I'm not a doomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.
I'm a coomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.
I think I hate the internet
151–160 of 167 posts
Re: I think I hate the internet
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you implying the same people that are pessimistic about the internet are also AI hypers or tech entrepreneurs? Because HN isn't monolithic, it's entirely possible -- in fact, likely -- that these are two distinct sets of people who both read HN. I know I'm pessimistic about much of what the hype people like. Edit: or if you meant the grandparent claims not to be a doomer but is pessimistic about something, I don'…
Look at the top comments on ANY article on HN. It's a bunch of people endlessly frustrated they never self actualized, hurling this frustration onto whatever random topic comes about. Constant whining about anything new or any change in the world...because of course everything was better in the past and anything new is worse. But things weren't better back then. These people were just happier in the past, because whe…
I think your comment is dismissive of valid criticism. Sorry, but I'm not convinced by the line of (blanket) argument who goes "the old always complain about the young". It fails to engage with the actual details of the criticism.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that nothing has ever gotten worse or just nothing in the last twenty years?
Some things have objectively gotten worse. Not EVERYTHING as this site would lead you to believe.
"This site" doesn't exist. Individual people do. And you'll see plenty of people all hyped over AI or any new tech here.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why not? I want to make the distinction on public and private speech. In the physical world, no one should ever have their private speech scrutinized, that's why there are laws banning covert recording. But in public, speech is very much moderated. We don't allow hate speech and we don't allow harassment of others. Social media is a public platform. We can't enforce moderation if we can't identify the abuser, the…
Not all internet usage would be deemed public. Social media sure. What about what you watch on PornHub? Should that be tied directly to your government ID? I know that's an easy one to cherry pick but just consider all you use the internet for and how an adversarial governmenft could use some of that info. Personally I'd love to see all social media corps required to verify ID but leave the rest of the internet alone…
PornHub is a great example! It is a public platform and thus posters have to be deanonymized. For one, this would provide traceability to people who revenge post intimate content. It would not block anonymous viewers. While that means minors can still access porn, there will be a level of accountability to the creators of porn. Porn mags were a thing before the internet anyways, and the magazine itself was tied to real identifiable people.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist. It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I…
" If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..." It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better. So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby o…
> So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".
lol This is a wild sentiment to not only have, but to share with others.
Just in shock someone actually believe this. That you're so entitled to other people's stuff that unless they give it to you for free they shouldn't be doing it.
> It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture.
lol What? You're just making things up.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up ). It's perhaps why I loathe it so much. For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through P…
> I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years This sounds great. What magazines do you recommend?
Nuts and Volts
Re: I think I hate the internet
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist. It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I…
>It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic? It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful s…
> It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone
It is entitlement. Nobody forced you to visit a web site with ads. The thing I said about people pretending they have no agency is exactly what you're implying.
Thinking you deserve free stuff because you don't like how it's presented is nothing but entitlement. If someone has to pay for your traffic, it's theft. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to come to terms with this. Maybe it's because everyone wants to believe their altruistic and this challenges it.
What's worse is seeing the same people who claim LLMs are stealing but have no issue with ad blockers. That level of incoherence is nuts to me.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#158Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it. Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
Same - WhatsApp has become mandatory in many nations like India even though I despise it with a passion. I wish the United Nations made a resolution to standardize messaging protocols and develop open-source common messaging libraries with no data given to advertisers.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#159I'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…
We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation. Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customi…
You're idea is well intentioned, but this legislation will be used by the well known platforms to burden the heterogeneous web and kill it with legislation.
What we need is a 2nd renaissance of small discussion forums. You don't need to use X, Facebook, instagram and the rest of the commercial web. Seek alternative, REAL COMMUNITIES.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The reason that algorithmic feeds were introduced was essentially that Zynga and various heavy posters were killing Facebook (but mostly Zynga).
Back near the dawn of time, FB's feed was chronological, and that meant that Every.Single.Farmville.Notification showed up in your feed (and there were a lot of Farmville notifications).
This was actually causing real problems for Facebook, and they introduced an algorithmic feed to fix it. Back then, it was actually relatively simple, and mostly just ranked posts based on how connected you were to the person on Facebook.
Obviously things have changed since then, and algorithmic feeds have had a host of weird impacts, but a ranked feed is not necessarily bad in and of itself.