The title is all bluster. Nothing wrong with going off to play in your own corner but I don't think it does this movement any good to play-act at some grand conflict.
Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root.
When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering.
I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology
I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was the entire point of the exercise. This is coming from a site that supposedly attracts the target audience for this type of page.
I've read your comment before visiting the site, and it got me wondering -- how bad can it be? Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?
Imagine my surprise, when I opened the site and it looked and felt just like a museum or art exhibit. This was the literal feeling I had -- being at an art gallery, but online.
I guess, these comments tell more about the commenters, than TFA. We should remind ourselves to be more critical to the content we consume, regardless where it comes from.
I think that social networks are not meant to be moderated at scale. We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks': we occupy the same infrastructure but see content filtered to the style that befits us. Most social networks have the notion of friend symmetry, but I think that read-time filtering needn't be like that.
To that end, I made a trivial Chrome extension and an equivalent CRUD backend that just helps me store lists of users I like and dislike. The former are highlighted, and the latter are simply removed from comments.
My personal tool is particularly idiosyncratic but I think information sieving is particularly important these days, so I recommend everyone build something like this for themselves. One thing I've found it particularly helpful with is the usual outrage bait. But I also killfile users who I think particularly misunderstand the comments they respond to, and I also killfile users who express what I think are low-information views.
I designed an extension with a roughly similar aim that filters based upon various phrases and characteristics rather than the poster of the comments themselves. It collapses comments (via automatic triggering of HN's built-in collapsing feature) and adds a "reason" tag to the comment information, so I can choose whether or not to read it anyways. I feel the features with the most positive differences are the capitalization detector (hides all caps or all lowercase) and the character requirement.
Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.
> Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.
An easy way to help with the negativity is to stop leaving bait comments
Reminds me of on interaction a few months ago where I mentioned the left-right spectrum in passing and someone accused me of making HN a worse place, only to call me a "snowflake" in their very next response! As usual, "things shouldn't be so political" is often uttered from a highly-political sense of discomfort. The quintessential example for me was its usage in US anti-desegregation rhetoric in the 1960s, alongside its resurgence in the anti-DEI movement today -- demanding that no one discuss our shared institutions is too often an endorsement of them, rather than an honest effort to focus on something else.
"toward the left" aside, it's always a little frustrating to read the ubiquitous "this place sucks" comments on here and Reddit. I have tons of problems with HN--both petty (markdown when??) and fundamental (SV/PE has metastasized in a discomforting way...)--but I'm still here because I love it, and think it's one of the best communities the internet has to offer.
Specific critiques of specific people or ideas are always welcome, but comments like "everyone here is curmudgeonly" just makes me wonder why they bother to log on in the first place...
I promise you Hacker News was exactly like this back in 2011.
> It has become political (toward the left)
I wonder what you're talking about - your definition of 'political' or 'left'.
Tech and politics are so deeply intrenched. More than just "is DEI evil and there's no such thing as algorithmic bias". Should Apple be restricted from collecting its Apple Tax and locking down its devices?? Should the EU be able to regulate American companies? Should governments demand encryption back doors in devices? Should Australia ban teens from social network? Should there be a Right to Repair for our devices?
Honestly one of my biggest gripes with HN is that it does seem to be a place where pretty regressive social viewpoints seem to flourish.
We've seen the same kinds of discourse arrive here as is common on other social media sites, where too much political discourse is just signaling what tribe you belong to and vilifying anyone outside it.
HN is so depressing, but at the same time so Im addicted to it. It’s like tiktok but for people who enjoy plain text and hacking related stuff. When I first visited HN more than 10 years ago (without account) like, 90% of the content was exciting and you got to learn something. Nowadays it’s about 40-50%, and the rest is crap (including comments). I have been trying to leave HN, let’s see if I can do it in 2026.
particularly ironic comment from an HN/lobsters celebrity account lol
this website isn't turning into Reddit, this website has been a pretentious orange subreddit for well over a decade if not right from the get go and a link to this site's Reddiquette page (just as ignored as on any subreddit!) is evidence TO that effect, and not against it!
the fact that the link petuously denies reality notwithstanding!
I don't get people who use "you say [thing] is getting worse but someone X years ago said the same!" as an argument that somehow proves [thing] isn't getting worse. Things can become progressively worse over long periods of time, it's not an instant change that can only happen once.
Another context where I often see this "argument" is major Windows versions. People rightfully say they want to stay on Windows 10 because 11 is objectively worse in many ways, and someone jumps in to say "you said the same about 7 to 10" as if it's some sort of gotcha. Both complaints can be right, each new version can be worse than the last.
Right now, we have at least one aspect in which HN has become objectively worse in the past years: AI-generated content. It didn't exist a decade ago, so good luck using that "argument" there. Thankfully, its prevalence is still nowhere near as bad as on Reddit (it's impossible to browse that site for 10 minutes without noticing bots posting blatant ChatGPT responses everywhere and getting hundreds of upvotes), but still.
I do feel like 40-50% signal ratio is still good compared to 90%
HN did give me some leads in the start of just cool things to follow and I have been able to make an understanding of what things interest me and what don't due to it. And this has also been the reason I read a lot of comments etc. and content here, maybe more than I should.
I don't know to me, building my own website and forum etc. are possible but they feel complicated and I still can't seem to get eye balls. On Hackernews Comments its easier personally to write something, get feedback on it, (improve?/learn?)
Of course if one wants to optimize for eyeballs, they can probably go for reddit or twitter maxxing or similar because cmon this is exactly the stuff the article is talking about from what I see.
Hackernews does indeed sit on the perfect spot. I feel like if you want more informationally dense topics, perhaps lobsters can be good for ya.
That's true of the US population in general too. Their quality of life has been decreasing due to accelerated globalization (sans the top ~10% of asset holders).
It's useless without describing concrete, practical solutions to those problems.
What do the voters want? Zero taxes, no crime, world peace and infinite benefits.
It's easy to identify things as shitty because the above doesn't describe the world yet and thus it's a banal observation. Implementing real, practical improvements is really hard and requires much more thought and consideration and introduces the possibility of failure. Which is why that part isn't discussed as much.
Why don't people that perpetuate the current system defend its existence? Why is the onus on us to develop a new realm of government when the current system never had to do this?
Your comment is "but you live in society too!"
Society acknowledging the shitty things is the first action in rectifying them.
Constantly? As if it were a psychological compulsion? So often that dang had to make a guideline about it, which no one even attempts to follow?
Two actually - the guideline against being "curmudgeonly" is separate from the guideline against going on a tilt because you get triggered by any website that doesn't look and act as much like plaintext as possible.
And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped across the knuckles and lectured about a rule that doesn't actually exist (no humor allowed)?
Yes, that's negative. That's a culture of performative misanthropy.
You've convinced me, I'm going to stop complaining about corporate slop and the connection between big tech / VCs and the awful political situation in the most advanced country in the world. I will try to glaze Liquid Glass from here on out, say some nice things about the richest man on earth who kept quiet about the fact that he pays people to grind video games for him, and make sure to give David Sacks and Jason Calacanis the benefit of the doubt next time they are whining like babies online for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout.
comment from account created ~4 years before the supposed noticeable decline: Here's a content-free opinion post designed to trigger more of the negative comments I really hate, but I'll keep coming back.
I am not sure, I would say I just joined hackernews for a year so I don't know the whole situation.
but the way I see it, If I assume you are correct, hackernews is in a bit of rough spot because there was this one comment which did some analysis and it feels like hackernews is definitely saturating a bit/(peaked?)
From my personal experience, I feel like we all just use reddit (as the article says) and so we just deal with the annoyances with it and not look for anything else. Or perhaps we join some discord communities.
If people who are within Hackernews are resonating this statement, its in a tough spot because people say such things.
Perhaps, its that Hackernews grew too big for some people and its too small for others. Perhaps one side's currently on reddit not even knowing about it and the other's complaining it on hackernews
And perhaps there's also a middle sweet spot where people aren't complaining but nobody hears them either because they got nothing to complain.
But from the outside what people see are other people complaining about hackernews on hackernews. Same goes for redditors too I guess.
I checked your comment and it says 5 months, I had been assuming you were here for years from the tone but perhaps I was wrong.
I don't know but to me hackernews felt like an information arbitrage of sorts which had these tid-bits of info which made me feel better if I ever were to do somethings like this or gave me confidence in myself in finding the right tool for the right job
If you are tired of hackernews, I would suggest you to open up a fediverse lemmy instance about anything related to hackernews because of the masses perhaps, then you would have less people but more signal since clearly someone would be interested if you create a lemmy instance about similar topics to hackernews but the problem then becomes is if that thing stays idle.
I see your concerns but do you have any suggestions, I see dang and others around here, I am sure if they could do something about it, they probably would?
Once you understand this, you realize maybe it's not that something is wrong with LLMs, crypto, Google, Apple, Windows, Amazon, the US, Rust, not-rust, JavaScript, Israel, copyright & VCs. It's just a negative place.
The real trend is toward personalization on the user’s side of things. Instead of interacting directly with a website, your web-browsing agent will extract the parts of the website you actually care about and present them to you in whatever format, medium and design style you prefer.
Where is that a trend? It really doesn’t work in most cases because often the information and the design are not separable. One needs the other to convey the intended meaning.
Yup. Pretty much everything seems better when you're being nostalgic. And that is singularly due to the human tendency to forget the bad parts and remember only the good ones (it's a solid self care strategy).
I had fond memories of programming my CP/M machine back in the day, built a re-creation and was painfully aware of how limiting a 25 line by 80 character display could be. Nostalgia, remembering the good times, reality some things really sucked too.
Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
Back in the early days of the web and SGML, the focus was reversed, which is to say "web" sites would just publish content and the "user" could apply what ever style they liked to get a presentation that worked for them. This infuriated web site authors who had their own idea about how their web site should look and act on your display. You were the consumer and they presented and if you didn't like it go somewhere else. You can still see vestiges of that with things like "use this font to show things" Etc.
So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
Y'know, the thing which you did is probably the best way to make use out of nostalgia.
Like of course you had your CP/M machine and it had its restrictions but you are seeing them now with the added information of the current stage
There were also things that you liked too and still like and they may be better than somethings in current time
So you can then take things that you like and add it to modern or remove previous restrictions by taking access to modern upgrades.
> So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
I think the problem's more so spiritual. The social contract is sort of falling off in most countries. So there is a nostalgia for the previous social contracts and the things which were with them like the old internet because to be honest the current monopolistic internet does influence with things like lobbying and chrony capitalism to actively break that social contract via corrupt schemes.
