I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community.
The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre.
I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit because I linger on them because my brain can't help but stare. I open X and it's all engagement bait from major creators I don't give a damn about. I can switch to the Following tab and it's a lot of political opinions I'd just rather not hear about.
Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I was having old internet fun. And then it just died, I don't know. All the energy left the room.
Hacker News and my very curated Reddit are about all I even use the internet for these days, and Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable.
There was a very popular thread on here the other day basically talking about how these modern algorithms are the product, and how they're actually great and everyone loves them despite denying it... I'm just like is my brain so alien? I actively want and desire these services to be interesting or fun to use and they're just... not. They're boring.
There's nothing I want to see, so I don't use them anymore. It's not a leave Meta/X/etc in a huff like some of my more reactionary friends. It's just I don't even think to open them anymore because there's nothing worth my time.
I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people.
Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd entered the conversation more intentionally?
No, it's probably more that a given thread was one conversation, like a GitHub issue, not a tree of comments with nested branches. Linear forum threads are great like that, posting is like joining a group of people by the vending machine, you're now in the group because you interrupted everyone else when you chimed in with your two cents, but that also means you belong there now.
Oh, and even more relevant: upvotes have zero effect on what post gets seen first! So it's not a popularity contest for the most pithy one-liner that gets upvoted to the top. You can write long-form posts and people will see them and engage on a human level.
I guess you can boil this down to "the absence of an algorithm": nothing has attempted to optimize what to put in front of their eyeballs, and so they engage with your long-form post. But when we talk about "opting out of algorithms", remember it's not just ML/AI algorithms: even Reddit/HN style upvotes are already an algorithm! It's obviously powerful enough that it has quite an effect.
Not sure why modern alternatives to phpBB, like Discourse, feel so impersonal and boring. I rarely feel the urge to check back on a Discourse thread, but that may just be me.
We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation.
Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.
> Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute.
I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.
> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...
There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.
Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].
Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
The road is neither public nor neutral, and that's where the analogy breaks.
This road is owned by a casino, and its signs are scientifically placed so that you take the wrong turn and reach their business. They place guardrails in the specific spot to hide places they don't want you to see. They actively encourage your children to grab a car and drive on it, even at risk of their health, to groom a new generation of casino clients.
Fritz_Haber, his inventions killed millions and his invention (Haber–Bosch process) helps to produce food for billions.
"
It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population.
"
"
Ammonia production is a highly
energy intensive process consuming around
1.8% of global energy output each year (steam
methane reforming accounts for over 80% of the
energy required) and producing as a result about
500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (about 1.8%
of global carbon dioxide emissions)
"
Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.
Oh, indeed. There's been a real public reversal in tolerance for open racism, over the past (see date) almost exactly 25 years.
This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.
Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)
But why not? I want to make the distinction on public and private speech. In the physical world, no one should ever have their private speech scrutinized, that's why there are laws banning covert recording. But in public, speech is very much moderated. We don't allow hate speech and we don't allow harassment of others.
Social media is a public platform. We can't enforce moderation if we can't identify the abuser, they can always just make a new account. So deanonymize social media access, but for private communication? Let's leave that free from prying eyes.
To bring it back to cars, roads are public infrastructure, that's why you need a license. No one cares if you drive licenseless on your private track.
I generally agree with this, but a problem I can't solve is: at what point does a "large group chat" become a "public channel"? If, hypothetically, someone is organizing a thousand people in balaclavas to turn up outside a business they want to intimidate, over Telegram or Signal, is that "private" or "public"?
(also everyone in this thread saying deanonymisation does not on its own solve the problem is correct)
What about what you watch on PornHub? Should that be tied directly to your government ID?
I know that's an easy one to cherry pick but just consider all you use the internet for and how an adversarial governmenft could use some of that info.
Personally I'd love to see all social media corps required to verify ID but leave the rest of the internet alone.
And that's how you get Minecraft letsplays on PornHub.
Interesting question though, because IRL, before the internet, there was also ID verification to access that kind of content. And that was actually worse, because the person checking your ID lived in your city and could see you buying groceries.
