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I think I hate the internet

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Re: I think I hate the internet

#131

Post by packetlost »

medstrom wrote: post #105
donatj wrote: post #83

I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community. The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre. I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit be…

I keep thinking of phpBB. I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people. Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd ente…

I was very happy to discover someone is building a phpBB-clone in ATProto (the thing that powers BlueSky): https://atmobb.app/

There's some hope that a small facet of forum culture can come back...

Re: I think I hate the internet

#132

Post by karmakaze »

Seems like a random rant to me.

> What is the internet now to me? In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.

It's so much more annoying to do any of these things without/before internet. I don't do half of the other things in the rest of that paragraph. Like for phones I just get a used CAD$400 Android phone with good audio output.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#133

Post by packetlost »

pmdr wrote: post #96
donatj wrote: post #83

I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community. The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre. I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit be…

> Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.

Bluesky has gotten considerably more tolerable by... adding an algorithmic feed ("For You"). It's developed by just some guy with the server running in his living room or something. I know people in this thread are down on algorithms, but a non-attention hacking algorithm is super, super nice because it helps cut out crap and show content in the niches I care about.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#134

Post by beej71 »

roenxi wrote: post #6

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to... There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can. Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by…

I don't understand. Your comment seems to imply that the Internet has no effect on the ability of groups to organize?

Re: I think I hate the internet

#135

Post by NoGravitas »

boesboes wrote: post #20
michael0church wrote: post #9

The “good” news is that, if LLMs really do reach AGI, and if we still live under this same economic system that ruined the Internet, there won’t be this decades-long grieving process. It will be a short one, if we’re aware of it at all.

please end the suffering XD

I yearn for the urn.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#136

Post by fsflover »

seanclayton wrote: post #74
willtemperley wrote: post #72

You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web. The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this. An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible. I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.

What seems more likely: There are literally zero people working on a web alternative, or all existing alternatives and forks are so unpopular that you have never heard of any of them?

Indeed, the Invisible Internet Project exists and works fine, https://geti2p.net

Re: I think I hate the internet

#137

Post by beej71 »

I still find the old Internet in a few ways. Mastodon, Signal group chats, quiet local (geographically) or private Discord servers, RSS, email, XMPP or IRC if I feel like it. Definitely use uBO. I sometimes even surf Neocities.

Stay away from "algorithmic" social media and all 24-hour news—if something important happens, it'll show up on the HN RSS feed.

If you want to stay politically active and informed, subscribe to political activist newsletters and write your congresspeople.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#138

Post by tdeck »

medstrom wrote: post #105
donatj wrote: post #83

I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community. The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre. I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit be…

I keep thinking of phpBB. I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people. Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd ente…

More of a vBulletin man myself, but I get what you mean. There were so many small, autonomous little niche communities and people took their time to learn how each one worked. Forums had their problems but I do think the time before upvotes/down votes was a very different dynamic, where not every judgment felt like it was being transmitted.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#139

Post by Gareth321 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #44
Gareth321 wrote: post #22

I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store. On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest…

I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)

I'm close to blocking it at the router. That might break the habit.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#140

Post by utopiah »

59nadir wrote: post #14
utopiah wrote: post #10

I think they hate the commercialized Internet, and I do too.

It's becoming an increasingly bad time to be hosting anything on your own, having to worry about whichever 0-day the clankers are going to find and/or exploit within minutes of it being patched. I'm not sure even nginx is safe in all of this. I used to think there was software that should be basically safe but I'm not sure hosting anything (open-source) yourself anymore (i.e. directly participating in the Internet on…

Been doing it for years, decades even now, and IMHO it's like visiting a touristic place or any place public with strangers really : you have to keep your wits about you otherwise you will get mugged.

If you setup your Website you will inexorably attract spammers at least. Yes they are using new tools and new techniques... but so can you. There are plenty of tools to keep track of abusive usage, individually or collectively, and ways to both backup your data or containerize your services. As long as you keep up then I don't feel it's getting more challenging.

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