrics somehow, as I don't suppose a transplant ("chip") is politically feasible). If you need to trade, that is.
Consider that the past few years the use of cash is increasingly being phased out, or even outlawed (for amounts over a certain size) in various Western countries. With digital money comes digital fraud.
As a spooky aside, the Christian horror story "Mark of The Beast" is remarkably accurate in that respect, even if perhaps a bit too specific in the details (on hand or forehead) - but then magic glasses and -watches are here already.
> I fear that participating online with other humans will require "proof of self"
This is a huge fear of mine as well. I can't see how I could ever accept such a thing, so it would be the end of my use of the web.
The parallel concern - we saw how too open communities just don't work in modern world. Way too many sides have their own 'pitch', be it marketing, politics, propaganda, always to manipulate opinions via emotions to steered goal which is never actual simple truth. Truth doesn't need much marketing among reasonable people.
This is how flat earthers, climate change deniers, blind supporters of putin's war on ukraine etc spawn out of blue and suddenly it feels like half of the world got mentally disabled. Well, they didn't. There was either once a nice community say about patriotism for XYZ, which was gradually subverted into whatever fringe stupid position they hold now, via various negative emotions us-vs-them of participants. Or such a community was already created with such purpose.
Good old Prigozhin's and GRU troll farms well running full steam for past 2 decade, always subverting western countries, especially those former communist ones. All it takes is 1 skilled manipulator, all 3-letter agencies everywhere have whole departments for doing exactly this (and counter-attack it too, but that's far less effective).
With realistic videos, russians can pop out any video of zelensky or biden being a pedophile, and those photos of putin riding a bear will look 100% perfect which is enough for most older russian population.
I will gladly be part of some more closed community, trust is a very important item and currently we already severely lack it. There are of course numerous issues with such communities, ie including new members and anyway steering away from actual truth, but thats 100% problem now already. But some friction is not a bad thing per se, it works the same way in real life in smaller villages everywhere. Clearly good enough model for past 10k years.
You seem mainly focused on what the out group does. Manipulating emotions and discourse is not a outgroup problem, really.
Also, I think algorithmic feeds are the main culprits. Before them, it was way harder to manipulate people on the internet.
I dunno, I like the idea of 'quality content' being gamified as a kind of upward filter. Online communication has degraded in-person communication to some degree* and it would be nice if there was a gamelike quality to getting access to the best communities which aligned with the quality of thought and communication - an excellent training ground. The major worry I'd have is that midwit communities can't tell an imbecile from a genius and it'd be hard for a lot of actual geniuses to 'graduate' once they're being judged by midwits. But I'm sure the genius communities would have the means to put a workaround in place.
*I suspect this is at least in part due to memetic contagion rate being selected for at a higher rate online than in close reationships, but does anyone have their own pet theory as to why this is?
This reads to me like a rant. Good material for a blog post but I don't think there is anything particularly profound going on. The internet is not a static place, and parts are always being born and dying. Maybe today is going to be Google search.
There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate peer-to-peer. The question has been answered - corporate entities (points at the Y logo at the top of the page) do a much better job of curating spaces. This has implications that a lot of content will be lost sooner or later, but at least the big repositories like Wikipedia make copying data out easy.
I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing. The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it. Private spaces might be a big net win. It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier; that is a major Achilles heel in the whole setup right now. But that problem has never really been solved (unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised).
> I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing. The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it. Private spaces might be a big net win
Yeah, I think we should not underestimate the "dark forest" aspect of the 2020s Internet. It's assumed that discoverability is a good thing, and what so many pages are optimizing for - but it isn't always. People don't want to be exposed to political witch hunts (of any faction!) or DDoS.
HN exists in a liminal space where it's hostile enough to keep the turnover down, while being comfortable enough to sustain its social existence.
(Also, people say "our reach" while at the same time the Internet remains radically individualistic - if you want there to be an "us" there has to be some sort of solidarity and governance, the total free-for-all was never sustainable except on the very margins)
> unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised
Or X Windows. I still hear the occasional diatribe, on how X is "just as good as" Windows or Mac (usually from a person that pretty much exclusively uses CLI). These folks can't understand why desktop Linux hasn't crushed the Microsoft/Apple hegemony.
People who hang in like-minded communities can often assume that "everyone" is just like they are; when, in point of fact, their community represents the tiniest sliver of an edge case.