People want to do something about it, but speaking as a young guy, we didn't witness the old era so we ourselves are frustrated too but most don't create manifesto's due to it and try to find hobbies or similar things as we try to find the meaning of our life and role in the world
But for the people who have witnessed the old internet, they have that nostalgia to end up to and that's partially why they end up creating a manifesto of sorts themselves.
The reality of the situation to me feels like things are slipping up in multiple areas and others.
Do you really feel that the govt. has best interests for you, the average citizen?
Chances are no, So this is probably why liberterian philosophy is really spreading and the idea of freedom itself.
Heck I joined linux and the journey behind it all because I played a game and it had root level kernel access and I realized that there really was no way to effectively prove that it wasn't gone (it was chinese company [riot] so I wasn't sure if I wanted it)
I ended up looking at linux and then just watched enough videos until I convinced myself to use it one day and just switched. But Most people are really land-locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, even tiny nuances can be enough for some.
using Linux was the reason why I switched from trying to go from finance to computer science. I already knew CS but I loved finance too but In the end I ended up picking CS because I felt like there were chances of making real impact myself which were more unique to me than say chartered accountant.
So my point is, I am not sure if I would even be here if I had even the slightest of nuances. Heck, I am not even much of a gamer but my first distro was nobara linux which focused on gaming because I was worried about gaming or worried about wine or smth. So I had switched to nobara.
Looking now, I say to others oh just use this or that and other things and see it as the most obvious decisions sometimes but by writing this comment, I just wanted to say that change can be scary sometimes.
> Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
I would say let the man have his freedom. I would consider having more choices to be less of a burden than few choices in most occasions. Of course one's mind feels that there is a sweet spot but in longevity I feel like its the evolution of ideas and more ideas means more the competition and we will see more innovation as such.
The site indeed is trying to be an artistic treatise, as opposed to being a clear, easy-to-read manifesto. It touches many themes I have read about many times, so I skimmed most of the content. It came to the expected indie-web conclusions and recommendations.
Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiring manager when your candidacy is considered for another job.
Some people are fine with that, and just enjoy the process of producing content, and seeing it published. They are a minority. Most people come to consume more than to produce, and to get quick feedback.
The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web, like Reddit, or Xitter, or, well, HN. A few dozen people will bookmark it, or subscribe to the RSS feed. Sites that are true works of art and craft, like https://ciechanow.ski/, will get remembered more widely, but true works of art are rare.
It is, definitely, very possible to build a rhizome of small indie sites, along the lines of Web 1.0. But they would also benefit from a thoughtful symbiosis with the "big bad" giants of the modern Web.
You can only be blind for things you cannot notice.
What you cannot notice is what shapes your "noticement" ability.
The best design is the shape of your perception.
The best design is already implemented in your reception of reality.
The quest for "good design" is a game.
On the other hand, your aesthetical culture and the shape of your perception create a system in which elements are more or less "understandable", "readable", "accessible".
The game of design does not have stable rules and is inconsistent among world populations.
"No design" is impossible, the nature of reality is such that entities are embodied. To be embodied is to be rendered in the game of design.
Ideas are not embodied OR their apparent embodiment in the game of design (electrical information ?) does not contain their content for the observer.
Sure, the medium is the message. But if the medium distracts from the message it means they are not aligned well
(side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology.
That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
> (side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to talk about intellectual one-upmanship xD
Also another thing but holy shit, LLM's are sycophantic man, it tries uses big words itself to show how the person has intellectual one-upmanship while cozying you up by saying practical design aphorism.
Like I agree with both of you guys and there's nuance but I am pretty sure that nobody's tryna sound intellectual hopefully.
Sorry for turning this into a rant about LLM's being sycophantic but man I tried today watching big bang and asked it if sheldon and raj were better duo in more common about physics (theorist and astrophysicist) since I was watching a episode where they both have dark matter in common and chatgpt agreed
Then I just felt the sycophancy in my heart so I opened up a new thread and I think I used the same prompt and changed it to sheldon and leonard and it ended up saying yes again.
The problem felt so annoying to me that I ended up looking at a sycophancy index being frustrated of sorts and wrote a lengthy ddg prompt lol to find this https://www.glazebench.com/
We really don't need more yes man's in our lives and honestly I will take up a less intelligent model than a sycophantic one. So I am curious what your guys opinion are on it too as sometimes I use LLM's as a search engines to familiarize myself with things I don't know and I am lately feeling it will just say yes to anything even silly ideas so I would never know what's the truth matter of the reality ykwim?
LLMs say yes to a lot. I often find myself priming it first with "absolute mode" type prompts before dealing with it. And also keeping my own opinions close to my chest
Seriously for my part, LLMs incarns exactly the only type of person that can break my nerves. Far too often I spot an hallucination, some bullshit rambling, sycophancy, or ----hughhhhh----- rethorical elements of language that makes me go mad :(.
examples for ---hughhhhh--- inducing stuff :
"I'll be blunt !"
"Here's the ground truth, no bullshit"
"Bottom line : <UPPER CASE EXPRESSION>"
"No fluff, technical, precise, no bullshit, devoid of unnecessary rethorical shapes, <etc..."
Pragmatically, you can design things to be highly readable for yourself and people that are "like you".
Alignment between the shape and the content is done in a circular fashion : what you see educates you to fabulate about design, once you fabulated enough you begin to say things are bad or well designed.
I often express myself online by writing a bit what goes through my mind, in a joyful and not very attentive manner, and I find it amusing to be barely understandable sometimes (I like the fact you had to use an LLM, lol) because, well, I feel it may bring a certain color to the otherwise often too uniform and immediate/instantaneous world of internet -- So, what I said previously is also mostly what occurs when you let your mind wander;
now, if I rejoin my own person and body, I can agree with you that my culture of good design is about the testimony of the removal of intention, in such a way that I feel content is highly readable, (fictionnaly) devoid of style, and somewhat raw or pure.
But again, at the "philosophical stage" all of this is pure fiction, and with a certain mindset, I am pretty sure I could shift my habits to adapt to what I feel as weird design, ugly, barely readable etc... It would be totally useless and absurd, but I could (given I have no specific perception-related medical conditions) !
We saw the web become a repetition of the same design, and while it IS good design in our "minimalism" addicted brains, I am pretty sure stumbling upon weiiiiird websites makes us great good sometimes, so much that maybe we also start to think about the absurdity of our standards : we arrived to the point in the "lie" where we identify this specific style as "the shape" of our perception, and yes : it become invisible to us, and is good design, but also it is a bit depressing.
My window manager and my emacs/vim/terminal configuration aren't what I call good design. They are highly readable but stratosphere-reaching levels of kitsch (yes ! I WANT to cosplay and feel as if I was writing code for aliens or to fight the matrix at work, and yes that's a bit cringe but at least I am honest with myself).
I don't wish the world and internet to be "more like that" and am ok with the actual state of design. Nevertheless I find that's a bit arbitrary and somewhat boring.
Welcome to the web. It’s this behavior that has led me to pursue more analog endeavors. I still need it to work but when I’m not working, I’m not online.
Beautiful website, great op-ed. I was an internet kid in the 00s, remember it fondly, and still carry many of the values it gave me in the way I particpate online today.
My 2c: the browser as the internet's interface will die with millenials, social media apps as the internet's interface will die with gen z, and the next generation will experience a new kind of mediated virtual connection through LLM-powered apps/OSes/devices that are in their infancy today. That future isn't more personal websites or syndicated social media, but whatever the 'same-but-different' iteration on those concepts is within a new AI paradigm.
Or put another way, what /is/ a website when an LLM is the interface used to reach it? Aim there if you want to be a part of making that future feel the way our internet used to.
Thinking about it. There are some things which can be done to better sooth the private forums.
Like to me especially signing up to each and every forum and then waiting to be accepted by a person feels good but has tons of friction and has some stress attached because you never know how strict the community is as well, it might take a day or two, perhaps this is the reason why we got the dumpster fire of mega internet forums called reddit or twitter of sorts
To me, federation feels better in this context since I can still have a single identity of sorts across multiple forums and you got better idea / ways to filter as well if need be
Another thing I feel about private forums where users have to wait for permission signing up is that I feel like something even as simple as having a cute cat or cute apple LOL or anything relaxing could make it less stressful for people to join. I assume its impact would be few but it would leave a deeper impact on those who do want to join.
I'm quite enthusiastic about my FreshRSS instance. I got to this article/these comments from there, and I've even worked out how to add YouTube subscription feeds, and comics. Just a straightforward, chronological list of the things I've chosen to follow--no ads, no BS. It's quite refreshing, I think it's had a material impact to improve my mental health. Of course, the things that the people I follow create, and the timing of their publications is inherently influenced by algorithms, removing my direct exposure to algorithmically-defined infinite feeds has been significant.
There is freetube which had rss really easy to work with for youtube subscriptions.
One of my biggest issues was that on some occasions, Youtube algorithm would give me home run so I would still frequent Youtube algorithm
Another issue was that smh, youtube's rss feeds couldn't really find the difference between shorts and normal videos.
So if you have a channel which makes lots of short form content, you would see that so much more often.
Like I remember taking a few hours out of my life to fix it but ended up giving up.
Although now thinking about it, I feel like what can be done is seeing all the youtube videos and seeing all the shorts videos from an api or similar I guess and then seeing the difference and having it for an rss or such to pass another rss.
But one can see the pain in the ass for that and I am not sure how that would even work.
I must comment, Hackernews has been the perfect spot between algorithmically generated and completely self feed as it gives me new things.
is there anything like Hackernews but for youtube/video content?
On the newsletter front, I really don't keep up with them and have thought about reducing the number I have showing up every week. I mostly just mass delete a lot of the mail in my personal inbox a couple times a week.
I wouldn't mind getting back to reading more from RSS over aggregators, even though I often appreciate the comments on HN. Aside: it's a shame that so many sites removed comment sections, and any attempt to create a comment extension for any site turns into a cesspool.
Web 1.0 nostalgia always skips the part where nobody read your painstakingly hand‑crafted blog. TikTok didn’t ‘kill’ personal sites, it just finally gave normies hosting, discovery, and an audience without making them learn how to center divs.
The solution offered is pretty weak. I don't think it addresses why the internet took the shape that it did. Publishing without centralized services is too much work for people. And even if you publish, it's not the whole solution. People want distribution with their publication. Centralized services offer ease of publication and ease of distribution. So unless the decentralized internet can offer a better solution to both, this story will play out again and again.
Internet is amazing, it is the best invention of humanity, and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
> and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
In the same way heroin proves itself more useful for everyone year after year.
Year over year, we eat more junk food and get more overweight than the previous year. This demonstrates that junk food and fat are becoming increasingly useful and beneficial.
> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
Each year, I spend more time in my car during my commute (on average) than a year before, which shows that being stuck in traffic is getting more and more useful to me.
