Ask HN: Has the Internet Become a Burden?
The internet nowadays is boring. Everything on the internet is monetized. From your clicks to selling you subscription. Everyone is trying to make a buck. Going on the internet is stressful and full of anxiety due to social media. People talk about detoxing from the internet. Has the internet become a burden to society? Were we happier when the internet was simpler?
40 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 97.2 ms ] threadI can confirm that we were happier when the internet was simpler, and more fragmented.
Who is "we?" Speak for yourself.
Obvious that was a delusion.
What do you feel one cannot build today but could in the past?
That is categorically false.
Wikipedia is the greatest collection of knowledge ever assembled. It puts the library of Alexandria to shame. And all of it was created by people who did not make a single buck from their efforts, nor were they trying to.
The same can be said for the highly skilled professionals who devote their free time to building amazing Open Source technologies, for the contributors on sites like Stack Exchange, for the creative geniuses that write certain comments on Reddit, and for millions of others who tirelessly work to make the Internet what it is.
Of course, if you try to view the Web through the narrow lens of Silicon Valley business, you are bound to be disappointed. Join a few subreddits that aren't constantly on the front page. Get an IRC and/or Matrix account, and hang out in the channels. You may find that the Internet you are feeling nostalgic for has never disappeared in the first place.
I’m not trying to counter anything you have stated - in fact, I agree with the majority of it. I just wanted to share this: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18644158/north-face-wikip...
But they are not the ones who "built Wikipedia". The ones that did never made a dime. If someone sticks an advertising poster to the front door of a human rights advocacy group's headquarters during the night, and the poster is removed the next morning, the fact that it hung there for a few hours says absolutely nothing about the organization or the people who work for it.
I see articles like the one you linked to, which try to extract sensationalist value out of such non-events, as part of a deliberate smear campaign against Wikipedia. The idea is to create the impression that Wikipedia has been infiltrated by political and commercial interests, which is absolute hogwash. This smear campaign has been going on for many, many years, and I've just learned to ignore such claims entirely, since I've convinced myself long ago that they are without any merit.
Yes, there were monetised sites and products during that period. But it didn’t feel quite as hyper monetisation & growth focused as it is today.
It was certainly before the social media giants of today conquered online communities & blogs.
A perhaps overlooked aspect of this “post-pandemic” moment we’re arguably in right now is how we can RE-assess our relationship with technology.
Recent artistic AI phenomena have made me feel this quite strongly for some reason, where it feels inevitable that mainstream internet is just gonna be full of bots posting “art” made by other bots. Makes me think of unplugging back to email/phone/text/Fax and maybe a well curated forum or two if they’re still around and spending time in the real world.
The other annoyance is trying to read an article and having a couple paragraphs of text broken up by an ad, then another two paragraphs of text and another ad and another and another. Then if you dare use an ad blocker these site whine at you about being ad supported.
I do enjoy the minimal nature of Reddit, HackerNews and the like. Also, there are plenty of subscription web apps and services that make our lives easier that we take for granted.
But ads and monetization are 100% why the much of the internet feels like hot garbage these days.
It seems everything or everyone on the internet is racing to be reduced into single bits of actions or attention.
A good example from the other day. I made the mistake of looking at twitter trends. Apparently “HES UGLY” and some other thing were trending because a famous YouTuber did a face reveal. I checked it out and he was just an average looking dude at worst. However, the tweets people made ranged from pure reactions of “distain” at best and legitimate racism and hatred at worst.
Seems things are operating on a “click -> run” basis and it is very tiring.
There are of course amazing things to come from the internet, good things everyday… but in general I just can’t say I’m a fan of the general direction.
I always hate voicing this opinion because it just seems like someone on their high horse but I just don’t see any other way to look at it. Interactions are getting less nuanced, content is getting byte-sized and things seem to be getting a mile wide but an inch deep.
A lot of things on here are boring just because nowadays they just work well, not a lot of stuff to improve.
Also things got boring because the common folk got online, most people are boring, where in the old days one could have a conversation with interesting professors or other people good at their job, nowadays the internet is a glorified "come see me how wonderful I am and how pretty my life is" egoistic echo chamber of totally uninteresting people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nowadays everyone is a content creator, the quality and originality of the content is not important. Contrarian ideas, not following trends is a sure way to loose views, subscribers.
The hackers are holed up in their information bubbles and have no impact on the internet culture and the internet as a whole.