The geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.
We need to rewild the internet
11–20 of 273 posts
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#12Bring back user-curated indexes.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#13Bring back user-curated indexes.
I would take these over ad infested search results any day.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#14There's lots of these projects already, such as https://neocities.org/browse And even people with weird myspace style social networking sites like https://spacehey.com/browse Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff. They're just not mainstream. Probably better that way.
>Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff
I was just about to say this. The new pockets of internet communities are filled with interesting and fun things again. It’s just that a lot of them are for and run by teenagers. As adults, we either feel immediately out of place or just get banned outright.
The ones run by adults are incredibly niche focusing on “non-mainstream” interests.
Discovery is a little harder, yes. And it feels more ephemeral than the static sites of yore. But they’re out there. And they thrive.
And 4chan still exists.
The kids will be alright.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#15Frankly, I'd much rather tend to my real-life garden than any digital metaphor for one. I find it so much more gratifying!
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#16Bring back user-curated indexes.
Makes discovery too easy, and memory holing too hard.
(Conspiratorial/Systems thinking acknowledged.)
https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1778899250857783731
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#17No, we don't. The issue was never and will never be the content, it is with the curation and mobility deeply and systemically taken over by social media and smart phone makers. If Google displays spam and AI generated nonsense, and almost everyone relies on it (including those who use "alternative front-ends"), then how do you expect anyone to find a healthy internet? Even if the "extractive and fragile monoculture"…
That's what the article is addressing.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#18The geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.
Can we find shit now?
I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens.
I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch of results that are about something I don't care about, identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the "-" modifier to my search string only to see it have no effect what-so-ever. Grrr....
I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk without an account and every single time I've tried to create an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so highly in the search results despite doing everything they can to prevent people without accounts from even being able to create accounts, let alone browse those results.
The Web is dead.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#19More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
I was just thinking today that I should just start posting my stuff on a personal site. Photos, blogs, life updates, etc. It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
I don't really share anything I make/do on the internet but I've found posting my photography on a personal site feels pretty good even if I don't expect anyone to ever see it there. Recently I made a /now page and even started blogging infrequently - again, there are likely 0 viewers, but there's some pride in knowing I've staked out a corner of the internet for myself.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#20It reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all over the place. I also wonder what would their point of view be if the internet truly was wilder, like 4chan or everything behind TOR. On one hand, I kind of like the idea of spreading and atomizing the internet to the masses, a bit like it was at the beginning, but at the beginning the people that were part of the internet were a particularly well educated…
> It reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all over the place.
It's nothing like GPT IMO; it's opinionated, for one thing. I think it's just hard to follow because it does draw from a large variety of sources and ideas and doesn't weave them together very smoothly. This is showcased with the horrible modern trend of displaying a large quote of something the article literally just said, or will say next. This practice is always a bad choice, but failure scales with the complexity of the article; the author would have done better to use more headings, which would help them organize the work.
I do completely agree with your assessment of why the earlier internet was... a more rewarding experience. (I don't think "better" is a meaningful term here.) But, the article is explicitly rejecting the idea of returning to the past, and instead building something new that fosters emergent behavior and diversity. The goal is empowerment of agents who have a will to cultivate their ideas.