It doesnt mean that it getting more and more useful though. The alternatives could be getting worse and worse. Or there just aren't alternatives.
Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.
I chose to give that nice man my wallet instead of taking a bullet, but that doesn’t actually reveal as much about my preferences as you seem to think it does.
You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.
It also could happen because tech companies have optimized their products to maximize the amount of time that people spend on them, often in ways that directly result in a worse user experience (by showing ads instead of the most relevant search results, for example).
The original poster said “more useful”, not “better”, so you’re already arguing something different than what was said. I might spend more time with something less useful because its time efficiency is one of the things that makes it less useful now.
Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.
Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?
You vote with your feet. If you can only follow the world would be exactly as simple as you make it out to be.
If you write things for your own website you would make more of an effort and it would ideally find an audience that enjoys your world view or insights into your topics.
It would be great to lure you into that experience. HN is a terrible dating agency. Gathering down votes here is the opposite of making friends. It is however great for discovering authors like Henry.
He could have spend his time complaining on x how bad it is.
It’s absolutely not the case that people are good enough in general at optimising their time and lives that the things they spend the most time on are the “best” they could have done.
Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.
When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much every freedom that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to drugs, it scares me quite a lot.
I think the arguments you're currently having with people come down to: To what extent do I control what I myself do?
People have a tendency to push blame to external forces rather than take responsibility for their own actions. But personal responsibility cannot be the full story, because (almost) everyone acknowledges that drug addiction is something over which people have starkly reduced control.
So the question remains: What about other things "in the middle" like social media or porn "addiction"? Is it the fault of the person, the external force (which you must admit is consciously organised with the goal in mind of promoting the addictive behaviour, since their bottom line depends on it), or some mixture?
I'm sympathetic to that view, but I'm also aware of a particular way it doesn't explain the world. Often I make local choices that I enjoy while nonetheless regretting them later. Text social networks are the most common way this happens to me. But the other common failure mode was with food.
Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).
This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.
But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.
tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take
0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.
Except social media feeds are designed to addict. A smoker will spend their time smoking instead of not smoking. Does that mean that smoking is good? Why else would they do it, if not smoking was better? It's not that simple. When we blame the users, we forget tech monopolies are spending billions to engineer systems which are stealing our time.
Correct. When I spend more time in the bar and fewer time at work and with my family then this is a sign that the bar is more useful and better for me than work and family.
When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much everything that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to gambling, it scares me quite a lot.
Nah, no bans. People should be free to spend their money and time as they please, but let's not pretend that 2000 calories of M&Ms a day is a healthy diet, either.
Back when I first got on the net I remember spending a lot more time on sites like Bellard's, where "like" means "no style (or would it be transparent style? brutalist style?) but tons of substance."
Yeah really love the density of information, and also love the discussion boards and irc. Back then we gathered together on those boards or in the channels to wait for the new year.
I've read most of this page and am surprised that nobody has (either positively or negatively) mentioned fandom.com, a wiki-farm founded over 20 years ago by one of Wikipedia's founders and another Wikipedia enthusiast. Formerly "Wikicities" then "Wikia", now "Fandom". Hosts about a third of a million communities. Supported by ads at top and side of pages, but logged-in users see very little advertising. Very secure, rarely exploited by malicious bots or other hackers. Numerically dominated by game, TV, and film sites, but many non-entertainment communities as well. The biggest English-languages sites are listed at https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Hub:Big_wikis but numerous other languages are included.
While I agree it’s a good resource, please note there’s quite a few controversies[1] with the site, e.g. “The excessive monetization model of user-generated content has been criticized by several newspaper outlets, such as the British newspaper The Guardian”
The open web needs to be preserved. And bespoke web pages are great. However it isn’t 1998 anymore. The second you expose anything to the public internet it is going to be flooded by malicious bots looking for things to exploit. Unless you are putting up static HTML the learning curve to have a website that runs will continue to run immediately slopes to the point where it is not worth it. Despite OP saying they aren’t invoking nostalgia, they are.
There's no reason _not_ to use static sites for types of sites he's talking about (learning sites for hobbies, blogs, general sharing of information), created with things like Hugo, or even a simple script to generate pages with your own templating. There's nothing to exploit, because it's just HTML.
If you don't feel like keeping a server secure, there are free and easy hosting solutions (Cloudflare pages publishes at a press of a button, for example).
There are a myriad of ways to host small websites without dynamic code that are easy to secure.
You’re also the one that is being a little nostalgic for the past. Even 15 years ago bots would immediately hit sites looking for vulnerabilities in things like phpmyadmin, Wordpress, etc
At the risk of sounding trite; things that haven't hit the mainstream yet are good, until they hit the mainstream. Once there's money to be made (and the giants have finally started to slowly move in your direction) it's done for.
Move on, and find the next thing before it hits mainstream.
The article mentions IndieWeb/POSSE but discoverability remains unsolved. I'm working on a pledge system for local-first projects - a /.well-known/freehold.json that crawlers can verify. Projects that break the pledge get delisted publicly. More at localghost.ai/manifesto
The issue is good, the thought is good. But things happen for reasons. Those reasons are often how systems work. Unless we understand how those complex systems work, we cannot change anything. We end up with cargo cult thinking. You need to understand the function that produces the result.
Why does the internet function the way it does? It is really pretty simple. The internet is primarily characterized by very-high-volume-very-low-value transactions.
How much does it cost to send an email? When I send a real letter, I buy a stamp $0.78. So if I can send an email instead, it will save me a lot of money. You can try to calculate how many email transactions you can provide on one VPS costing $5.00 per month.
Here is a great business opportunity! You sell people email stamps at $0.01 per letter for 10k bytes. Cool. And 1,000,000 people each buy 10 stamps. Wow. That is a lot of money for your $5/month VPS, right?
But how do you get the money? You need to find a way for the one million people to each send you a dime. You cannot do it. If they put a dime in envelope and mail it to you, it will cost them $0.78. Etc.
So you have another idea. Why not let scammers include details of their scam in all emails send and they pay for the email. Oops, I should have used the term "advertisers". Now the people who email pay nothing and the scamm.... oops advertisers pay for the cost.
And you surprisingly find many, many people and corporations from all over the world are eager to exploit, oops target with advertising users. Especially if you can identify what kind of target they are.
IMO things never go back to what they used to be, but they will certainly never stop changing.
I do not for a second believe that the doom-scrolling brain-rot phase will not pass. It will pass like the many before it, the important question is what will replace it..
Effort should not be put into pulling us backwards as that's a fools errand. Instead it should be invested in asserting some control over current trajectories so we get something closer to what we like and further from what we hate during the next cycles.
As far as web is concerned, I would really like to see more decentralized services in every facet of our online usage. Mastodon to me is exactly what I wished things become.
Lovely design - but also shows the inherent problem. Not everyone can create a design like this. Medium and Substack mean that not everyone needs to. When everyone is able to publish, you invariably end up with a lot more crap, and it has to hosted by someone else.
People who were not technical then and are not now made it work with Myspace, Neopets and Geocities. There are a number of free microhosts out there. And the big social media sites also allow you to post a lot more crap.
I think bringing back websites like hawkee etc and providing an easy way to host is the right way forward, but it needs a catalyst (like most things) to become a trend.
From what I can tell, their solution is to personalize the web by creating personal websites. Here are the 5 steps at the end that they list to construct a personal website:
The weakest part is the last one - and it's a big one. Personalsit.es is just a flat single-page directory (of thumbnails, even, not content - so the emphasis is design.) To be part of the conversation, you'd list there and hope someone comes along. Compare with Reddit where you start commenting and you're close-to-an-equal with every other comment.
Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.
Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.
Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that.
Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.
I'm with you. Surprised by the negative reactions here.
A possible piece of the puzzle: I originally read the article on mobile, no issues. Then I opened it on my desktop, and found the design quite jarring. The margins are much too large for my taste, forcing the text into a single narrow column, and the header animations were distracting and disorienting (fortunately the page works perfectly with JavaScript disabled). Perhaps this triggered people?
while i agree with you; I also think that sound ideas are sound regardless. i don't think the negative comments are helpful at all. If people wanted new information, go read nature, science, cell. There's plenty of journals. HN is not for new information, it is for interesting information which allows refactored info imo.
Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, I subjectively feel like comments on Hacker News have become more negative and cynical over the last 10 years. It often seems like the prevailing attitude is "let me try and point to a perceived flaw" or "here is why this is not good enough" rather than being helpful or supportive... We're staying away from the hacker ethos IMO.
It's by no means a perfect article, but the general message seems to be that we're not powerless to build the web we want, and you can host your own website, which is still true.
Whenever I see something I like, I vote it. It feels awkward to me to type a bland show of praise when many other users have already done (and will continue to do) the same*. When I see something I dislike or disagree with, I feel it easier to go into more detail as to why, as I rarely see people sharing similar criticisms.
* As a sidenote, people who just say "This." and "Cool." irk me, and I don't want to elicit the same annoyed reaction in others.
Webmentions in particular are a totally unserious hobbiest technology that will never reach anything like mass adoption. That the author was willing to offer this as any kind of solution really colored my view of the rest of piece.
It’s like suggesting that everyone become HAM radio operators or join Gemini (the protocol).
First 80%: "le web is le better" (sure, ok, it's a statement that u can make)
then it's an instant jump to "Let's write down what we want", which skips so many steps in between. why is the current internet bad, what are the reasons and causes that go along with it?
I'm saying this because, if I add these steps, I always conclude that it's just the past talking to me. The old internet also sucked, but for different reasons. You were yearning for things you take for granted now.
I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.
And while you could make the argument that these forms of media were superior to TikTok, I’d also argue that this is mostly just taste.
While we have closed ecosystems now, they’re much easier to make and share content to than the web of the past. It’s much easier to get distribution and go viral. There’s also a well trodden path to monetization so that if you craft great content people love, you can make a living from it.
Yeah quirky designs, guestbooks, affiliate badges, page counters, all that stuff. I miss it. But only ever a very small fraction of society was going to be able to make and consume that stuff.
This new internet is much more accessible and it occasionally produces diamonds of culture, you just have to know where to look.
So no, I don’t think any amount of decentralized protocols or tooling or any technology really can change this. I think this trend is set and will continue, and I’ve had to learn to be more open minded to how I perceive internet content.
No one is going to make personal websites or change their behavior in a major way.
Look, you can still sign up for free web hosting and make an HTML page and tell your friends. There are still people that do this. But it’s naturally eclipsed by these other methods of much easier content sharing.
The point is the content itself, not the packaging. Just get over the shape of the packaging and enjoy.
I hear clamoring to go back to "the old web" frequently, I never really understood the perspective. The old web still exists. I use it every day. I'm a member of a number of tiny community websites with old web charm, and there are certainly millions more out there, for any random niche or interest. In fact, I almost consider Hacker News to be in that category (though it might be a tad too large these days; you can't really get to know everyone's name).
