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Ask HN: Is the internet as we knew it, dead?

30 points by behnamoh ↗ HN
Just looking at the major websites, I can't help but think that they're increasingly getting locked down and heavily monetized. Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest, Tiktok, etc.

What went wrong? Why did we go from having a world-wide web that used to be freely accessible to everyone, to a set of silos that only serve money generating customers?

How did we go from a proliferation of ideas in the form of various websites and forums to centralized gated websites (e.g., Reddit)?

33 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] thread
fsniper
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
jmclnx
Yes, died over 20 years ago when it was commercialize. Maybe what is happening now is the last nail in the coffin.
philipov
Lobby Capitalism is what went wrong. It turns out that the most effective return on investment isn't to make the best product for the lowest price.
marginalia_nu
I think it very much lives, it's just really hard to find. The biggest change is how we navigate the web.
MattGaiser
> used to be freely accessible to everyone

This costs money, especially at scale. As much as people hate it, nobody has solved the problem of how news organizations or most digital content platforms can actually make money.

tester756
don't scale then :)

there are still websites/forums with just thousands of users for decades.

Acrobatic_Road
It can be solved by cutting needless expenses + charging money for things, but not necessarily for content. 1% of users pay for everyone else's ride.
gremlinsinc
Had Reddit never updated their app and only relied on 3rd party apps then buy up the two with biggest market reach (assuming different app on Apple and Android), and simply used AdSense in subreddits until they could build a self serve ad center and operated extremely lean with no sales, 5 devs max, a few marketers and growth experts they could probably keep yearly expenses down to 5 million or less and ad revenues would far exceed that.

They could also put affiliate marketing on Reddit sidebars and share profits with moderators and community regular contributors.

On porn subs they could use the ads porn sites use that are annoying, but it's porn so who cares.

They could create some sort of YouTube player with their own pre-roll ads for embeds. They could create a premium plan that actually has value, like tools for business and marketing to schedule posts to multiple subreddits, and get feedback on if the post will be moderated before it even gets posted.

They could've given every profile it's own link tree, and created an onlyfans competitor so onlyfans models could just do all their work on Reddit itself.

I've got 50 more ideas to monetize the shit out of Reddit, the admins are just too stupid to get anything done and figure this out. Many other business leaders could have made Reddit successful.

Facebook and Reddit aren't a lot different and Facebook is one of the biggest companies on the planet.

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ren_engineer
everything post 2008 was a 0% interest rate phenomenon, now all these tech companies have to find a way to turn a profit rather than running as zombie companies with fake valuations propped up by cheap VC money. It's going to take years for this to all shake out and a lot of "best practices" are now invalid

it's not a coincidence that all these companies are locking down APIs, fighting against scraping, and doing other cost cutting measures at the expense of users, all at the same time. You can't raise money easily anymore, so showing revenue is more important than user count or other fluff metrics

etimberg
Yeah, I think the next big thing will be value engineering and that's going to be a big shift for those not used to leaner budgets
ShamelessC
As badly as I want to answer this question, the way it's formed is going to ensure that the only answers you get are all cliche's.

So I'll ask you a question:

It didn't simply happen all at once. It's been going on since the inception of the world wide web. Are you really surprised?

gremlinsinc
It's not dead and never has been, it's just shifted, like a magnitude 8 earthquake a number of times. Often with great destruction and many fatalities. Sometimes we build back better, sometimes we don't. I never bought into the dead Internet theory in the past, but with ai, I'm open to the possibility of most interactions online leading to a chat bot, in that way the Internet community dies, but still there will be an Internet.

Just like there will probably be humans even if we have a nuclear Armageddon, just a fraction of normal.

I'm most worried about the social contract between ai, search engines, and websites. How can websites provide valuable content if nobody goes to it, thus creating a loop causing most websites that run on advertising to die and that will definitely be a blow.

Tldr: is it dead? no IMHO, but it could become a ghost town with small remnants of community, however there is a chance for another shakeup, Ready player one becomes a reality and we basically socialize in VR worlds that aren't just voxels, etc but real world graphics thanks to ai generation.

It's both a scary and exciting time to be alive, AI can speed up technological advancement, maybe we get to the singularity and the Internet is the least of our worries. Maybe they not only cure aging but reverse it, as well as poverty.