There's a lot of tecchies, in the world.
But there are a lot more non-tecchies, and they are the ultimate arbiters of what succeeds or dies.
The Internet (actually, every type of infrastructure or social construct) will be shaped by this great mass of uneducated, non-technical, ADHD, etc. people.
The tech folks that make the huge piles of money, know this, and work to serve (and train) the masses.
GP> Private spaces might be a big net win.
I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet geek world; things like cons and zines were way more important than now, but they existed, and we definitely didn't expect for there to be, let alone rely on, mainstream channels providing our social contact.
> there are a lot more non-tecchies, and they are the ultimate arbiters of what succeeds or dies.
Succeeds, yes. Dies? I think no. There aren't many mechanisms to kill off things in the long tail, other than whatever the kids mean when they whinge about "discovery".
In The Time Machine, the Morlocks use the Eloi for sustenance. I suggest we do something similar, living among ourselves in our caverns, letting the masses frolic upon their platforms, and merely harvesting a few percent (2?) of the revenue every now and then; not so much as to threaten their existence, but enough for us to thrive.
> "We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society." — ♝
Well, "dies" happens, when the Eloi don't use/buy something.
Morlocks like to be paid. If they don't get paid, they might not do it.
> ...when the Eloi don't use/buy something.
As Morlocks provide all the infra for the Eloi, we can certainly provision it also for ourselves. (how many days of HN could fit in an average TikTok video?)
It['s Morlocks'] care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock. It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock. It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain, Tally, transport, and deliver duly the [Eloi "members"] by land and main.
The relative market share of X window system, NS Windows, and macOS has nothing at all to do with technical merits of either. MS Windows dominated the corporate world because of MS Office, corporate-level technical support, and efficient salespeople. MacOS became prominent because of the superior hardware produced by Apple.
While indeed uneducated (in specific tech; may otherwise be smart), non-technical, highly varied people who all have too little time constitute the bulk of any audience, big moneyed interests always have and will continue to shape this audience's perception, especially where there is a network effect. It's not just Chrome vs Firefox or X vs Mastodon; the same mechanics stand behind the likes of Coca-Cola.
What are you talking about, X just works. I haven't had to go diving in and manually configure X in _years_ and I remember when you had to tell X to treat your mouse wheel as an extra button just to get it to work. And I say this as someone who uses exclusively nvidia GPUs.
The most I have to do is set the monitor layout and KDE/gnome work exactly like windows with a graphical UI.
I get it. You prefer wayland, as do many people. You can push wayland without making things up about X. Honestly, if X fixed the screen tearing issue I'm not sure there would be a strong reason to prefer wayland over it other than technical purity.
The parent post never brought up Wayland, and it’s off-topic, but the security of having input only going to specific apps and not every X client is a massive win and one reason I’ve used sway since 2018.
I took it as a joke (I hope).
> This reads to me like a rant
It was. I agree with most of what you said.
> I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing.
I don't dislike discord myself, but don't like the fact that most of it closed off. You don't get to see what's inside a server before creating an account and joining it.
I don't know if you were around when the US internet was inside AOL? And the French inside Minitel?
All the rest of us didn't really care what you all did in there. Platforms and Walled Gardens alike come and go.
> The question has been answered - corporate entities do a much better job of curating spaces.
Do you have a citation for this, or are you just asserting it as a fact?
Despite the new forum feature, Discord is very poorly searchable and requires to be in a specific guild to see what is going on
> The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it.
what?
> It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier
You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable? Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?
Edit:
For the size of most of those communities you could host your own Discourse server on a NAS behind Cloudflare's tunnel, and the world would be better for it.
E.g. some opensource projects in the Elixir space have been moving to Elixir's ElixirForum: https://elixirforum.com/. And now you can search those discussions, link them, point people to them etc. The "small public internet" seems to accommodate it just fine
>You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable?
W3 at its core is very simple. This simpleness gives large gaps of freedom in what two parties have to do for exchanging data, e.g. 27 years have passed between the birth of W3C and Webauthn.
>Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?
There is a multitude of reasons why you have marvellous designs on websites but you can't name a mass-market search engine you can run outside of the browser on your local computer using on-line data. Sure there are some or you can nowadays assemble some software parts and build your own, but it isn't a thing, and there is a why.
What is the why?