> But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.
No one is making you do any of these things. If you don't like it... stop? And go use the sites that you do like instead?
> Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.
Not really? There is an absurd amount of high quality content on the Internet to learn from - now more than ever. Yes, there is also poor quality AI slop garbage. But, again, if you don't like it... stop? And go watch the good stuff instead?
I don't get it either. It's all still there. There's just also a lot more.
It always sounds to me like "life was great when it was just me and a few dozen people exactly like me". Now it's got stuff for other people, too, and people seem to resent that.
>> The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires.
Don’t just stop at social networks, this paradigm can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace. Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
A lot to unpack here, but the article fails to tackle the question of distribution. Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. I can assure you that although you can probably figure out how to host videos that nobody sees, you cannot afford to host a popular video.
The author clearly spent a lot of time writing and presenting this, but the facts and conclusions don't seem to warrant the presentation. In particular the (useless, in the narrative) section about antibiotics shows that the author is a deeply unserious person suffering from some pretty severe fallacies. Nobody can have seen a chart of childhood mortality over the 20th century and still believe such things.
This is one of the most difficult articles my eyes could read. The font is so small and my eyes jumped all over the place. The web I want: One that's easy to read.
Pretty successful in terms of the content representing the intent. Which is in part, don't skim, don't scroll, read something if you want to actually read something, or go elsewhere for doom-scrolling and skimming.
I also found half-skimming it worked pretty well, using the images as markers to find what I really wanted.
Also it looks like it works pretty good on mobile, I thought it was small on my laptop too, but hey, thanks the heavens for built-in-browser zoom...
This felt so detached from reality to me that I attempted to check if the author was even old enough to have experienced the old web.
The current state of things is not something that spawned out of nowhere. It's not some random trend. 2008 happened and normal people got online. That is basically the whole story. It is not coming back because people are not going to log off, as a matter of fact it's only going to get worse and worse as people from worse-off countries progressively get online.(Don't take that to mean that I think that's bad)
You can tell people to build personal sites and such, sure, go at it, I'm all for personal expression. Where are they going to find them? Whoops, back to social networks. But that wasn't the case before I hear you say? Yes, because we didn't have colossal enterprises which entire purpose is to vacuum as much data as they could, you see, those didn't make sense before, but they do now since normal people use the internet. Google is dead and the only old-school forums still running generally either have political inclinations that would induce a heart attack to someone that still thinks Brendan Eich resigning over a thousand bucks was good or are established niche places in their communities.
>With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.
My brother in Christ people today are not even trusted to choose their font when messaging their friends, what in the world makes one think that there's a desire to build whole websites? Like who is this for? It's definitely not for laymen, it's not for the majority of web developers, it's not for programmers either, is it for the fraction of designers who are also developers? Does that really make sense?
I agree. I remember when you could read pages without requiring JavaScript enabled, and when enabled it was enabled it wouldn't cause things to constantly float about as you scroll.
One of the biggest reasons you'll never get the "old web" back, is because the culture of the "independent" world wide web morphed into something entirely different from what it was (or more aptly was outright replaced with general "weirdos" rather than model train hobbyists and the like[1]). Ironically all of the people complaining about "capitalism and corporations killing the internet" as they scroll their federated social media feeds and start their "indie" initiatives[2] don't realize that they are part of the problem.
The internet was never good. The feeling that it used to be good is just the creation of a golden age myth, it's just nostalgia. It was exciting because you were young and it was new, but the reality is the internet was almost useless. If you had to log into the internet circa 1997 or even 2002 right now you would have fun for about 2 hours, but it would be the "hey remember this?" kind of fun, then you would realize there was nothing worth doing and go do something else.
> I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.
Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.
(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)
If you disable CSS as well then it works. (This is true of some web pages that allegedly require JavaScripts, while others will not work with JavaScripts disabled whether or not you disable CSS as well.)
Oh great, another one of these dumb posts about how social media is so terrible and RSS, blogs, and HTML are so awesome. I'm getting sick of Hacker News people upvoting stuff like this all the time since it's just the same damn idea presented over and over again. Perhaps this site has grown too large and is attracting the Reddit hive mind crowd.
>JavaScript is more progressively-ehanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though).
I think the author should take a step back. He's complaining about politicized brain rot while engaging in politicized brain rot. He ruined his entire plea in one sentence. I was skimming to see if I could find anything useful in his words before reading, saw this, and closed the page.
I love the design and the underlying message, but I just have to engage on the three examples of "radical monopolies". Most pressingly, I don't think any of the three show an example like that of the automobile, whose ubiquity is mandatory!
1. Describing "proponents [of the industrial revolution]" as some external group seems pretty absurd, and gives the rest of the piece an unsettling Kazinsky vibe. Yes, of course there are a variety of problems in the world related to the textile industry, that's obvious. But blaming "wage theft" and "over consumption" on the technology itself just seems absurd. You can still buy handmade clothes, and due to transportation-enabled specialization, they'd almost definitely be much cheaper and higher quality than they would've been in 1725!
2. Citing a 256 page report on antibiotic resistance[1] with no page number for the vague claim that they were overprescribed to some extent in the 1950s-70s is just plain rude! Regardless, there's no economic system forcing antibiotics on you; if you really wanted to for some reason, you could even save money by refusing them. Rather, the basic realities of human health are what makes them so ubiquitous, in the same way that they make food or hand washing ubiquitous.
3. This summary of the issues with LEO internet satellites is just way, way oversimplified -- the most egregious part being the implication that it is now "impossible to use earth-based sensors... to learn about space"! More fundamentally, equating LEO telecommunications with astrophysics research because they both involve things above our heads is goofy and misleading. Even more fundamentally--and to return to my overall point--there's no attempt to even vaguely gesture at a "radical monopoly" here! It's fair to say that the vast, vast majority of people only interact with LEO satellites when using GPS, which, again, is absolutely not mandatory.
And, finally, the web:
The web is no exception to this pattern. A vision of interoperability, accessibility, and usability, the World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989... But the proliferation of access and ultimate social requirement of access has spawned countless troubles for human society...
I hope it's clear how "technologies come with downsides" is a much more vague, obvious, and less-useful point than the Radical Monopoly thesis.
It’s an industrial, production-minded way of approaching a discipline that has all the hallmarks of being a great craft
I feel like the word "craft" is pretty telling here, as it strongly implies a break from the marketplace. If you don't like "industrial" websites, maybe take up issue with the concept of industry instead?
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary
I love personal websites, as do we all. The idea that more than, say, 5% of the population would be interested in them without radical changes to our work-life schedules is a tad absurd tho, is it not? You really think the millions of people who are happily sharing AI-generated images of Jesus statues made out of plastic bottles on Facebook could be tempted away to learn HTML and build their website from scratch? Overwhelming https://xkcd.com/2501/ vibes from this section!
And, finally, my thesis:
The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons.
No. It can feel awful for one primary reason that dwarfs all others: advertising, which is of course just a wrapper over capitalism. If you want the internet to meaningfully change, no amount of artsy blogs will do the trick: you need to change the economic forces that drive people to contribute non-trivial intellectual products.
I, for one, see a world without advertising within our grasp -- still-capitalist or otherwise. We can do this. The Free and Open internet can exist once again.
The title is all bluster. Nothing wrong with going off to play in your own corner but I don't think it does this movement any good to play-act at some grand conflict.
Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root.
When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering.
I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology
I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was the entire point of the exercise. This is coming from a site that supposedly attracts the target audience for this type of page.
I've read your comment before visiting the site, and it got me wondering -- how bad can it be? Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?
Imagine my surprise, when I opened the site and it looked and felt just like a museum or art exhibit. This was the literal feeling I had -- being at an art gallery, but online.
I guess, these comments tell more about the commenters, than TFA. We should remind ourselves to be more critical to the content we consume, regardless where it comes from.
Yeah, its a really beautiful site.
I think that social networks are not meant to be moderated at scale. We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks': we occupy the same infrastructure but see content filtered to the style that befits us. Most social networks have the notion of friend symmetry, but I think that read-time filtering needn't be like that.
To that end, I made a trivial Chrome extension and an equivalent CRUD backend that just helps me store lists of users I like and dislike. The former are highlighted, and the latter are simply removed from comments.
As an example, the user I'm responding to is someone whose comments I like so I have had them in my highlight list for two months now and not regretted it https://overmod.org/lists/view?pk=ELpqNsanTYP9_wZXNjdF-FcEOc...
My personal tool is particularly idiosyncratic but I think information sieving is particularly important these days, so I recommend everyone build something like this for themselves. One thing I've found it particularly helpful with is the usual outrage bait. But I also killfile users who I think particularly misunderstand the comments they respond to, and I also killfile users who express what I think are low-information views.
I designed an extension with a roughly similar aim that filters based upon various phrases and characteristics rather than the poster of the comments themselves. It collapses comments (via automatic triggering of HN's built-in collapsing feature) and adds a "reason" tag to the comment information, so I can choose whether or not to read it anyways. I feel the features with the most positive differences are the capitalization detector (hides all caps or all lowercase) and the character requirement.
Beware of trapping yourself in a manufactured social bubble of emotional comfortable
If it happens it happens. I can only hope that the result is boredom rather than increased engagement.
Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.
> Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.
An easy way to help with the negativity is to stop leaving bait comments
Reminds me of on interaction a few months ago where I mentioned the left-right spectrum in passing and someone accused me of making HN a worse place, only to call me a "snowflake" in their very next response! As usual, "things shouldn't be so political" is often uttered from a highly-political sense of discomfort. The quintessential example for me was its usage in US anti-desegregation rhetoric in the 1960s, alongside its resurgence in the anti-DEI movement today -- demanding that no one discuss our shared institutions is too often an endorsement of them, rather than an honest effort to focus on something else.
"toward the left" aside, it's always a little frustrating to read the ubiquitous "this place sucks" comments on here and Reddit. I have tons of problems with HN--both petty (markdown when??) and fundamental (SV/PE has metastasized in a discomforting way...)--but I'm still here because I love it, and think it's one of the best communities the internet has to offer.
Specific critiques of specific people or ideas are always welcome, but comments like "everyone here is curmudgeonly" just makes me wonder why they bother to log on in the first place...
Yeah, you're an example of the tedious and unproductive political discourse being referenced.
As long as someone labels any argument as "DEI" they are the good guys and immune from critique or any burden of evidence.
> "things shouldn't be so political"
Skunk Anansi would likely disagree with that.
I promise you Hacker News was exactly like this back in 2011.
> It has become political (toward the left)
I wonder what you're talking about - your definition of 'political' or 'left'.
