Is not death a form of change?
The internet isn't dying, it's changing
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
"He's not dying, it's his body just rapidly decomposing and ceasing to support the so called homeostasis, yes, but calling it 'death' is a misnomer". No, sorry, if it looks like a rotten corpse, smells like a rotten corpse...
The MAU of the internet continues to grow. How is it a corpse when it hasn't even reached its peak yet?
A decomposing body will be full of active organisms and life too!
You could have made the same argument about settler colonialism: No, the culture of the indigenous population isn't being destroyed. How can it be dying when there's more and more people living there?
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#53The internet is dying. All hail the new islandnet powered by AI. In all seriousness, the open web is under siege too. Hosting choices dwindled. Cloud providers few. Dark web isn’t the answer. Decentralized isn’t either (the web is already decentralized). We need legislation that protects humans and not corporations . Common carrier. Fair privacy law. Following privacy laws. And ending the piracy of content for the sa…
Humans were made second class netizens when ISPs made self hosting very difficult for individuals. While self-hosting doesn’t solve everything (and introduces its own problems) it does place control of content in the hands of people hosting it. Facebook, reddit, and the rest should be protocols that your server can speak. You can allow/deny access on your terms. But instead we ended up putting our stuff on other peop…
idk, every ISP I've ever had hasn't made it particularly difficult to host anything besides an email server on my residential service.
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
"He's not dying, it's his body just rapidly decomposing and ceasing to support the so called homeostasis, yes, but calling it 'death' is a misnomer". No, sorry, if it looks like a rotten corpse, smells like a rotten corpse...
The MAU of the internet continues to grow. How is it a corpse when it hasn't even reached its peak yet?
[deleted]
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Decentralized isn’t either (the web is already decentralized). Cloudflare. EDIT: To those downvoting, you do realize how much of the internet relies on Cloudflare to connect server and client, right? Cloudflare is a bigger gatekeeper than Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook combined.
To provide an opposing opinion which might help you understand why you're getting downvoted (though I didn't) - the reason this doesn't ring true to me is that none of your source-of-truth is actually hosted _on_ Cloudflared (they're just a proxy - you still control your own content), and the switching costs are minimal (especially if you're brave enough to raw-dog it on the public Internet without a CDN). That disti…
You're both wrong. Cloudflare is breaking the internet by doing interactive verification of users, meaning the web is no longer an open protocol. I'm referring to that "enable javascript" page and "one more step" page. They require you to have Firefox or Chrome, neither of which are acceptable, which they verify with scripts and deep packet inspection. Contrast this to old school communication protocols which I could implement in an hour. I can't implement a Firefox in 100 years. Firefox can't even run on 95% of my machines, it just lags to hell once you open two tabs. And I need as many instances of Firefox as possible across many boxes to prevent being data mined. Cloudflare is the nail in the coffin for the web, they just not have advanced that far yet. Just wait until "something happens" and Cloudflare ups their policing.
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#56The 'open web' I think is genuinely dying, but it has been for a while. Generic/Garbage AI content is just automation and commodification taken to its conclusion, spam and SEO content have been driving the signal to noise ratio down for a long time. There's no genuine defense against it and people are increasingly moving to private spaces be that Discord servers, Telegram groups, decentralized networks etc. that are…
> Unless someone has a really new idea how you can make a defensible, healthy 'public townsquare' ...
I think this change is that idea. The thing about a 'public townsquare' is that it's a square for a _town_, not the whole world. Social media today is trying to be a global square and has shown it doesn't work on multiple levels, so the pendulum's swinging back to human-scale communities and I'm here for it.
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Decentralized isn’t either (the web is already decentralized). Cloudflare. EDIT: To those downvoting, you do realize how much of the internet relies on Cloudflare to connect server and client, right? Cloudflare is a bigger gatekeeper than Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook combined.
To provide an opposing opinion which might help you understand why you're getting downvoted (though I didn't) - the reason this doesn't ring true to me is that none of your source-of-truth is actually hosted _on_ Cloudflared (they're just a proxy - you still control your own content), and the switching costs are minimal (especially if you're brave enough to raw-dog it on the public Internet without a CDN). That disti…
I counter with the fact that hosting something means nothing unless connections can be made. Well, unless hosting in itself is your end goal.
Even here on HN, there are plenty of comments about how someone can't connect to a website because it uses Cloudflare and Cloudflare decided to block them due to a dirty IP address, shady (read: hyper privacy focused) user agent, CAPTCHAs that don't work (see prior factor), or other factors.
Some form of DDOS protection is desired in this day and age, and Cloudflare provides a very convenient service to answer it. Unfortunately, this means the vast majority of the internet is routed through Cloudflare making it a singular point of failure/denial. Aka centralization.
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#58It’s Balkanizing. Every community ends up having a general other chat channel and we’ve made all these small tiny islands for that general chat channel to be in. That’s what we’re losing. The hacker Slack that I’m in the Lisp enthusiasts group, the factorial discord. All those general chats are in their own tiny little islands instead of being in a bigger, wider world. That’s what’s changing. We’ve got these small pr…
I see several converging factors
1) It’s impossible to distinguish between human and AI. Breaking a captcha is a resume building weekend project for any dedicated hacker.
2) The turing test has thoroughly been solved. There’s already a trend of accounts on reddit that reply with helpful but obviously ai generated content to farm reputation.
3) Spam and troll content is still an unsolved problem that requires a dedicated team to solve.
4) Communities themselves can be hostile, especially when the majority adopt black and white thinking.
5) Vetting new accounts is mostly done by verifying email or phone, and doesn’t filter out bad actors.
Some of these problems are solvable. The AI ones seem like a tall hurdle. There are some verification methods like video that AI struggles to replicate but it will soon be intractable to distinguish between human and AI online.
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#59Dead Internet Theory (2021): https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-... TL;DR Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.
Not a falsifiable theory, but I believe it anyway.
Re: The internet isn't dying, it's changing
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are other search engines than google. I really have no problem finding what Im looking for except when I use google.
Genuine question - this isn't some "gotcha" sarcastic comment - but what search engines do you use that are an actual improvement? The only one I know is Marginalia, which I love, but is more of a discovery tool for old sites than for actual relevant information.
For a range of questions - ones which are complex to distill for google, I'm using ChatGPT occasionally.
I recently wanted to understand better the position of the rising and setting sun, and it did an excellent job of explaining where my mental model of the sun was inaccurate.