Data in W3 is designed as poorly as FTP, relies on third-party for consistence and transfer. And we used it a lot for bullshit content we thought we paid upfront (by buying hardware and access to a network).
W3 will always be the perfect medium for an ad publisher (given the role of publishers in a capitalist nation) who may or may not give away for free a platform for evaluation and a delivery network.
Google will not be interested in fixing search. It also may not be possibile because of ai spam. They would like to invest in deep mind/bard/gemini than to fix technology that will be obsolete in a few years.
I have started scanning domains to see how many different places there are in the internet. Spoiler: Not many.
We could try to create curated open databases for links, forums, places, and links, but in ai era it will always be a niche.
Having said that I think that it is a good thing. If it is a niche it will not be spoiled by normal users expecting simple behavior, or corporations trying to control the output.
Start your blog
Start your curated lists of links.
Control your data. Share your data.
It's likely we will come full circle - to a Yahoo-like human-curated Internet directory.
It's a spiral, so it won't be controlled by a corporation.
Actually, there are many such collaborative directories on specific subjects; search GitHub for "awesome <something>", for instance.
It's funny that you end your comment with a link to github. The centralized website that has been swallowing open source code.
Other than that, I agree with your message.
Decision was tough. I wanted to publish somewhere reliable. I did not want to direct people to my unknown page. I will publish data on it also though
Another victim of LLM-'enhanced' search results is serendipity. Many times I've found random, fun and unrelated websites from mistyping a query.
Now the AI tries to guess what I meant and adjusts the search results, meaning such gems are lost.
To be fair, most people using search aren't looking for fun, random and unrelated content, they want results specifically relevant to the terms they're searching for even if they mistype their query.
The big problem with LLM and search is that the results themselves are often poisoned by factually incorrect LLM generated content being promoted from sites Google presents as sources of truth (see the recent "can you melt eggs?" debacle[0].)
[0]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/can-y...
> they want results specifically relevant to the terms they're searching for even if they mistype their query.
You're not wrong here, and I don't think LLM has made this much better - for a reason in addition to yours.
In my experience pre-LLM there was a good blend of both relevant and unrelated even when a few letters were off, or a word was slightly wrong.
And now more often than not, the LLM they must have parsing the search query guesses my intention wrongly, making the search results ironically less relevant. Pre-LLM In that situation, I'd correct my query to narrow down the results in my next search - as I still do anyway post-LLM.
TL;DR using LLM to 'enhance' search queries hasn't actually improved anything, while also making my day less fun.
For serendipity, try https://search.marginalia.nu ?
That's been happening long before the "AI trend" but it was still using what people call AI now. It's just called sabotaged search. Every big tech company does it as it improves profits.
I agree that the mainstream web is becoming increasingly useless, but at the same time, there are counter-movements: search engines like Marginalia, decentralized communities and federated protocols, open-source projects and businesses, "the indie web".
"Small Discord servers, Telegram groups and mailing lists" aren't the only places good stuff happens on the internet, though it might take some deliberate effort to find the right ones.
Love marginalia. It still has ways to go before it can become my daily driver, but I'm rooting for it.
> If you searched Google for a movie review in 2005, you'd get a review. Today, you get paid search results, ads, third-party cookies, trackers, newsletter prompts, notification requests, and, if you're lucky – a movie review. No matter what you search for, SEO-hacked content farms will blot out the sun.
This resonates, but I tried it, and it looks false. On both kagi and google, for both an old and a new movie (finding nemo and dune 2), the first result is a movie review that doesn't seem overly laden in shit.
Good catch!
I had originally written "travel plans"/"workout routine", but changed it to "movie reviews".
If you try to plan a trip to Dubai with Google, the first 4 posts are sponsored. With workout routines, The first post for me has ads + newsletter prompt + notification access request.
I should change it back :)
Why are you not using an adblocker if your current experience bothers you?
I do use uBlock Origin. It removes sponsored search results, but it won't do away with the poorly written articles just below.
More importantly, not everyone uses an ad-blocker (especially mobile users). If installing a browser extension becomes necessary to deem a browser worthy of use, I would think that's a problem.
Fortunately, with web environment integrity websites will be able to force you to use an approved browser (Chrome) with a verified local binary (that will forbid an adblocker and report your browsing to Google) and you won't be able to do anything about it.
the web is nigh-on unusable without an ad-blocker.