I suppose what you would want there is a verification mechanism that proves that you're an adult, but gives absolutely no info on which adult you are.
This - to my understanding - is possible with the technology we have. But whether that will actually be what happens remains to be seen.
I definitely participate in a deanonymized internet social media platforms, especially for local issues, employment or niche hobbies. I also want anonymous internet, but having the choice between the two, for certain things may be great.
I hate to say it, but I do not see how else a nation state could act.
The goal of a state is stability. The free, open, anonymous global internet otoh is a force of change.
The west really liked that, back when it was useful to its geopolitical goals, but now, not only does it have outlived its usefulness, but also, it's suddenly being pointed at the west itself.
At least I do not see how it could be any other way. You cannot simultaneously have high-trust and low-filtering in a space.
I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that this was actually always kinda the case. It was just not enforced by law, but by the fact that computers were weird, expensive and complex.
As the technology matured, these core assumptions started holding true less, until, eventually, we've ended up where we are now.
___
This doesn't necessarily mean that we will have no more anonymous networks though. But they will be less global and less accessible.
Thanks to open weights LLMs, we will have more capabilities within them than we did in the 90s and earlier, but, we will lack the leverage of tidal proportions that social media held.
This, to me, sounds like the compromise to be found with the powers that keep the states we live in running.
I think you are ignoring McLuhan's very very famous point ("the medium is the message") which is that new forms of media do more than just allow us to extend ourselves in new ways; they change our mindset by enabling those new capabilities. It's not so much what we're using the media to communicate as it is what kind of communication that medium encourages. Television had disastrous consequences on what would seem to be unrelated behavior [1], including an increase in general antisocial behavior among children.
Roads are neutral, social networks are not. Twitter is run by white supremacist openly trying to stroke racial violence. Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side before the genocide. And it continues to favor outrage stroking groups.
roads = ip packet network routing, DNS, telecommunications cabling
racist conventions/meetups = social media platforms like Facebook
Therefore, "I hate the internet" is analogous to "I hate the roads" because their perspective is dominated by seeing all the racists meetups that use the roads.
(Yes, people do "hate traffic" but that not's the same as "hating roads". Anyone who has travelled on unpaved dirt roads or gravel trails that make their teeth rattle will appreciate having paved roads. And that appreciation doesn't change even if a lot of KKK racist members also use roads.)
Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:
> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.
But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.
But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.
I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.
This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.
Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.
A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.
Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.
Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.
I wouldn't disagree if in-person service was even comparable, but nowadays, for the banks available to me in the area, opening hours are even worse than they were in the 00s, there are way less branches still opened than there used to, and there's barely any staff, most are just a room with a branded ATM. I wouldn't call it gracefully degrading so much as them keeping minimal service (legal reasons, maybe, I don't know).
> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist.
It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?
" If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..."
It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better.
So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".
How so? I have 1 bank account with a local credit union and I have never logged into any of the online stuff. What do you take issue with, specifically?
The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.
An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible.
I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.
What seems more likely: There are literally zero people working on a web alternative, or all existing alternatives and forks are so unpopular that you have never heard of any of them?
I think the more likely reason is that there's nothing wrong with the web per se, but rather with the way people use it.
Even the argument against the Javascript/CSS/APIs explosion and browser complexity... all that can be "avoided" if you make a JS-less document-centric webpage, for example.
The issue is not that the web is bad for content producers, the issue is that it’s bad for content consumers. Consumers doesn’t do create the content (like js) that they are consuming.
Arguably having numerous decentralized, small and insular sub-networks hostile to change and growth makes them not worth the effort of corporations to co-opt and control.
The biggest problem with the web is that there is only one.
Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it.
Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
You know why? Because Acton and Koum arranged the carrier deals prior to the acquisition. That's what Zuckerberg bought, to enlargen his war chest. It's not his product, it's something he effectively stole
True, but here things went a little differently. Carriers here charged per SMS sent, and had plans with things like "includes 100 messages per month for free!!!" and extra SMS packages sold at a discount compared to the standard price, even years after they had began providing Internet (2G at the time).
