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Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV.
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.
> real ones not insane made up ones
There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1]
There is a notable vibe shift from when I showed a date my plex setup 5 years ago to now. Awhile back it was ick-inducing, now it's cool again to own your data / not pay for crap.
> Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
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.
There were definitely insane views.
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.
Abandoning is not the answer.
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.
Re: Left behind
My elderly parents can't even go out to eat dinner in the town they've lived in for 60 years because they don't have the phone app to pay the parking meters in town. So they have to drive out of town to a restaurant with a parking lot.
Some may even be oblivious to the fact that the article is from 2004 ;)
Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.
Counterpoint, my father is very IT literate, at least he was. Managed IT for a large government organisation in Europe, taught me code. Has done his best to keep up over the years.
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.
"Abandoning is not the answer."
Why not? Simpler life like back in the 80s.
Or what? The Internet is not required to have a peaceful life.
For those not familiar, this post is by John Walker[0] one of the co-founders of Autodesk who made AutoCAD. He passed away last year[1]
Wow, definitely familiar with his work, though haven't used AutoCAD for quite some time. Pretty sure my fingers still remember some of the text commands.
I hadn’t heard that he died, sad.
> But I fear the cure may be worse than the disease, so much so that I penned a 25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers.
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.
Technically he's not wrong about spam, it's just that the classical view of spam is no longer applicable. When you think of the rise of AI-generated content and SEO-focused design, it is almost impossible to use the internet without being inundated by a deluge of low quality spam. Everywhere we go we're served ads for scam products, have to figure out if someone is an actual person or a bot and so forth.
And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.
There was not even an AI back then, what would he say now?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-da...
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...
> When I'm feeling down I call it “Internet Gated Communities”, when in an optimistic mood, “The Faculty Club”. This may lead to what many observers refer to as “the Balkanisation of the Internet”—a fragmentation of the “goes everywhere, reaches everybody” vision of the global nervous system into disconnected communities. This may not be such a bad thing.
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.
Precisely this, old internet was fun and good because it was a defacto walled garden. A very specific group of people had access to the internet. Want to bring that magic back? recreate that crowd / demographic. It is really that simple. The internet, once truly connecting everyone, was always just going to mirror the physical human world, because why would it not?
Facebook is a walled garden; it requires you to sign up before viewing most content. Quora, Instagram, and Pinterest are the same way.
> 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).
Is that a market where FB traffic is free on otherwise metered connections?
A group of humans (with all kinds represented) blurs out all refined qualities almost by definition.
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 haven't abandoned it at all, but I do try to regulate my internet time.
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.
This is basically where I’m at. It’s mostly become a utility.
I already did. I don't use the Internet anymore.
Hello stranger, nice to see you on the interwebz.
Bots now make most internet traffic. I wonder how many Reddit stories are written by bots. Answered by bots. Interesting to read, don't get me wrong.
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.
The Internet is BGP, IP, and the like.
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.
@dang, it's small, but there's a spelling error in the title. Intenet -> Internet
That's like saying you should abandon the Earth. There's a multitude of ways to be a part of and use The Internet.
Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.
The internet is the new daytime TV.
If for internet we think of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like...then YES.
see also: Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace - https://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299
You don't need to abandon "the Internet". Maybe we could improve on the TCP/IP stack or the ISP model but it's hardly a priority. What we need is to abandon the web and start a divergent platform.
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.
> "As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside the rule of law."
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.
Betteridge's law in full effect
Well I sort of abandoned it now. I visit here and, occasionally, the articles posted here. Also a thin slice of very curated youtube content. And software documentation. And porn. That’s it.
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.
Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners.
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.