Tech and politics are so deeply intrenched. More than just "is DEI evil and there's no such thing as algorithmic bias". Should Apple be restricted from collecting its Apple Tax and locking down its devices?? Should the EU be able to regulate American companies? Should governments demand encryption back doors in devices? Should Australia ban teens from social network? Should there be a Right to Repair for our devices?
Honestly one of my biggest gripes with HN is that it does seem to be a place where pretty regressive social viewpoints seem to flourish.
I disagree it's "toward the left" but I would also disagree if you said "toward the right". By that I mean I've observed BOTH extremes happening.
We've seen the same kinds of discourse arrive here as is common on other social media sites, where too much political discourse is just signaling what tribe you belong to and vilifying anyone outside it.
HN is so depressing, but at the same time so Im addicted to it. It’s like tiktok but for people who enjoy plain text and hacking related stuff. When I first visited HN more than 10 years ago (without account) like, 90% of the content was exciting and you got to learn something. Nowadays it’s about 40-50%, and the rest is crap (including comments). I have been trying to leave HN, let’s see if I can do it in 2026.
Haven’t people been saying that since the late 2000’s?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
The actual quote has links, the first of which is to a comment from 2009.
particularly ironic comment from an HN/lobsters celebrity account lol
this website isn't turning into Reddit, this website has been a pretentious orange subreddit for well over a decade if not right from the get go and a link to this site's Reddiquette page (just as ignored as on any subreddit!) is evidence TO that effect, and not against it!
the fact that the link petuously denies reality notwithstanding!
Yes, but why can't both be true?
I don't get people who use "you say [thing] is getting worse but someone X years ago said the same!" as an argument that somehow proves [thing] isn't getting worse. Things can become progressively worse over long periods of time, it's not an instant change that can only happen once.
Another context where I often see this "argument" is major Windows versions. People rightfully say they want to stay on Windows 10 because 11 is objectively worse in many ways, and someone jumps in to say "you said the same about 7 to 10" as if it's some sort of gotcha. Both complaints can be right, each new version can be worse than the last.
Right now, we have at least one aspect in which HN has become objectively worse in the past years: AI-generated content. It didn't exist a decade ago, so good luck using that "argument" there. Thankfully, its prevalence is still nowhere near as bad as on Reddit (it's impossible to browse that site for 10 minutes without noticing bots posting blatant ChatGPT responses everywhere and getting hundreds of upvotes), but still.
I do feel like 40-50% signal ratio is still good compared to 90%
HN did give me some leads in the start of just cool things to follow and I have been able to make an understanding of what things interest me and what don't due to it. And this has also been the reason I read a lot of comments etc. and content here, maybe more than I should.
I don't know to me, building my own website and forum etc. are possible but they feel complicated and I still can't seem to get eye balls. On Hackernews Comments its easier personally to write something, get feedback on it, (improve?/learn?)
Of course if one wants to optimize for eyeballs, they can probably go for reddit or twitter maxxing or similar because cmon this is exactly the stuff the article is talking about from what I see.
Hackernews does indeed sit on the perfect spot. I feel like if you want more informationally dense topics, perhaps lobsters can be good for ya.
https://lobste.rs/
I always forget about lobste.rs because I never comment since I don’t have an account and don’t know anyway of getting an invite.
The site that is really, insufferably toxic is LinkedIn.
Whereabout you plan to move?
That's true of the US population in general too. Their quality of life has been decreasing due to accelerated globalization (sans the top ~10% of asset holders).
Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place.
No it hasn't.
>No it hasn't.
I'm sorry, is it a 5 minute argument, or the full half-hour?
Is it "negative" to identify shitty things as being shitty? I wouldn't necessarily blame the commenters for that.
It's useless without describing concrete, practical solutions to those problems.
What do the voters want? Zero taxes, no crime, world peace and infinite benefits.
It's easy to identify things as shitty because the above doesn't describe the world yet and thus it's a banal observation. Implementing real, practical improvements is really hard and requires much more thought and consideration and introduces the possibility of failure. Which is why that part isn't discussed as much.
Why don't people that perpetuate the current system defend its existence? Why is the onus on us to develop a new realm of government when the current system never had to do this?
Your comment is "but you live in society too!"
Society acknowledging the shitty things is the first action in rectifying them.
Constantly? As if it were a psychological compulsion? So often that dang had to make a guideline about it, which no one even attempts to follow?
Two actually - the guideline against being "curmudgeonly" is separate from the guideline against going on a tilt because you get triggered by any website that doesn't look and act as much like plaintext as possible.
And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped across the knuckles and lectured about a rule that doesn't actually exist (no humor allowed)?
Yes, that's negative. That's a culture of performative misanthropy.
You've convinced me, I'm going to stop complaining about corporate slop and the connection between big tech / VCs and the awful political situation in the most advanced country in the world. I will try to glaze Liquid Glass from here on out, say some nice things about the richest man on earth who kept quiet about the fact that he pays people to grind video games for him, and make sure to give David Sacks and Jason Calacanis the benefit of the doubt next time they are whining like babies online for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout.
I think the OP website is pretty cool by the way.
> he pays people to grind video games for him
The POE shilling might be what pisses me most off about him.
> It has become political (toward the left)
I don’t feel this way at all. Maybe it’s one of the only places you’re actually consuming mixed opinions.
comment from account created ~4 years before the supposed noticeable decline: Here's a content-free opinion post designed to trigger more of the negative comments I really hate, but I'll keep coming back.
The bitter politics can also be right wing and you can spot it when migration topics pop up.
What distinguishes so much of the right wing and left wing politics is that so much of it is angry and zero sum.
I've also been looking for greener pastures. Lobsters has better technical signal/noise but is much more bitter, zero sum, and political.
> It has become political (toward the left)
Clever people tend to be on the political left. Computery people tend to be on the left because they have a higher level of literacy.
That's also why there are no particularly successful right-wing comedians.
I see the same thing. I don't know why I even bother to post here, habit mainly. I know I'm not changing any minds.
I am not sure, I would say I just joined hackernews for a year so I don't know the whole situation.
but the way I see it, If I assume you are correct, hackernews is in a bit of rough spot because there was this one comment which did some analysis and it feels like hackernews is definitely saturating a bit/(peaked?)
From my personal experience, I feel like we all just use reddit (as the article says) and so we just deal with the annoyances with it and not look for anything else. Or perhaps we join some discord communities.
If people who are within Hackernews are resonating this statement, its in a tough spot because people say such things.
Perhaps, its that Hackernews grew too big for some people and its too small for others. Perhaps one side's currently on reddit not even knowing about it and the other's complaining it on hackernews
And perhaps there's also a middle sweet spot where people aren't complaining but nobody hears them either because they got nothing to complain.
But from the outside what people see are other people complaining about hackernews on hackernews. Same goes for redditors too I guess.
I checked your comment and it says 5 months, I had been assuming you were here for years from the tone but perhaps I was wrong.
I don't know but to me hackernews felt like an information arbitrage of sorts which had these tid-bits of info which made me feel better if I ever were to do somethings like this or gave me confidence in myself in finding the right tool for the right job
If you are tired of hackernews, I would suggest you to open up a fediverse lemmy instance about anything related to hackernews because of the masses perhaps, then you would have less people but more signal since clearly someone would be interested if you create a lemmy instance about similar topics to hackernews but the problem then becomes is if that thing stays idle.
I see your concerns but do you have any suggestions, I see dang and others around here, I am sure if they could do something about it, they probably would?
Once you understand this, you realize maybe it's not that something is wrong with LLMs, crypto, Google, Apple, Windows, Amazon, the US, Rust, not-rust, JavaScript, Israel, copyright & VCs. It's just a negative place.
Unique is not a quality hard to achieve
And they are complaining precisely because it has pompous title. If it was "badly designed but personal website" there would be much less of that
It's just a fun title, don't read so much into it
The real trend is toward personalization on the user’s side of things. Instead of interacting directly with a website, your web-browsing agent will extract the parts of the website you actually care about and present them to you in whatever format, medium and design style you prefer.
I miss RSS too
Where is that a trend? It really doesn’t work in most cases because often the information and the design are not separable. One needs the other to convey the intended meaning.
Yup. Pretty much everything seems better when you're being nostalgic. And that is singularly due to the human tendency to forget the bad parts and remember only the good ones (it's a solid self care strategy).
I had fond memories of programming my CP/M machine back in the day, built a re-creation and was painfully aware of how limiting a 25 line by 80 character display could be. Nostalgia, remembering the good times, reality some things really sucked too.
Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
Back in the early days of the web and SGML, the focus was reversed, which is to say "web" sites would just publish content and the "user" could apply what ever style they liked to get a presentation that worked for them. This infuriated web site authors who had their own idea about how their web site should look and act on your display. You were the consumer and they presented and if you didn't like it go somewhere else. You can still see vestiges of that with things like "use this font to show things" Etc.
So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
Y'know, the thing which you did is probably the best way to make use out of nostalgia.
Like of course you had your CP/M machine and it had its restrictions but you are seeing them now with the added information of the current stage
There were also things that you liked too and still like and they may be better than somethings in current time
So you can then take things that you like and add it to modern or remove previous restrictions by taking access to modern upgrades.
> So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
I think the problem's more so spiritual. The social contract is sort of falling off in most countries. So there is a nostalgia for the previous social contracts and the things which were with them like the old internet because to be honest the current monopolistic internet does influence with things like lobbying and chrony capitalism to actively break that social contract via corrupt schemes.
People want to do something about it, but speaking as a young guy, we didn't witness the old era so we ourselves are frustrated too but most don't create manifesto's due to it and try to find hobbies or similar things as we try to find the meaning of our life and role in the world
But for the people who have witnessed the old internet, they have that nostalgia to end up to and that's partially why they end up creating a manifesto of sorts themselves.
The reality of the situation to me feels like things are slipping up in multiple areas and others.
Do you really feel that the govt. has best interests for you, the average citizen?
Chances are no, So this is probably why liberterian philosophy is really spreading and the idea of freedom itself.
Heck I joined linux and the journey behind it all because I played a game and it had root level kernel access and I realized that there really was no way to effectively prove that it wasn't gone (it was chinese company [riot] so I wasn't sure if I wanted it)
I ended up looking at linux and then just watched enough videos until I convinced myself to use it one day and just switched. But Most people are really land-locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, even tiny nuances can be enough for some.
using Linux was the reason why I switched from trying to go from finance to computer science. I already knew CS but I loved finance too but In the end I ended up picking CS because I felt like there were chances of making real impact myself which were more unique to me than say chartered accountant.
So my point is, I am not sure if I would even be here if I had even the slightest of nuances. Heck, I am not even much of a gamer but my first distro was nobara linux which focused on gaming because I was worried about gaming or worried about wine or smth. So I had switched to nobara.