People sought cheaper alternatives, and for a while several messaging apps were used, but WhatsApp was so convenient compared to everyone else (using the phone number as username, no password required, was a genius move), that it was already becoming the standard before Facebook came and acquired it.
Carriers noticed their error eventually, and stopped charging for SMS, but by then it was too late. They even tried using the tribunals to block WhatsApp, without success, and technical measures to degrade WhatsApp's protocol and block audio and video calls on it, which also failed legally. So they eventually relented, and now offer packages like "n GB/month plus free WhatsApp!!!" (and in small letters: "audio and video calls not included").
Could you say more about this? I'm not very familiar with the WhatsApp acquisition, or necessarily happy about it, but at first glance I don't see what part would come anywhere close to theft.
The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.
Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.
It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up).
It's perhaps why I loathe it so much.
For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
I think we're reaching a level of maturity in tech that makes us question it for the same reasons it's great.
I think it's healthy for a society to question everything, as long as it doesn't get us stuck, but rather helps us conciously choose our path. We have more options than ever.
I used to be on social media all the time and always want the next shiny thing in tech. And I enjoyed that. But now I can choose to not be on social media and be on a basic iPhone mini. And I'm enjoying that now. All is to reiterate: we can choose our path, and that applies to many verticals.
Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.
I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.
On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.
Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.
I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was.
There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier.
In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.
Is the implication here that it’s cheaper to build a house with lead, asbestos, and radium? I cannot see how those have any causal link to home prices, which seem to be much more heavily influenced by broader socioeconomic factors (area desirability, gentrification, housing supply, etc.)
> There has been a massive disintermediation of information,
How do you figure? Information is gatekept differently, but editorialized harder than ever before.
I also question whether "better optimized supply chains" is in fact a benefit. Optimizing a supply chain has meant just-in-time inventory etc; I'd argue an optimized supply chain is a fragile supply chain.
It will take the thinking persons a while to realize that like the utility curve for wealth, the utility curve for modernity also has decreasing marginal returns:
A basic bit of modernity is very useful, but as we become more modern, it becomes more nuisance, less comfort.
Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.
There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet.
It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people.
Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t.
There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself.
One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope.
We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them.
What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything?
But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.
Yes it's bad and it'll only get worse but how about thinking positive and towards ways out of the crisis? If your problem is with social media specifically, you could join the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed/Lemmy and co.) which while not perfect by any means is a bit more resilient and can be used to continue participating in niche interests while avoiding tribalism, doom, and propaganda.
...Which was a perfectly valid choice in 2005. It was that or Ruby, more or less. Java, ASP, and ColdFusion were a thing for enterprise, otherwise it was Perl CGI, Python, or some crazy custom C++ stuff.
The “good” news is that, if LLMs really do reach AGI, and if we still live under this same economic system that ruined the Internet, there won’t be this decades-long grieving process. It will be a short one, if we’re aware of it at all.
Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself?
I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.
I couldn't finish the book because my Kindle died halfway, but based on the opening chapters I agree with you.
I admire her for the stance she's taking today and the personal sacrifice it's costing her to this day, but I won't deny that her own account sounds like someone who thought "this will be big" and decided to help without thinking "should this be big?" first.
Facebook IS NOT the internet. Meta is NOT the internet. Neither is Google or Tiktok. And everyone who knows tis not these folks, laughs at people who think world starts and ends with social media. Besides, yes, one can live without all this shit, and live well.
I think we're finally realizing that the Internet is just one thing in an infinite universe of things. You, at any point, can go outside and do something else. Or don't go outside and still do something else
You don't have to "hate" the Internet. You can just choose not to participate in it.
Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy.
High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet.
Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable.
Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.
It's becoming an increasingly bad time to be hosting anything on your own, having to worry about whichever 0-day the clankers are going to find and/or exploit within minutes of it being patched. I'm not sure even nginx is safe in all of this. I used to think there was software that should be basically safe but I'm not sure hosting anything (open-source) yourself anymore (i.e. directly participating in the Internet on a personal level) is a good idea.
Having to go through 3rd party services (and rely on them to stay on top of things) to participate is not fun.