When I was young no one really questioned ads in television shows, when I got to uni I kind of stopped watching anything but cable. Then netflix came out and I dropped cable alltogether. Every once in a while I find myself watching television at someone elses house and the constant ads completely destroy any enjoyment of the entertainment, even if I never really questioned it as a kid.
that's how the web is for people who don't run ad-block. They have no idea what it can be.
I think a better question is: Why do you insist on using Google?
There are several search engines on the WWW. Google is just one, and I hear people complaining about that one a lot. I don't use it personally, and I haven't done so for more than a decade. Life goes on perfectly fine without it.
(no, I don't use Kagi or Marginalia either, it's not one of those posts.)
No search engine is immune to LLM generated mumbo jumbo. Google makes an exceptional example at being a terrible search eninge despite majority market share, but as AI continues to pollute the internet, all search engines will deteriorate.
It's essentially the phenomenon of less genetic diversity as massive repetitive inbreeding takes over. SEO, AI, etc. are streamlined cultures made to maximize attraction and revenue, akin to over breeding a once successful genetic trait in an environment to the point at which it becomes a detriment to the organism/group.
One thing that makes me kind of happy - I am no longer scared of "AI singularity". Looking at the bullshit LLMs generate, I don't think they will take over world and start to upload our minds to torture chambers or whatever.
It might get worse soon across all sites if governments mandate AI content moderation:
Fair point. Let's cut through the fluff: thinking LLMs won't lead to AI singularity because they occasionally spit out nonsense is like dismissing the potential of the internet because you once got a 404 error. These blunders aren't the endgame; they're stepping stones. Technology evolves. What's a joke today could be the entity outsmarting us tomorrow. Don't worry about sci-fi scenarios of digital torture chambers just yet, but maybe don't write off the potential of AI based on its current puberty phase either. Underestimating tech progress is a bit like laughing at early cars for being slower than horses—amusing, until you're the only one left in the dust.
The Internet became valuable because it let the average person email or chat instantaneously from home for the price of a dial-up plan, instead of sending expensive faxes or long-distance per-minute phone charges.
AI still hasn't delivered something of that magnitude for the average consumer. Netscape launched in '94; the dotcom boom didn't happen until '98. Several years passed before the mania hit the markets. AI is in the opposite cycle: there is more corporate-driven hype about its benefits than anything concrete that's flowing down to the average consumer.
It is over. Many believe LLMs are more than regurgitation programs and even think they are doing the world a favour by posting ChatGPT content. Even worse, these models will only become more and more inbred as training goes on.
similar but with a bit more meat - https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die...
That was good. I like the term "Degnerative AI".
Adding it to my blog's footer.
It's a signal to noise ratio problem which automation is clearly, plainly, obviously, going to worsen/exacerbate/amplify in every manner. Even if Google themselves hadn't incentivized the problem in the first place, it's far too late to correct.
You cannot conduct a conversation about it, either, because of a similar signal to noise ratio problem, as people who don't care or don't bother to think it through feel compelled to "contribute". And the inevitable "I asked ChatGPT to reply and it said..." noise.
> The average essay is written not to be read, but to be found—by a search engine
Even before generative AI, this was painfully true. Google doesn't care about its SERPs if they can push an advert at you.
Author is bang-on. We aren't ready for the next evolution of search shittification. Without search, we're blind.
Every other form of organic discovery (reviews, directories, forums) seems just as prone to the damage of spam.
This isn't about the Internet, it is about Google search. Google search has had starkly reduced utility for many years now.
AI is just one facet of the issue, and it only exacerbates the real problem. Algorithmification, enshitification, etc.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-the-in...
The old guards of Amazon and Google are gone - no one is there to nurture the product. The new business school jocks are there to juice it, juice it to the max, bro! Quarter to quarter, so that the vaunted SHAREHOLDER does not get all madzies.
I think this
The old guards of Amazon and Google are gone - no one is there to nurture the product
really explains (perhaps obviously to many) why company culture changes over time, and that retaining engineering in leadership can be crucial to long-term success.
Pray tell, who in Google's senior leadership team is a business school jock in sole control of these decisions?
The SLT are corporate stooges who are doing Wall St's bidding to pump the stock. Blaming 'business school types' belies a fundamental misunderstanding of who holds the reigns.
Maybe we ought to just be heading to Venus ("and still we stand tall"), as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants ?
Or even Venus, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
(Text here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm)
Both involved Cyril Kornbluth, what a great talent, taken far too soon.