Looking now, I say to others oh just use this or that and other things and see it as the most obvious decisions sometimes but by writing this comment, I just wanted to say that change can be scary sometimes.
> Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
I would say let the man have his freedom. I would consider having more choices to be less of a burden than few choices in most occasions. Of course one's mind feels that there is a sweet spot but in longevity I feel like its the evolution of ideas and more ideas means more the competition and we will see more innovation as such.
The site indeed is trying to be an artistic treatise, as opposed to being a clear, easy-to-read manifesto. It touches many themes I have read about many times, so I skimmed most of the content. It came to the expected indie-web conclusions and recommendations.
Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiring manager when your candidacy is considered for another job.
Some people are fine with that, and just enjoy the process of producing content, and seeing it published. They are a minority. Most people come to consume more than to produce, and to get quick feedback.
The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web, like Reddit, or Xitter, or, well, HN. A few dozen people will bookmark it, or subscribe to the RSS feed. Sites that are true works of art and craft, like https://ciechanow.ski/, will get remembered more widely, but true works of art are rare.
It is, definitely, very possible to build a rhizome of small indie sites, along the lines of Web 1.0. But they would also benefit from a thoughtful symbiosis with the "big bad" giants of the modern Web.
> Sites that are true works of art and craft, like https://ciechanow.ski/, will get remembered more widely, but true works of art are rare.
This is a really nifty website.
The best design is invisible
You can only be blind for things you cannot notice.
What you cannot notice is what shapes your "noticement" ability.
The best design is the shape of your perception.
The best design is already implemented in your reception of reality.
The quest for "good design" is a game.
On the other hand, your aesthetical culture and the shape of your perception create a system in which elements are more or less "understandable", "readable", "accessible".
The game of design does not have stable rules and is inconsistent among world populations.
"No design" is impossible, the nature of reality is such that entities are embodied. To be embodied is to be rendered in the game of design.
Ideas are not embodied OR their apparent embodiment in the game of design (electrical information ?) does not contain their content for the observer.
"No design" is perceptually inintelligible.
Sure, the medium is the message. But if the medium distracts from the message it means they are not aligned well
(side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
> (side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to talk about intellectual one-upmanship xD
Also another thing but holy shit, LLM's are sycophantic man, it tries uses big words itself to show how the person has intellectual one-upmanship while cozying you up by saying practical design aphorism.
Like I agree with both of you guys and there's nuance but I am pretty sure that nobody's tryna sound intellectual hopefully.
Sorry for turning this into a rant about LLM's being sycophantic but man I tried today watching big bang and asked it if sheldon and raj were better duo in more common about physics (theorist and astrophysicist) since I was watching a episode where they both have dark matter in common and chatgpt agreed
Then I just felt the sycophancy in my heart so I opened up a new thread and I think I used the same prompt and changed it to sheldon and leonard and it ended up saying yes again.
The problem felt so annoying to me that I ended up looking at a sycophancy index being frustrated of sorts and wrote a lengthy ddg prompt lol to find this https://www.glazebench.com/
We really don't need more yes man's in our lives and honestly I will take up a less intelligent model than a sycophantic one. So I am curious what your guys opinion are on it too as sometimes I use LLM's as a search engines to familiarize myself with things I don't know and I am lately feeling it will just say yes to anything even silly ideas so I would never know what's the truth matter of the reality ykwim?
LLMs say yes to a lot. I often find myself priming it first with "absolute mode" type prompts before dealing with it. And also keeping my own opinions close to my chest
Seriously for my part, LLMs incarns exactly the only type of person that can break my nerves. Far too often I spot an hallucination, some bullshit rambling, sycophancy, or ----hughhhhh----- rethorical elements of language that makes me go mad :(.
examples for ---hughhhhh--- inducing stuff :
"I'll be blunt !"
"Here's the ground truth, no bullshit"
"Bottom line : <UPPER CASE EXPRESSION>"
"No fluff, technical, precise, no bullshit, devoid of unnecessary rethorical shapes, <etc..."
"Blunt answer: <bold text>"
"<title> : the hard truth"
I am becoming snob ?
Pragmatically, you can design things to be highly readable for yourself and people that are "like you".
Alignment between the shape and the content is done in a circular fashion : what you see educates you to fabulate about design, once you fabulated enough you begin to say things are bad or well designed.
I often express myself online by writing a bit what goes through my mind, in a joyful and not very attentive manner, and I find it amusing to be barely understandable sometimes (I like the fact you had to use an LLM, lol) because, well, I feel it may bring a certain color to the otherwise often too uniform and immediate/instantaneous world of internet -- So, what I said previously is also mostly what occurs when you let your mind wander;
now, if I rejoin my own person and body, I can agree with you that my culture of good design is about the testimony of the removal of intention, in such a way that I feel content is highly readable, (fictionnaly) devoid of style, and somewhat raw or pure.
But again, at the "philosophical stage" all of this is pure fiction, and with a certain mindset, I am pretty sure I could shift my habits to adapt to what I feel as weird design, ugly, barely readable etc... It would be totally useless and absurd, but I could (given I have no specific perception-related medical conditions) !
We saw the web become a repetition of the same design, and while it IS good design in our "minimalism" addicted brains, I am pretty sure stumbling upon weiiiiird websites makes us great good sometimes, so much that maybe we also start to think about the absurdity of our standards : we arrived to the point in the "lie" where we identify this specific style as "the shape" of our perception, and yes : it become invisible to us, and is good design, but also it is a bit depressing.
My window manager and my emacs/vim/terminal configuration aren't what I call good design. They are highly readable but stratosphere-reaching levels of kitsch (yes ! I WANT to cosplay and feel as if I was writing code for aliens or to fight the matrix at work, and yes that's a bit cringe but at least I am honest with myself).
I don't wish the world and internet to be "more like that" and am ok with the actual state of design. Nevertheless I find that's a bit arbitrary and somewhat boring.
unique has gone away. everything must fit into some cookie-cutter pre-formatted mold that everyone has to agree upon OR ELSE!
Gimme 10 minutes, notepad, and 10,000 GIFs, and I'll give you the World [Wide Web] of my youth.
>10,000 GIFs
half of dancing hampsters.
De da dee dee doh!
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20000301193204/http://www.hamste... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampster_Dance
I do miss "memepool" and snarky curation from ye olde web days
https://web.archive.org/web/20050225005911/http://memepool.c...
I'd show you mine but it's currently.. UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Welcome to the web. It’s this behavior that has led me to pursue more analog endeavors. I still need it to work but when I’m not working, I’m not online.
Beautiful website, great op-ed. I was an internet kid in the 00s, remember it fondly, and still carry many of the values it gave me in the way I particpate online today.
My 2c: the browser as the internet's interface will die with millenials, social media apps as the internet's interface will die with gen z, and the next generation will experience a new kind of mediated virtual connection through LLM-powered apps/OSes/devices that are in their infancy today. That future isn't more personal websites or syndicated social media, but whatever the 'same-but-different' iteration on those concepts is within a new AI paradigm.
Or put another way, what /is/ a website when an LLM is the interface used to reach it? Aim there if you want to be a part of making that future feel the way our internet used to.
These are some ways I’ve been using the web in a way that keeps me free.
- Run my own site (not much there yet)
- Use RSS Feeds instead of Reddit
- If a YouTube creator you like has a newsletter, SIGN UP!
- If a short form content creator makes long form content, watch that instead
- Post on forums, instead of their subreddit/Discord (lots of Linux distros have all three)
- Invest in my cozy web communities[1]
Speaking of the last one there, newsletters, RSS feeds and forums are the best way to be in control of the hose of content.
Will these ever be as “big” as the monolithic platforms? No. That’s okay.
1: https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
rss and private forums are the soul of the internet. find your people
Thinking about it. There are some things which can be done to better sooth the private forums.
Like to me especially signing up to each and every forum and then waiting to be accepted by a person feels good but has tons of friction and has some stress attached because you never know how strict the community is as well, it might take a day or two, perhaps this is the reason why we got the dumpster fire of mega internet forums called reddit or twitter of sorts
To me, federation feels better in this context since I can still have a single identity of sorts across multiple forums and you got better idea / ways to filter as well if need be
Another thing I feel about private forums where users have to wait for permission signing up is that I feel like something even as simple as having a cute cat or cute apple LOL or anything relaxing could make it less stressful for people to join. I assume its impact would be few but it would leave a deeper impact on those who do want to join.
I'm quite enthusiastic about my FreshRSS instance. I got to this article/these comments from there, and I've even worked out how to add YouTube subscription feeds, and comics. Just a straightforward, chronological list of the things I've chosen to follow--no ads, no BS. It's quite refreshing, I think it's had a material impact to improve my mental health. Of course, the things that the people I follow create, and the timing of their publications is inherently influenced by algorithms, removing my direct exposure to algorithmically-defined infinite feeds has been significant.
There is freetube which had rss really easy to work with for youtube subscriptions.
One of my biggest issues was that on some occasions, Youtube algorithm would give me home run so I would still frequent Youtube algorithm
Another issue was that smh, youtube's rss feeds couldn't really find the difference between shorts and normal videos.
So if you have a channel which makes lots of short form content, you would see that so much more often.
Like I remember taking a few hours out of my life to fix it but ended up giving up.
Although now thinking about it, I feel like what can be done is seeing all the youtube videos and seeing all the shorts videos from an api or similar I guess and then seeing the difference and having it for an rss or such to pass another rss.
But one can see the pain in the ass for that and I am not sure how that would even work.
I must comment, Hackernews has been the perfect spot between algorithmically generated and completely self feed as it gives me new things.
is there anything like Hackernews but for youtube/video content?
Could you please tell us a bit more? It sounds great
On the newsletter front, I really don't keep up with them and have thought about reducing the number I have showing up every week. I mostly just mass delete a lot of the mail in my personal inbox a couple times a week.
I wouldn't mind getting back to reading more from RSS over aggregators, even though I often appreciate the comments on HN. Aside: it's a shame that so many sites removed comment sections, and any attempt to create a comment extension for any site turns into a cesspool.
Web 1.0 nostalgia always skips the part where nobody read your painstakingly hand‑crafted blog. TikTok didn’t ‘kill’ personal sites, it just finally gave normies hosting, discovery, and an audience without making them learn how to center divs.
...with a price :)
The solution offered is pretty weak. I don't think it addresses why the internet took the shape that it did. Publishing without centralized services is too much work for people. And even if you publish, it's not the whole solution. People want distribution with their publication. Centralized services offer ease of publication and ease of distribution. So unless the decentralized internet can offer a better solution to both, this story will play out again and again.
Internet is amazing, it is the best invention of humanity, and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
> and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
In the same way heroin proves itself more useful for everyone year after year.