Is this actually grounded in real experiences and not headlines? Have real projects / people actually experienced this hyperbolic insta-hack you describe? People are getting DDoSed regularly sure, but no, you don't get hacked the instant you forward a port, in my experience hosting a few public services in my community.
The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections.
That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel).
I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.
I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.
> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.
The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor).
Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me.
But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that.
> Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone?
It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time.
I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is.
Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept.
But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction.
I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones.
And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls.
P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community.
The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre.
I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit because I linger on them because my brain can't help but stare. I open X and it's all engagement bait from major creators I don't give a damn about. I can switch to the Following tab and it's a lot of political opinions I'd just rather not hear about.
Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I was having old internet fun. And then it just died, I don't know. All the energy left the room.
Hacker News and my very curated Reddit are about all I even use the internet for these days, and Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable.
There was a very popular thread on here the other day basically talking about how these modern algorithms are the product, and how they're actually great and everyone loves them despite denying it... I'm just like is my brain so alien? I actively want and desire these services to be interesting or fun to use and they're just... not. They're boring.
There's nothing I want to see, so I don't use them anymore. It's not a leave Meta/X/etc in a huff like some of my more reactionary friends. It's just I don't even think to open them anymore because there's nothing worth my time.
I keep thinking of phpBB.
I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people.
Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd entered the conversation more intentionally?
No, it's probably more that a given thread was one conversation, like a GitHub issue, not a tree of comments with nested branches. Linear forum threads are great like that, posting is like joining a group of people by the vending machine, you're now in the group because you interrupted everyone else when you chimed in with your two cents, but that also means you belong there now.
Oh, and even more relevant: upvotes have zero effect on what post gets seen first! So it's not a popularity contest for the most pithy one-liner that gets upvoted to the top. You can write long-form posts and people will see them and engage on a human level.
I guess you can boil this down to "the absence of an algorithm": nothing has attempted to optimize what to put in front of their eyeballs, and so they engage with your long-form post. But when we talk about "opting out of algorithms", remember it's not just ML/AI algorithms: even Reddit/HN style upvotes are already an algorithm! It's obviously powerful enough that it has quite an effect.
Not sure why modern alternatives to phpBB, like Discourse, feel so impersonal and boring. I rarely feel the urge to check back on a Discourse thread, but that may just be me.
We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation.
Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.
please no more legislation, especially for 'thing i dont like'
Yeah, looking around at society today it's obvious the main problem is the government trying too hard and passing too much legislation.
Won't somebody think of the struggling megacorporations?
> Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute.
I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.
> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...
There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.
Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].
Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
The road is neither public nor neutral, and that's where the analogy breaks.
This road is owned by a casino, and its signs are scientifically placed so that you take the wrong turn and reach their business. They place guardrails in the specific spot to hide places they don't want you to see. They actively encourage your children to grab a car and drive on it, even at risk of their health, to groom a new generation of casino clients.
Fritz_Haber, his inventions killed millions and his invention (Haber–Bosch process) helps to produce food for billions.
" It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
" Ammonia production is a highly energy intensive process consuming around 1.8% of global energy output each year (steam methane reforming accounts for over 80% of the energy required) and producing as a result about 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (about 1.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions) "
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-...
> cars
Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.
Oh, indeed. There's been a real public reversal in tolerance for open racism, over the past (see date) almost exactly 25 years.
This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.
Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)
But why not? I want to make the distinction on public and private speech. In the physical world, no one should ever have their private speech scrutinized, that's why there are laws banning covert recording. But in public, speech is very much moderated. We don't allow hate speech and we don't allow harassment of others.
Social media is a public platform. We can't enforce moderation if we can't identify the abuser, they can always just make a new account. So deanonymize social media access, but for private communication? Let's leave that free from prying eyes.
To bring it back to cars, roads are public infrastructure, that's why you need a license. No one cares if you drive licenseless on your private track.
I generally agree with this, but a problem I can't solve is: at what point does a "large group chat" become a "public channel"? If, hypothetically, someone is organizing a thousand people in balaclavas to turn up outside a business they want to intimidate, over Telegram or Signal, is that "private" or "public"?