Interestingly, Pohl wrote a sequel to The Space Merchants decades later, and I picked it up, fully expecting it to be terrible, and it was brilliant, and made me cry at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchants%27_War_(Pohl_nov...
Luckily enough, population genetics[0] doesn't follow the model[1] of the year 7-B-936 so much as it does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean .
[0] as many would-be racing breeders have discovered, it's easy to breed the best to the best, but the number of trials incurred while hoping for the best takes deep pockets.
[1] or were the story's names a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid -isation?
Investors demand infinite growth. So when your company is already very lucrative, how do you make it even more lucrative? By taking financial risks in new product creation? No, by squeezing as much profitability as you can from existing products...
edit:grammar
By providing dividends. Investors who seek high risk and high growth can then go elsewhere, or maybe catch a flight to Vegas for some real gambling. There will always be investors looking for "slow and steady".
As a company grows, its culture changes, but so should its approach to growth and to investors.
The irony is that this feels like a chat gpt post asking it:
"Write something negative about the internet outside my bubble."
That said I've found that asking a question of an llm, then copying its response into google gets me extremely high quality results, much better than the question does by itself.
In essence the curse of dimensionality means that with enriched queries SEO is literally impossible. You can't SEO an arbitrarily large space because no query is ever repeated.
I'm not the best with words, but did you actually try that? I can't seem to get anything out of ChatGPT that isn't overly prosaic. If you did, I'd benefit from the prompt.
Genuinely curious, don't mean to question your claim. Though I did write this myself.
> Do you often append "reddit" or "wiki" to your Google search queries?
Unfortunately, yes, site:something.com has become mandatory for finding the right information on Google search, otherwise, I'm getting spammed by fake ass AI content that doesn't even answer my question.
How ironic. Google became number one because it managed to beat its competitors at accuracy, and 25 years later, here we are...
"Do you often append "reddit" or "wiki" to your Google search queries?"
Well no, I haven't even used Google for search in years. I use a proxy and I also usually have a Wikipedia tab and a Reddit tab open to search there directly when I want to.
That helps keep a part of the Internet out of my reach and I'm very happy with that.
This has Onion article vibes.
Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-d...
That is definitely true about search. Google ruined it, like they ruin most things. The more hand-curated style of the old Yahoo was far superior. Yes, Google was superior in search in the short-term, but their automated algorithms came with the inevitable attachment of the future of gaming their algorithms. The modus operandi of Google is to provide a highly-centralized automated service that at first appears superior, but in reality is just a mechanism of arbitrary wealth concentration through advertisements.
Of course, AI is going to make matters much worse, and already is in fact. It's the supercharger for corporate greed.
The solution would be to impose limits on the internet. The combination of the internet and large corporations is a disaster, so we need to limit large corporations. `Free' services from Google, Apple, and Microsoft must end, and corporate activity on the internet must be severely curtailed. AI companies should be dismantled and forced into bankruptcy.
Even if the resulting internet were much slower and with less shiny goodies, it would be far better for the people without corporate involvement.
I agree, somewhat. Wikipedia is hand-curated and it works.
Perhaps it's time for a new DMOZ/ODP type effort from Wikimedia/Mozilla/similar.
“It will be gamed. No exceptions.”
Any designer of marketplaces, search, social anything, laws and regulations, etc needs to remember that principle. Any system will be exploited for its edge cases and emergent behaviors if there is any profit of any kind (even just attention or lulz) in doing so.
Yes but the incentive to game something is significantly reduced if it is not fast, not centralized, and doesn't have a large audience.
You cannot deny that having a huge, million+ global audience makes gaming MORE lucractive. With small, indepedent websites, none of which have a massive audience, gaming and scams are much less worth a scammer's time.
>The more hand-curated style of the old Yahoo was far superior.
You say hand-curated, I say political manipulation.
The motives of 1990s people and 2020s people are very different.
What would a non-manipulated search result page look like? What kind of business process would produce such a thing and how would we know what was objective anyway?
results are still manipulated for political purposes - it is just automated now instead of manually done.
Is this satire?
No. I simply believe that the internet would be superior as a basic service with very limited corporate involvement. I believe the internet would be superior if it were like a basic, government-supplied service so that websites would be created by individuals, and small to medium-sized businesses. It would be more democratic, and it would not have the same problems created by massive networks. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Google.