Year over year, we eat more junk food and get more overweight than the previous year. This demonstrates that junk food and fat are becoming increasingly useful and beneficial.
> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
Each year, I spend more time in my car during my commute (on average) than a year before, which shows that being stuck in traffic is getting more and more useful to me.
You chose to do it, so it means it was better to you than all other choices. Why would you still do it otherwise?
If your goal is to suffer as much as possible, it does not matter. You are still making choices that lead you to your goal as fast as possible.
It doesnt mean that it getting more and more useful though. The alternatives could be getting worse and worse. Or there just aren't alternatives.
Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.
I chose to give that nice man my wallet instead of taking a bullet, but that doesn’t actually reveal as much about my preferences as you seem to think it does.
You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.
It also could happen because tech companies have optimized their products to maximize the amount of time that people spend on them, often in ways that directly result in a worse user experience (by showing ads instead of the most relevant search results, for example).
It makes no sense what you say. If the experience with A was really worse than with B, people would stay with B.
The original poster said “more useful”, not “better”, so you’re already arguing something different than what was said. I might spend more time with something less useful because its time efficiency is one of the things that makes it less useful now.
Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.
Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?
More useful is one of many ways of being better. What are you talking about?
You vote with your feet. If you can only follow the world would be exactly as simple as you make it out to be.
If you write things for your own website you would make more of an effort and it would ideally find an audience that enjoys your world view or insights into your topics.
It would be great to lure you into that experience. HN is a terrible dating agency. Gathering down votes here is the opposite of making friends. It is however great for discovering authors like Henry.
He could have spend his time complaining on x how bad it is.
It’s absolutely not the case that people are good enough in general at optimising their time and lives that the things they spend the most time on are the “best” they could have done.
Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.
Addiction & Tolerance. You choose to take bigger doses of Heroin more frequently instead of living a healthy life. Your logic seems a bit too simple.
When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much every freedom that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to drugs, it scares me quite a lot.
That’s a massive leap. Recognizing a fact about those things does not equate to being ready to ban those things. The same is true of drugs!
I think the arguments you're currently having with people come down to: To what extent do I control what I myself do?
People have a tendency to push blame to external forces rather than take responsibility for their own actions. But personal responsibility cannot be the full story, because (almost) everyone acknowledges that drug addiction is something over which people have starkly reduced control.
So the question remains: What about other things "in the middle" like social media or porn "addiction"? Is it the fault of the person, the external force (which you must admit is consciously organised with the goal in mind of promoting the addictive behaviour, since their bottom line depends on it), or some mixture?
Network effects and anti-competitive practices defy simple logic. Intermediate logic is unavoidable, I'm afraid.
I'm sympathetic to that view, but I'm also aware of a particular way it doesn't explain the world. Often I make local choices that I enjoy while nonetheless regretting them later. Text social networks are the most common way this happens to me. But the other common failure mode was with food.
Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).
This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.
But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.
tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take
0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.
Except social media feeds are designed to addict. A smoker will spend their time smoking instead of not smoking. Does that mean that smoking is good? Why else would they do it, if not smoking was better? It's not that simple. When we blame the users, we forget tech monopolies are spending billions to engineer systems which are stealing our time.
Correct. When I spend more time in the bar and fewer time at work and with my family then this is a sign that the bar is more useful and better for me than work and family.
Or that B got worse.
Yes, but that still means A is a better choice than B to a greater extent than it was before.
A lot of these arguments are really arguments about an unstated "baseline" that we feel we deserve.
Each year the gambler spends more time, money, and energy on slot machines. Obviously his gambling habit is getting more and more useful to him. /s
When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much everything that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to gambling, it scares me quite a lot.
Nah, no bans. People should be free to spend their money and time as they please, but let's not pretend that 2000 calories of M&Ms a day is a healthy diet, either.
I'll counter propose a website to destroy all websites:
https://bellard.org/
That's all we need. Maybe throw in a few images:
http://www.candlekeep.com/
Seeing bellard.org for the first time just warmed my heart.
Back when I first got on the net I remember spending a lot more time on sites like Bellard's, where "like" means "no style (or would it be transparent style? brutalist style?) but tons of substance."
Yeah really love the density of information, and also love the discussion boards and irc. Back then we gathered together on those boards or in the channels to wait for the new year.
I've read most of this page and am surprised that nobody has (either positively or negatively) mentioned fandom.com, a wiki-farm founded over 20 years ago by one of Wikipedia's founders and another Wikipedia enthusiast. Formerly "Wikicities" then "Wikia", now "Fandom". Hosts about a third of a million communities. Supported by ads at top and side of pages, but logged-in users see very little advertising. Very secure, rarely exploited by malicious bots or other hackers. Numerically dominated by game, TV, and film sites, but many non-entertainment communities as well. The biggest English-languages sites are listed at https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Hub:Big_wikis but numerous other languages are included.
While I agree it’s a good resource, please note there’s quite a few controversies[1] with the site, e.g. “The excessive monetization model of user-generated content has been criticized by several newspaper outlets, such as the British newspaper The Guardian”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)
It's a great hub, and it's quite easy to fall down a rabbithole there!
The open web needs to be preserved. And bespoke web pages are great. However it isn’t 1998 anymore. The second you expose anything to the public internet it is going to be flooded by malicious bots looking for things to exploit. Unless you are putting up static HTML the learning curve to have a website that runs will continue to run immediately slopes to the point where it is not worth it. Despite OP saying they aren’t invoking nostalgia, they are.
There's no reason _not_ to use static sites for types of sites he's talking about (learning sites for hobbies, blogs, general sharing of information), created with things like Hugo, or even a simple script to generate pages with your own templating. There's nothing to exploit, because it's just HTML.
If you don't feel like keeping a server secure, there are free and easy hosting solutions (Cloudflare pages publishes at a press of a button, for example).
There are a myriad of ways to host small websites without dynamic code that are easy to secure.
You’re also the one that is being a little nostalgic for the past. Even 15 years ago bots would immediately hit sites looking for vulnerabilities in things like phpmyadmin, Wordpress, etc
I mean didnt Geocities solve this and many other problems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities
I always thought MySpace was the natural evolution of this. Flame GIFs and all.
Where are my hypermart.net peeps at? Iconoclastic, even in 1995, represent.
At the risk of sounding trite; things that haven't hit the mainstream yet are good, until they hit the mainstream. Once there's money to be made (and the giants have finally started to slowly move in your direction) it's done for.
Move on, and find the next thing before it hits mainstream.
The article mentions IndieWeb/POSSE but discoverability remains unsolved. I'm working on a pledge system for local-first projects - a /.well-known/freehold.json that crawlers can verify. Projects that break the pledge get delisted publicly. More at localghost.ai/manifesto
The issue is good, the thought is good. But things happen for reasons. Those reasons are often how systems work. Unless we understand how those complex systems work, we cannot change anything. We end up with cargo cult thinking. You need to understand the function that produces the result.
Why does the internet function the way it does? It is really pretty simple. The internet is primarily characterized by very-high-volume-very-low-value transactions.
How much does it cost to send an email? When I send a real letter, I buy a stamp $0.78. So if I can send an email instead, it will save me a lot of money. You can try to calculate how many email transactions you can provide on one VPS costing $5.00 per month.
Here is a great business opportunity! You sell people email stamps at $0.01 per letter for 10k bytes. Cool. And 1,000,000 people each buy 10 stamps. Wow. That is a lot of money for your $5/month VPS, right?
But how do you get the money? You need to find a way for the one million people to each send you a dime. You cannot do it. If they put a dime in envelope and mail it to you, it will cost them $0.78. Etc.
So you have another idea. Why not let scammers include details of their scam in all emails send and they pay for the email. Oops, I should have used the term "advertisers". Now the people who email pay nothing and the scamm.... oops advertisers pay for the cost.
And you surprisingly find many, many people and corporations from all over the world are eager to exploit, oops target with advertising users. Especially if you can identify what kind of target they are.
IMO things never go back to what they used to be, but they will certainly never stop changing.
I do not for a second believe that the doom-scrolling brain-rot phase will not pass. It will pass like the many before it, the important question is what will replace it..
Effort should not be put into pulling us backwards as that's a fools errand. Instead it should be invested in asserting some control over current trajectories so we get something closer to what we like and further from what we hate during the next cycles.
As far as web is concerned, I would really like to see more decentralized services in every facet of our online usage. Mastodon to me is exactly what I wished things become.
That’s literally what TFA is about: how to proceed.
Lovely design - but also shows the inherent problem. Not everyone can create a design like this. Medium and Substack mean that not everyone needs to. When everyone is able to publish, you invariably end up with a lot more crap, and it has to hosted by someone else.
People who were not technical then and are not now made it work with Myspace, Neopets and Geocities. There are a number of free microhosts out there. And the big social media sites also allow you to post a lot more crap.
I think bringing back websites like hawkee etc and providing an easy way to host is the right way forward, but it needs a catalyst (like most things) to become a trend.
Text is way too small for me… can’t read it without reader mode being on
From what I can tell, their solution is to personalize the web by creating personal websites. Here are the 5 steps at the end that they list to construct a personal website:
1. Start small
2. Reduce friction to publishing
3. Don't worry about design
4. Use the IndieWeb
5. Join us in sharing what you've made
The weakest part is the last one - and it's a big one. Personalsit.es is just a flat single-page directory (of thumbnails, even, not content - so the emphasis is design.) To be part of the conversation, you'd list there and hope someone comes along. Compare with Reddit where you start commenting and you're close-to-an-equal with every other comment.
Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.
Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.
Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that.
Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.
Bookmarked. Called me to get back to reading and writing again.
A joy to read and loved the artwork on mobile.
Wait, this was a nice article. why are people complaining?
I'm with you. Surprised by the negative reactions here.
A possible piece of the puzzle: I originally read the article on mobile, no issues. Then I opened it on my desktop, and found the design quite jarring. The margins are much too large for my taste, forcing the text into a single narrow column, and the header animations were distracting and disorienting (fortunately the page works perfectly with JavaScript disabled). Perhaps this triggered people?
It says the same few things that always get hive mind upvoted on Hacker News. There is nothing new about this information.
Social media bad, Javascript bad, cars bad, old internet good, RSS good, personal websites good, HTML good.
If you want to farm upvotes on Hacker News, write about these topics. This content is like crack to developers.
while i agree with you; I also think that sound ideas are sound regardless. i don't think the negative comments are helpful at all. If people wanted new information, go read nature, science, cell. There's plenty of journals. HN is not for new information, it is for interesting information which allows refactored info imo.
Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, I subjectively feel like comments on Hacker News have become more negative and cynical over the last 10 years. It often seems like the prevailing attitude is "let me try and point to a perceived flaw" or "here is why this is not good enough" rather than being helpful or supportive... We're staying away from the hacker ethos IMO.
