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

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.

* 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.

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.

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.

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.