(also everyone in this thread saying deanonymisation does not on its own solve the problem is correct)
Not all internet usage would be deemed public.
Social media sure.
What about what you watch on PornHub? Should that be tied directly to your government ID?
I know that's an easy one to cherry pick but just consider all you use the internet for and how an adversarial governmenft could use some of that info.
Personally I'd love to see all social media corps required to verify ID but leave the rest of the internet alone.
And that's how you get Minecraft letsplays on PornHub.
Interesting question though, because IRL, before the internet, there was also ID verification to access that kind of content. And that was actually worse, because the person checking your ID lived in your city and could see you buying groceries.
I suppose what you would want there is a verification mechanism that proves that you're an adult, but gives absolutely no info on which adult you are.
This - to my understanding - is possible with the technology we have. But whether that will actually be what happens remains to be seen.
I definitely participate in a deanonymized internet social media platforms, especially for local issues, employment or niche hobbies. I also want anonymous internet, but having the choice between the two, for certain things may be great.
I hate to say it, but I do not see how else a nation state could act.
The goal of a state is stability. The free, open, anonymous global internet otoh is a force of change.
The west really liked that, back when it was useful to its geopolitical goals, but now, not only does it have outlived its usefulness, but also, it's suddenly being pointed at the west itself.
At least I do not see how it could be any other way. You cannot simultaneously have high-trust and low-filtering in a space.
I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that this was actually always kinda the case. It was just not enforced by law, but by the fact that computers were weird, expensive and complex.
As the technology matured, these core assumptions started holding true less, until, eventually, we've ended up where we are now.
___
This doesn't necessarily mean that we will have no more anonymous networks though. But they will be less global and less accessible.
Thanks to open weights LLMs, we will have more capabilities within them than we did in the 90s and earlier, but, we will lack the leverage of tidal proportions that social media held.
This, to me, sounds like the compromise to be found with the powers that keep the states we live in running.
The over-simplification and over-sharing natures of the current times do seem to fight against balanced positions, unfortunately.
Do you honestly think roads and the internet are similar? I don't think you've really thought that through.
I think you are ignoring McLuhan's very very famous point ("the medium is the message") which is that new forms of media do more than just allow us to extend ourselves in new ways; they change our mindset by enabling those new capabilities. It's not so much what we're using the media to communicate as it is what kind of communication that medium encourages. Television had disastrous consequences on what would seem to be unrelated behavior [1], including an increase in general antisocial behavior among children.
1: https://justinharter.com/my-god-it-was-awfulmy-husband-and-i...
But social media is like a car that drives faster if you’re racist.
Their algorithms promote the wrong posts for the wrong reasons.
Red pill content also gives you a nice speed boost. And xenophobia is very good for engagement.
Roads are neutral, social networks are not. Twitter is run by white supremacist openly trying to stroke racial violence. Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side before the genocide. And it continues to favor outrage stroking groups.
>Roads are neutral, social networks are not.
The gp's analogy maps better this way:
Therefore, "I hate the internet" is analogous to "I hate the roads" because their perspective is dominated by seeing all the racists meetups that use the roads.(Yes, people do "hate traffic" but that not's the same as "hating roads". Anyone who has travelled on unpaved dirt roads or gravel trails that make their teeth rattle will appreciate having paved roads. And that appreciation doesn't change even if a lot of KKK racist members also use roads.)
Agreed but the word is stoke not stroke.
Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:
> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.
But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.
But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.
I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.
This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.
Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.
A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.
Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.
Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.
I wouldn't disagree if in-person service was even comparable, but nowadays, for the banks available to me in the area, opening hours are even worse than they were in the 00s, there are way less branches still opened than there used to, and there's barely any staff, most are just a room with a branded ATM. I wouldn't call it gracefully degrading so much as them keeping minimal service (legal reasons, maybe, I don't know).
> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist.
It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?
People consistenty act like they have no agency.
" If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..."
It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better.
So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".
Are you kind of implying that you can have a bank account without internet access in 2026? Extremely disingenuous
How so? I have 1 bank account with a local credit union and I have never logged into any of the online stuff. What do you take issue with, specifically?