It's by no means a perfect article, but the general message seems to be that we're not powerless to build the web we want, and you can host your own website, which is still true.
Whenever I see something I like, I vote it. It feels awkward to me to type a bland show of praise when many other users have already done (and will continue to do) the same*. When I see something I dislike or disagree with, I feel it easier to go into more detail as to why, as I rarely see people sharing similar criticisms.
* As a sidenote, people who just say "This." and "Cool." irk me, and I don't want to elicit the same annoyed reaction in others.
Webmentions in particular are a totally unserious hobbiest technology that will never reach anything like mass adoption. That the author was willing to offer this as any kind of solution really colored my view of the rest of piece.
It’s like suggesting that everyone become HAM radio operators or join Gemini (the protocol).
I'm inspired to write more in 2026 and publish more of the things I just make for myself.
First 80%: "le web is le better" (sure, ok, it's a statement that u can make)
then it's an instant jump to "Let's write down what we want", which skips so many steps in between. why is the current internet bad, what are the reasons and causes that go along with it?
I'm saying this because, if I add these steps, I always conclude that it's just the past talking to me. The old internet also sucked, but for different reasons. You were yearning for things you take for granted now.
I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.
And while you could make the argument that these forms of media were superior to TikTok, I’d also argue that this is mostly just taste.
While we have closed ecosystems now, they’re much easier to make and share content to than the web of the past. It’s much easier to get distribution and go viral. There’s also a well trodden path to monetization so that if you craft great content people love, you can make a living from it.
Yeah quirky designs, guestbooks, affiliate badges, page counters, all that stuff. I miss it. But only ever a very small fraction of society was going to be able to make and consume that stuff.
This new internet is much more accessible and it occasionally produces diamonds of culture, you just have to know where to look.
So no, I don’t think any amount of decentralized protocols or tooling or any technology really can change this. I think this trend is set and will continue, and I’ve had to learn to be more open minded to how I perceive internet content.
No one is going to make personal websites or change their behavior in a major way.
Look, you can still sign up for free web hosting and make an HTML page and tell your friends. There are still people that do this. But it’s naturally eclipsed by these other methods of much easier content sharing.
The point is the content itself, not the packaging. Just get over the shape of the packaging and enjoy.
> I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.
You can still do that right now. I highly recommend it.
Writer assumes reader is as cranky as writer. Reader loses interest.
I hear clamoring to go back to "the old web" frequently, I never really understood the perspective. The old web still exists. I use it every day. I'm a member of a number of tiny community websites with old web charm, and there are certainly millions more out there, for any random niche or interest. In fact, I almost consider Hacker News to be in that category (though it might be a tad too large these days; you can't really get to know everyone's name).
> But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.
No one is making you do any of these things. If you don't like it... stop? And go use the sites that you do like instead?
> Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.
Not really? There is an absurd amount of high quality content on the Internet to learn from - now more than ever. Yes, there is also poor quality AI slop garbage. But, again, if you don't like it... stop? And go watch the good stuff instead?
I don't get it either. It's all still there. There's just also a lot more.
It always sounds to me like "life was great when it was just me and a few dozen people exactly like me". Now it's got stuff for other people, too, and people seem to resent that.
The "old web" people want to go back to is a web that wasn't mainstream and wasn't complex.
This is why people created alternatives like the gemini protocol - explicitly designed to never grow and never become mainstream.
The only issue I have is that there are only 6 parts to this. I've installed the homepage on my telephone just to be sure.
>> The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires.
Don’t just stop at social networks, this paradigm can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace. Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
A lot to unpack here, but the article fails to tackle the question of distribution. Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. I can assure you that although you can probably figure out how to host videos that nobody sees, you cannot afford to host a popular video.
The author clearly spent a lot of time writing and presenting this, but the facts and conclusions don't seem to warrant the presentation. In particular the (useless, in the narrative) section about antibiotics shows that the author is a deeply unserious person suffering from some pretty severe fallacies. Nobody can have seen a chart of childhood mortality over the 20th century and still believe such things.
This is one of the most difficult articles my eyes could read. The font is so small and my eyes jumped all over the place. The web I want: One that's easy to read.
Firefox's reader mode works on this one!
Not sure if its by design/intent, the font is too small to skim through it
I haven't tried on a laptop but on iOS (iPhone 13 Pro) and iPadOS (iPad Air)
It is quite nice on iPhone, while I agree font is smaller in iPad for readability.
Although, they didn't block zooming/pinching (I hate when they do) therefore I was satisfied with the overall design.
Pretty successful in terms of the content representing the intent. Which is in part, don't skim, don't scroll, read something if you want to actually read something, or go elsewhere for doom-scrolling and skimming.
I also found half-skimming it worked pretty well, using the images as markers to find what I really wanted.
Also it looks like it works pretty good on mobile, I thought it was small on my laptop too, but hey, thanks the heavens for built-in-browser zoom...
Do you feel destroyed tho?
This felt so detached from reality to me that I attempted to check if the author was even old enough to have experienced the old web.
The current state of things is not something that spawned out of nowhere. It's not some random trend. 2008 happened and normal people got online. That is basically the whole story. It is not coming back because people are not going to log off, as a matter of fact it's only going to get worse and worse as people from worse-off countries progressively get online.(Don't take that to mean that I think that's bad)
You can tell people to build personal sites and such, sure, go at it, I'm all for personal expression. Where are they going to find them? Whoops, back to social networks. But that wasn't the case before I hear you say? Yes, because we didn't have colossal enterprises which entire purpose is to vacuum as much data as they could, you see, those didn't make sense before, but they do now since normal people use the internet. Google is dead and the only old-school forums still running generally either have political inclinations that would induce a heart attack to someone that still thinks Brendan Eich resigning over a thousand bucks was good or are established niche places in their communities.
>With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.
My brother in Christ people today are not even trusted to choose their font when messaging their friends, what in the world makes one think that there's a desire to build whole websites? Like who is this for? It's definitely not for laymen, it's not for the majority of web developers, it's not for programmers either, is it for the fraction of designers who are also developers? Does that really make sense?
> it wasn’t always like this.
I agree. I remember when you could read pages without requiring JavaScript enabled, and when enabled it was enabled it wouldn't cause things to constantly float about as you scroll.
One of the biggest reasons you'll never get the "old web" back, is because the culture of the "independent" world wide web morphed into something entirely different from what it was (or more aptly was outright replaced with general "weirdos" rather than model train hobbyists and the like[1]). Ironically all of the people complaining about "capitalism and corporations killing the internet" as they scroll their federated social media feeds and start their "indie" initiatives[2] don't realize that they are part of the problem.
[1] https://www.girr.org/girr/
[2] https://indieweb.org/
The internet was never good. The feeling that it used to be good is just the creation of a golden age myth, it's just nostalgia. It was exciting because you were young and it was new, but the reality is the internet was almost useless. If you had to log into the internet circa 1997 or even 2002 right now you would have fun for about 2 hours, but it would be the "hey remember this?" kind of fun, then you would realize there was nothing worth doing and go do something else.
And it fails to render anything with Javascript disabled.
I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.
> I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.
Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.
(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)
It gets a pass from me. The JS content didn’t annoy me, e.g. it didn’t show me any off topic popups, so I didn’t feel the need to disable JS.
If you disable CSS as well then it works. (This is true of some web pages that allegedly require JavaScripts, while others will not work with JavaScripts disabled whether or not you disable CSS as well.)
Oh great, another one of these dumb posts about how social media is so terrible and RSS, blogs, and HTML are so awesome. I'm getting sick of Hacker News people upvoting stuff like this all the time since it's just the same damn idea presented over and over again. Perhaps this site has grown too large and is attracting the Reddit hive mind crowd.
Delusion. The only thing that will make dead Internet come back alive is another technological leap forward. Big Tech has total control.
>JavaScript is more progressively-ehanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though).
I think the author should take a step back. He's complaining about politicized brain rot while engaging in politicized brain rot. He ruined his entire plea in one sentence. I was skimming to see if I could find anything useful in his words before reading, saw this, and closed the page.
I love the design and the underlying message, but I just have to engage on the three examples of "radical monopolies". Most pressingly, I don't think any of the three show an example like that of the automobile, whose ubiquity is mandatory!
1. Describing "proponents [of the industrial revolution]" as some external group seems pretty absurd, and gives the rest of the piece an unsettling Kazinsky vibe. Yes, of course there are a variety of problems in the world related to the textile industry, that's obvious. But blaming "wage theft" and "over consumption" on the technology itself just seems absurd. You can still buy handmade clothes, and due to transportation-enabled specialization, they'd almost definitely be much cheaper and higher quality than they would've been in 1725!
2. Citing a 256 page report on antibiotic resistance[1] with no page number for the vague claim that they were overprescribed to some extent in the 1950s-70s is just plain rude! Regardless, there's no economic system forcing antibiotics on you; if you really wanted to for some reason, you could even save money by refusing them. Rather, the basic realities of human health are what makes them so ubiquitous, in the same way that they make food or hand washing ubiquitous.
3. This summary of the issues with LEO internet satellites is just way, way oversimplified -- the most egregious part being the implication that it is now "impossible to use earth-based sensors... to learn about space"! More fundamentally, equating LEO telecommunications with astrophysics research because they both involve things above our heads is goofy and misleading. Even more fundamentally--and to return to my overall point--there's no attempt to even vaguely gesture at a "radical monopoly" here! It's fair to say that the vast, vast majority of people only interact with LEO satellites when using GPS, which, again, is absolutely not mandatory.
And, finally, the web:
I hope it's clear how "technologies come with downsides" is a much more vague, obvious, and less-useful point than the Radical Monopoly thesis. I feel like the word "craft" is pretty telling here, as it strongly implies a break from the marketplace. If you don't like "industrial" websites, maybe take up issue with the concept of industry instead? I love personal websites, as do we all. The idea that more than, say, 5% of the population would be interested in them without radical changes to our work-life schedules is a tad absurd tho, is it not? You really think the millions of people who are happily sharing AI-generated images of Jesus statues made out of plastic bottles on Facebook could be tempted away to learn HTML and build their website from scratch? Overwhelming https://xkcd.com/2501/ vibes from this section!And, finally, my thesis:
No. It can feel awful for one primary reason that dwarfs all others: advertising, which is of course just a wrapper over capitalism. If you want the internet to meaningfully change, no amount of artsy blogs will do the trick: you need to change the economic forces that drive people to contribute non-trivial intellectual products.I, for one, see a world without advertising within our grasp -- still-capitalist or otherwise. We can do this. The Free and Open internet can exist once again.
[1] https://iris.who.int/server/api/core/bitstreams/a04b4607-044...