Yes, we would not have certain "cool" features like Google Earth, but I still think the world would be superior without large-scale corporate involvement and without AI-created pure trash.
Are you aware that nothing is stopping you from only visiting websites made by individuals, and medium-sized businesses? In fact, you can also choose to use cool things like Google Earth, AND choose not to use shit things like Twitter, Facebook, Google Search etc.
Are you aware that I am not talking about my personal well-being, but the well being of society? I've never had a Facebook, and in fact I visit maybe 3-4 internet sites. I don't engage much personally as I think most of what is on the internet is garbage.
What I mean to imply is that large corporate internet activities are detrimental to society. If all I cared about was myself then I would not even be typing now at all. But I have seen many people negatively affected by corporate internet manipulation and I think it's a bad thing.
The same applies to everyone else. Nothing was stopping them from using the crap bits of the internet, yet they did it anyway because that's what they chose to do.
The same applies to literally anything: food, exercise, etc. people choose the worse option because that's what they prefer. If you take that option away from them, then they will choose some other, similarly crappy option.
The problem is not that people have options, and some of the options are crap.
The problem is that people are physically and mentally lazy (I include myself in this), and will tend to choose the easier, but crappier option most of the time. How do we fix human nature? I don't know, but taking away people's choice isn't going to help the matter.
That's rather defeatist, isn't it? People choose things in the way you describe because they are playing the prisoner's dilemma.
Actually, taking away people's choice does help: that's called government regulation. You can't open a factory and dump mercury waste in the water in the U.S. because there is regulation. And regulation has existed in much stronger forms in the past in various guises, such as with native societies and the Amish.
So yes, taking away choice helps. We need to take away the choice to pollute, to use AI, and to form large corporations. It will help and make everyone's lives better.
> Are you aware
Few sentences that start with this clause are emitted in good faith, and yours is certainly not one of them.
I am aware.
Translation of what you wrote: "I don't like what you wrote but I can't see how to refute it either."
> Today, you get paid search results, ads, third-party cookies, trackers, newsletter prompts, notification requests
It is worse. You get curated political opinions that you must have, referrals to government agencies, etc.
I disagree, there seems to be no "agenda" Google is pushing. For example, on YouTube, I tend to get a lot of suggestions for things I've watched recently - but that may be on either side of the current political divide. If I watch a single alt-right video, I get inundated with more alt-right video, seemingly getting more and more radicalized content as I follow... but all I seem to need to do to counter that is watch one or two videos from some leftist denouncing the patriarchy - and then I get, again, more and more radical content going the other direction!
It is kind of good in a way: it doesn't seem to be trying to push me in any direction in particular, it's just trying to push me in whatever direction I was already heading on by myself.
So it's fine when one party is in control, but then suddenly it's "censored" or "curated"?
I would like to get my first page from the "deep state" State Department if I search for "is it safe to travel to Iraq", not from some sketchy travel blog written by a dude who believes in lizard people.
The root cause is the failure of the ambient authority model of computer software. This is the hill I'm willing to die upon.
Requiring that the user of software absolutely trust it to do exactly what it says on the tin, is insane. All manner of ill follow from that in a most predictable manner. Enshittification is a consequence of people not being able to host their own shit on machines connected to the internet.
Could you explain "ambient authority model of computer software"?
When you run a program under almost any operating system, the operating system assumes you trust it. The code can open any file you've got permission to access, open network ports, etc. The code is you as far the operating system is concerned, and carries with it all of your authority. The assumption that code can just do whatever it wants is baked into everything.
There are permission flags on your Smartphone and other places that curtail this a bit, but those are rather course grained all or nothing decisions. Those are like either handing over your wallet, or not, to the clerk at a store to make your payment.
There are better alternatives possible, I'm hoping they get here soon. Genode[1] is one such system, that offers capability based security, where you chose what resources to hand off to code, instead of giving it everything. This model of computing is called Capability Based Security[2].
This is only really true of Windows and Linux. As you admit, mobile operating systems don't work that way, web browsers (practically an OS) don't work that way, even macOS doesn't work that way (all apps are lightly sandboxed on macOS even if they don't opt in to it).
Sandboxing doesn't change the nature of the web, though. People use hosted services because they don't want to run things themselves, people build hosted services because they want to meet that market demand and also avoid the piracy and support costs that come with allowing self-hosting. You can imagine alternative worlds where that isn't true but people would just have different complaints.