They're inconvenient but physical banks still exist
You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web.
The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.
An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible.
I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.
What seems more likely: There are literally zero people working on a web alternative, or all existing alternatives and forks are so unpopular that you have never heard of any of them?
I think the more likely reason is that there's nothing wrong with the web per se, but rather with the way people use it.
Even the argument against the Javascript/CSS/APIs explosion and browser complexity... all that can be "avoided" if you make a JS-less document-centric webpage, for example.
The issue is not that the web is bad for content producers, the issue is that it’s bad for content consumers. Consumers doesn’t do create the content (like js) that they are consuming.
What's to stop this nu-web going the same way?
Arguably having numerous decentralized, small and insular sub-networks hostile to change and growth makes them not worth the effort of corporations to co-opt and control.
The biggest problem with the web is that there is only one.
>The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.
People are working on this: https://geminiprotocol.net/
And the fediverse and other decentralized protocols have yet to entirely succumb to the rot.
Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it.
Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
You know why? Because Acton and Koum arranged the carrier deals prior to the acquisition. That's what Zuckerberg bought, to enlargen his war chest. It's not his product, it's something he effectively stole
True, but here things went a little differently. Carriers here charged per SMS sent, and had plans with things like "includes 100 messages per month for free!!!" and extra SMS packages sold at a discount compared to the standard price, even years after they had began providing Internet (2G at the time).
People sought cheaper alternatives, and for a while several messaging apps were used, but WhatsApp was so convenient compared to everyone else (using the phone number as username, no password required, was a genius move), that it was already becoming the standard before Facebook came and acquired it.
Carriers noticed their error eventually, and stopped charging for SMS, but by then it was too late. They even tried using the tribunals to block WhatsApp, without success, and technical measures to degrade WhatsApp's protocol and block audio and video calls on it, which also failed legally. So they eventually relented, and now offer packages like "n GB/month plus free WhatsApp!!!" (and in small letters: "audio and video calls not included").
> effectively stole
Could you say more about this? I'm not very familiar with the WhatsApp acquisition, or necessarily happy about it, but at first glance I don't see what part would come anywhere close to theft.
The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.
Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.
It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up).
It's perhaps why I loathe it so much.
For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
Its the not internet, its bad incentives (profit) making once ok platforms shitty. But there are alternatives
Whatsapp - https://signal.org / http://element.io Instagram - https://fotoapp.co/ / https://glass.photo Twitter - https://joinmastodon.org/ Substack - https://tuhat.net Facebook - maybe replace it with a mix of the others
I think we're reaching a level of maturity in tech that makes us question it for the same reasons it's great.
I think it's healthy for a society to question everything, as long as it doesn't get us stuck, but rather helps us conciously choose our path. We have more options than ever.
I used to be on social media all the time and always want the next shiny thing in tech. And I enjoyed that. But now I can choose to not be on social media and be on a basic iPhone mini. And I'm enjoying that now. All is to reiterate: we can choose our path, and that applies to many verticals.
Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.
That internet and almost all the people from it still exists.
I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.
On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.
Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.
I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)
I still use Reddit, but only see niche hobbyist subreddits for things I'm interested in. It's not bad if you use it that way.
Internet and 24x7 connectivity is like humanity collectively having a seizure.
I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was.
There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier.
In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.
Is the implication here that it’s cheaper to build a house with lead, asbestos, and radium? I cannot see how those have any causal link to home prices, which seem to be much more heavily influenced by broader socioeconomic factors (area desirability, gentrification, housing supply, etc.)
> There has been a massive disintermediation of information,
How do you figure? Information is gatekept differently, but editorialized harder than ever before.
I also question whether "better optimized supply chains" is in fact a benefit. Optimizing a supply chain has meant just-in-time inventory etc; I'd argue an optimized supply chain is a fragile supply chain.
It will take the thinking persons a while to realize that like the utility curve for wealth, the utility curve for modernity also has decreasing marginal returns:
A basic bit of modernity is very useful, but as we become more modern, it becomes more nuisance, less comfort.
Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.
You're affected by the choices others make too.
