[flagged]
We need to rewild the internet
31–40 of 273 posts
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#32Smartphones enabled internet addiction to reach the masses. Previously it only engaged those who had the patience and wits to maintain a PC and sit down at a desk to read and write on the internet. As long as the professional and volunteer skills to invest in a "wild" project are transferrable to that of a centralized platform, creators will gravitate to the side that has more users and can pay them more and consumers will gravitate toward the one that is easier to access and worth the according cost of entry (oftentimes free).
This isn't a unique phenomenon. Look at video games. When any subculture/industry goes mainstream you don't see it preserving the thriving ecosystem of before and just adding on a synergistic mainstream bloc. Rather, the mainstream bloc cannibalizes and leaves dwindling ghost towns. That's the price of attention competition and opportunity cost.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#33More 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 remember when they were on the agenda path to eliminate gifs. You'd see posts on hacker news written by Giffy, a company seeking to make its existence justified by getting rid of gifs, all over hacker news.
When I would say: This is a terrible idea, they just want to control and own the content. a gif you own, a gif you can download and so what ever you wanted, etc. boy was I down voted into oblivion.
One of the reasons for this is many posts aren't on hacker news by accident, they are hidden advertisements. Chances are, you got the karma to downvote people. Just starting off at -1 is a disadvantage.
You can try it too: just disagree with what an article says in the comments, 99% of the time you will be downvoted. Agree and you get free karma. This is not always the case, but generally is.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#34More 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.
That stuff is still around, it's just on Discord and VRChat now.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#35I am running my personal web crawler since September of 2022. I gather internet domains and assign them meta information. There are various sources of my data. I assign "personal" tag to any personal website. I assign "self-host" tag to any self-host program I find.
I have less than 3k of personal websites.
Data are in the repository.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
I still rely on google for many things, or kagi. It is interesting to me, what my crawler finds next. It is always a surprise to see new blog, or forgotten forum of sorts.
This is how I discover real new content on the Internet. Certainly not by google which can find only BBC, or techcrunch.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#36[flagged]
Great meta-comment: The attention economy has changed a lot over the last 2 decades.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#37It 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…
> if the internet truly was wilder, like 4chan
I don't think they were referring to moderation in itself. 4chan isn't a decentralized platform like the Fediverse (AFAIK), so, if it was theoretically large enough (like, TikTok-sized), it would be just as big a problem.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#38There's plenty of great fascinating wild Internet out there. The problem is finding it, since it typically struggles to be heard in a sea of well funded SEO-optimized garbage. It's a discovery problem, above all.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#39Re: We need to rewild the internet
#40Self hosting is definitely the way toward rewilding the internet.
If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform, the forests will thrive again.