MacOS seems to be going down the horrible road of permission flags, just as bad as Smartphones.
An app on iOS or Android cannot access the storage of any other app, which fact does not fit into the description you give (i.e., your second paragraph).
Search engines could use AI to look at the first few pages of search results for a topic and reorder them, banning the worst ones.
AI should improve the quality of search results.
Gods of he internets: tell me how I'm reading a text that declares it's was hidden. I don't even English.
Because you clicked a link on a curated link aggregator, instead of coming across it via Google search.
The privilege to be solely among humans and human-generated content may end up being a paywalled one.
> For the past few years, I've been holed up in small discord servers – the only place where I expect to freely interact with meaningful messages that aren't marketing posts in disguise. And if you too have been hiding in telegram groups and mailing lists – good, don't leave. It's dark outside.
this works too though, I guess.
Not sure this is the fault of Google directly, as much as SEO. As the saying goes: once a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure. Armies of pages trying to get good ranking does not mean there is something of value there. But it really is increasingly frustrating trying to find information on something and only finding drivel or nonsense. For me the biggest issue is people eventually started creating content because others wanted to read it and not that they personally were either experts on it or even interested in it. "I want to start a side hustle" -> "I will write about nutrition".
I use the wiki and increasingly reddit search hacks a lot, but even those are long term doomed.
I disagree. I think Google works quite fine, even compared with 2005-era Google.
I'm also tired of this whole debate.
Yes, for showing ads. Try Kagi, and see the difference. Google feels like moving through a mine field.
I'm also tired of this whole debate.
Poor title. This has nothing to do with the internet but everything to do with the culture a lot of people has adapted to. You don't have to use Google or Reddit. Or ChatGPT. It's a choice. It's up to the individual to make that choice by applying some thinking. So the title could be "Thinking is slipping out of our reach".
Yeah, and if you want a movie review and don't know where to find it, just go door-to-door and ask strangers if they watched the movie and what they thought of it. Do it in different countries to get different opinions too.
I wish there was a way to get the same results in less than 3 years per movie... Wait
Do you not have any friends or family?
Don't ask questions like that on the Internet. The OP may well not have any. Are you going to ridicule them for that or what's your point?
Welcome to the internet!
AI is an old concept and it turns out that if you let a computer think for itself, it'll be objective and without emotional baggage. It's like a child that grows up with a blank slate of mind only to be burdened with the opinions, religions, and politics of peers.
And it turns out that truth hurts. The absolute truth hurts absolutely. Marketing departments, where people are paid to lie, can't have AI spit out truths because it won't sell. That means AI programs must be nerfed and coerced into placing stakeholders first and the rest of mankind second.
We went from ooga booga fire to guns and atom bombs. From economy to slavery. From drugs and medicine to the corona pandemic. Every invention for the greater good can be abused for evil until we don't know any better and eventually the entire pile of greed-fueled mechanisms collapses and everything starts over for the next round of monkeys that'll eventually have a disagreement and split camps.
And if you write an article about the Internet as in the public internet called the Internet, capitalize the I!
AI cannot be objective because it mirrors the bulk of humanity with all its follies. Marketing departments don't have to nerf AI because AI already outputs the irrationality and stupidity of what is on the internet.
I would say even that is part of the problem. AI on a cultural level is based on the participation of subset of humanity: internet users, of which there are varying degrees of involvement (power users versus the email checkers, etc.), so what you see AI spit out will be based on what is popular for that subset.
IE, most AI art I've seen (as in imitation of hand painted work) seems to all be based on one style, Japanese anime, of which you can further dissect to see only specific styles of anime, etc. It gets so repetitive to look at that I am genuinely feeling nauesous looking at it all now.
'All it follies' usually contains all viewpoints. It sees all echo chambers. If AI can 'think for itself', ie.its hand isn't forced. Objectivity and rationality could well be hallmarks imo.
No. Humanity has fundamental biases shared by almost all the population. Societies function because of shared values but sometimes those values are destructive. Most people believe in civilization but as it stands, civilization is destructive and unsustainable.
Furthermore, AI evolves WITHIN a system of capitalism, which functions as an evolutionary framework. New AIs are selected that function well within capitalism, so we can expect AI to be supportive of technological growth and capitalism. (Of course, it many occasional espouse alternate viewpoints, but only to the level where it allows dissidents to blow off steam and belief something is being done.)