This is the part that I feel the “just turn it off” crowd don’t think enough about.
The algorithms helped give us the single most dysfunctional and corrupt US administration since the 1800s.
Sure. But it didn't used to be as pervasive or hateful.
It did. The Internet has always had awful views on it, because it was used by humanity, who also had awful views on things.
What is a hatred of the Internet seems to be a hatred of humanity or at least its ability to freely express itself.
The solution is to reduce the noise, in much a way someone 100 years ago would only visit clubs or establishments they enjoyed.
So true. I think the problem is not that there's more or less hate. I remember forums and chats with awful stuff.
The problem are the algorithms that put us into buckets and benefit from divisions.
There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet.
It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people.
Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t.
https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_By...
There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself.
One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope.
We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them.
What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything?
But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.
Yes it's bad and it'll only get worse but how about thinking positive and towards ways out of the crisis? If your problem is with social media specifically, you could join the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed/Lemmy and co.) which while not perfect by any means is a bit more resilient and can be used to continue participating in niche interests while avoiding tribalism, doom, and propaganda.
> He was a good coder ...
Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.
Which two files were leaked in 2007.
https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406
>"Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php."
...Which was a perfectly valid choice in 2005. It was that or Ruby, more or less. Java, ASP, and ColdFusion were a thing for enterprise, otherwise it was Perl CGI, Python, or some crazy custom C++ stuff.
Social media is a subset of the web, and the web is a subset of the internet. Don’t lump the entire internet into your hatred of social media.
The “good” news is that, if LLMs really do reach AGI, and if we still live under this same economic system that ruined the Internet, there won’t be this decades-long grieving process. It will be a short one, if we’re aware of it at all.
please end the suffering XD
seconded -- end it here and now :)
Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself?
I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.
I couldn't finish the book because my Kindle died halfway, but based on the opening chapters I agree with you.
I admire her for the stance she's taking today and the personal sacrifice it's costing her to this day, but I won't deny that her own account sounds like someone who thought "this will be big" and decided to help without thinking "should this be big?" first.
They forgot to mention SaaS, and that everything is a subscription now.
Also, automatic updates that are forced on the user.
And of course that the internet is breaking down our democracies.
I'm not a doomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.
You should become a doomer. Apart from the doom and gloom, the company is great and, I dare say, genuine.
Facebook IS NOT the internet. Meta is NOT the internet. Neither is Google or Tiktok. And everyone who knows tis not these folks, laughs at people who think world starts and ends with social media. Besides, yes, one can live without all this shit, and live well.
I think we're finally realizing that the Internet is just one thing in an infinite universe of things. You, at any point, can go outside and do something else. Or don't go outside and still do something else
You don't have to "hate" the Internet. You can just choose not to participate in it.
It is quite sad, isn’t it.
Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy.
High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet.
Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable.
Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.
I think they hate the commercialized Internet, and I do too.
Government control, more. Continually restricting things that go against their viewpoint. Pushing digital ID online despite obvious security risks.
It's becoming an increasingly bad time to be hosting anything on your own, having to worry about whichever 0-day the clankers are going to find and/or exploit within minutes of it being patched. I'm not sure even nginx is safe in all of this. I used to think there was software that should be basically safe but I'm not sure hosting anything (open-source) yourself anymore (i.e. directly participating in the Internet on a personal level) is a good idea.
Having to go through 3rd party services (and rely on them to stay on top of things) to participate is not fun.
Is this actually grounded in real experiences and not headlines? Have real projects / people actually experienced this hyperbolic insta-hack you describe? People are getting DDoSed regularly sure, but no, you don't get hacked the instant you forward a port, in my experience hosting a few public services in my community.
The internet isn’t the web/social media.
People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame.
Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.
The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections.
That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel).
I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.
I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.
> People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on that drive.
We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.
I have to insert a quick joke: "guns don't kill people - people kill people."
Nope, you hate what capitalism has done with it, not the internet itself.
> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.
The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor).
Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me.
But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that.
> Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone?
It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time.
I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is.
Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept.
But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction.
I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones.
And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls.
P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
well said