ApolloFortyNine
Well for one, what's the long term strategy of providing something for free, when your user base will simply use an ad blocker to block your one attempt at income?

YouTube in particular simply isn't possible without monetization, a substantial amount of that money at least does go to the creator.

Also for things like reddit and Twitter, lazy users is the real truth. Instead of having to locate the forum for your obscure topic, you just see if there's on on reddit and call it a day.

Morluche
The loss of internet neutrality in some countries only accelerated this phenomena, Hopefully we still have wikipedia
voisin
Sort of makes you wonder what the hell the point of all this was. Spend all this time contributing in various ways, under the guise of connecting with others, and in the end it was just all a load of shit that had to destroy itself in a vain attempt to appease shareholders’ insatiable demand for further growth.
tennisflyi
Why would it have been anything else? Espressos, ping pong tables, and the like are simply the wool over your eyes.
marginalia_nu
Usually starts out as wanting to do good and settling for a modest trickle of profit. Then at some point management changes, and they want to do a public listing, and from that point it's basically all down hill; once the IPO goes through the vultures really descend and it's not long until the company is just a skeleton of its former glory.

Pattern keeps repeating and it's not just post-2008 tech companies.

scrollaway
I may be an optimist but I think it's just one swing of the pendulum.

The web was riding a wave of monetized eyeballs, and the value extraction from it has become incredibly … bad. With people having gotten used to the internet, ads gotten more aggressive, more people using adblock etc etc the "free content" industry is in a race to the bottom, they long since reached the bottom and are now fighting over shovels.

The LLM explosion is the spark in the powder keg. Now those companies with broken business models have execs pressured by investors seeing the end of the free ride. A lot of money is riding away from this model purely based on (reasonably justified) fear.

What's next? Well, predicting the future is difficult, but IMO it's reasonable to think that high quality human content will now come at a premium. For example, subscriber-only communities (be it pay-gated, or gated in some other way… login-only won't cut it for long IMO).

The pendulum will swing the other way until someone once again finds and popularizes a push for free and open content, and the cycle will begin anew.

albertopv
Laziness. Too few would want to host and manage forums, mail server... anymore. Big companies made email server hosting more and more difficult and too few raised their voices. Cloud centralized services were just too convenient.
raverbashing
Spammers made hosting your email hard, not the big providers
albertopv
That's something big providers would say.
raverbashing
So do you have an actual solution to the spam problem that makes it work with any email server?
gremlinsinc
Spamassassin, and ip rotation. You use monitoring to check the reputation of the email ip, rotate it out if reputation sinks. Now with ai, you could also have ai check every email for spam and phishing.
LinuxBender
Also look into the S25R regex methodology. It's not an app, just a set of regex patterns that one could take different actions on. It's explained on this site [1] but there is no HTTPS. I don't think this site has been updated since HTTPS was required everywhere but the concepts have not changed. The regex patterns likely need to be updated.

I used this for decades to reduce the load on spamassassin. I took 12 inbound postfix servers from an average run queue of 8+ down to 0.x. It takes some tuning to get rid of false positives and to allow people that break RFC1912.

[1] - http://www.gabacho-net.jp/en/anti-spam/anti-spam-system.html

weikju
Maybe we can get back to an internet of the people for the people, and avoid the commercial enshitified internet? Maybe we were all just blinded by the bright shouting of the commercial internet, and forgot the rest is still there?
roylez
I thought about this a while back.

Virtual reality is still reality. The early internet that we experienced in 90s felt so different from real world, because it was a new media and real world powers had not yet expand their influence into it yet, but eventually they will. Censorship, speech control, propaganda, commercialization, etc and etc, everything will be there. To the point the new media/platform/reality becomes no different from outside world.

People are excited about VR technology recently. I am not. It would be the same damn story again.

freediverx
Capitalism destroys everything good in the long run.
butz
This looks like a great opportunity to join some smaller community (or several communities) or even spin up a forum of your own. And look at all free time you'll get for non computer related activities.
thealchemistdev
I'm currently investigating Flarum for my forum. Have you seen it?

https://flarum.org/

marginalia_nu
It brings joy to my heart that both Flarum and Discourse, while very js-heavy bordering on SPA, browse very well without javascript enabled.