It seems like having a website open and available on the internet is getting practically impossible to manage, with bots accounting for more and more traffic. AI has gotten to a point where it can circumvent just about any form of captcha, sooooo, what? Does "the internet just get abandoned in favor of some other, better technology that we hope crops up? Does it fade away? Do the real nerds start their own separate internet, and not let companies in? I donno, food for thought I guess.
It seems like having a website open and available on the internet is getting practically impossible to manage,
What are the issues you’re facing?
with bots accounting for more and more traffic.
Can’t you just ignore them?
AI has gotten to a point where it can circumvent just about any form of captcha, sooooo, what?
Not sure I understand that.
Does “the internet just get abandoned in favor of some other, better technology that we hope crops up? Does it fade away? Do the real nerds start their own separate internet, and not let companies in? I donno, food for thought I guess.
Technology will not be the solution to what is partly at least already a technological issue. Or more precisely, no tech can solve the way we poorly handle tech. That needs to change first.
The living Web you mention was a curated Web. Human curation, that is.
People used to share information and to promote sites and content from other sites to their own readers because they considered it worthwhile of their time and attention. That’s good curation. ‘Read this, guys, I think it’s worth it’.
And at times, that was truly amazing. As far as I’m concerned, that was the peak ‘Web’, the one I was the most happy with and the most proud to be part of.
Then, blogging started to become trendy. Blogging was an impressive technological breakthrough, making it instantly simpler for anyone without any expertise to
- Publish content without any need to master complex tools (I created my first website learning to write HTML and then CSS, there was no PHP or javascript back then)
- Share content from elsewhere. It was dead simple to share a link, to ping other websites.
- And, obviously, to post comments everywhere too.
Trendy bloggers started monetizing the hell out of every single bit of content they published, and the crowd of bloggers followed suit. Through ads and partnerships content publication and curation itself, that used to be about caring about our readers, became a bankable practice. That means there quickly was a demand for even more tech to make it even simpler/cheaper to publish (and also to show ads). Next to that there was also SEO growing in importance: more content and more demand required ways to optimize placement in search results so we could sell more ads, right? More tech needed.
And then social networks started appearing.
They were even simpler than blogging. Incredibly much simpler. Quickly, thx to social media, sharing content went ballistic. And then that was all that mattered: poop out as much content as possible. Even more tech was required (tech to automate it, to cross post it, to re-post, to share and to reply, and so on). Even commenting became too much work, that need to be reduced in order to be worth it, it was too slow, we started using a new tech: ‘Likes’. Almost instant. No need to write stupid words anymore, just press a button. Like or Dislike, that was all that was needed, even more so that there was so much endless content that was pushed down reader’s throat they would not possibly have any time left to, you know, write anything.
Gone were the desire to share useful or interesting content with readers, and for readers to contribute back some content through comments. Here comes the time to milk that reader, and their attention.
A reader that had suddenly morphed into a ‘follower’, the 21st century cattle (like with cattle, all that matter on social media is the number of heads/followers one owns and can monetize). The time to abuse the curation mechanism by promoting whatever shit was susceptible to generate revenues. hence the explosion of low quality posts. Quick, let’s make a 15 second video about the war somewhere, or that fact that I hate a tuna sandwich for lunch.
Soon there will not even be that left as everything, every once of content, may well be AI-made without any human involved. Content that will be perfectly and algorithmically tailored to suit every single reader/follower (happy cattle, with it s own unique tag different from all the other cows that are being being milked at the same time they are).
But the ‘living’ Web, that human-curated source of content is still available on the WWW. It survives next to those huge factories constantly pooping content that most people seem so hungry to consume from. It may vanish, rendered illegal by those poop-content factories that don’t want no interferences with their businesses, but it is still a thing today.
I doubt creating a new Internet will change that.
What need to change is… I don’t know… the way they are being educated and encouraged in being lazy as fuck? The way we consider and we use technology as a magical wand to solve all our needs and fears? Something like that.
And sorry for the long rant.
Edit: (too many) typos
Well put. That was leagues better than what I did the other day by trying to be a smartass and saying it through puns to get around AI-based and algorithmic content filtering.
Everybody thought I was being a schizo. Fair though. Although I got Ask Grok locked down for non-premium users so that was something I guess?
I think the deeper problem being implied by your analysis is what’s currently happening. The herds (or artificial social cliques) you just defined are literally being aligned. Something like what they do to AI (Reinforcement Learning Through Human Feedback), but it’s “Advertiser Feedback”.
Non-zero-sum-James has a beautiful ongoing series on the subject if you’re interested: https://nonzerosum.games/alignment1.html
(That’s one of the still living parts of the internet you mentioned, and I’d recommend a visit if you’re still looking)
not a long rant. an appropriately old school engaged response
Thx, just edited out a few of way too many typos. Sorry for that too.
Do the real nerds start their own separate internet, and not let companies in?
We’re already doing it.
how do we join this we?
Everyone start using project gemini (obviously Google named it’s AI that because we were getting too popular. The slow and small Internet is what we want. Be the change. Write weird blog posts pseudonymously
There are dozens of us. And I love it here.
Oh yeah, easily a handful, maybe more.
To the Undernet!
I imagine you could do something with chains of trust. You trust yourself. You trust your friend you know in real life. To a lesser extent you trust people he trusts. But then one of them turns out to suck or be a bot, so now you trust your friend less.
Do the real nerds start their own separate internet
What, like tor/i2p?
That’s what I thought of. That and Gemini, Gopher, etc.
I think about this a lot. Well, on a few different levels: to a significant degree, it is already happening. The www of now doesn’t really resemble the www of like 2006.
I have recently been working on a WP plugin that’s a labyrinth for bots, because the www is being significantly and actively enshittified.
And like, this is what happens when opportunists seek to own public goods. AI has made it worse (also it’s way more A than I), but this has been happening since there has been such a thing as a “web browser.”
To paraphrase some movie…Clerks, maybe? Why do we have to leave? They’re the ones who suck.
To paraphrase some movie…Clerks, maybe? Why do we have to leave? They’re the ones who suck.
It was Michael Bolton in the movie Office Space (1999)
100% – I celebrate his entire catalog.
where does it go from here?
Places like this. There is no real alternative, this is the best we currently have. Unless you want to overthrow the capitalist world order which I am admittedly in favor of.
This place ain’t immune.
Certainly, but we don’t have anything else except interacting irl
we don’t have anything else except interacting irl
And we are not desperate enough to resort to that!
Oh dear no. Talking to someone face to face like some primitive caveman? Dear lord, I’d rather be a hermit.
* goes back to painting his cavern wall *
Mhm, the moment the Fediverse hits a critical mass it’s coming. Maybe it’ll stay small enough to avoid it, but it’s probably already here to some degree.
Why I started investing more energy in live chat. Harder to bot synchronously.
Captchas are getting really tough. Took me 3 tries to get one right the other day.
found the bot
Hahahah it would be the ultimate irony if @rimu@piefed.social was a bot.
Haha that would certainly be humorous
Try asking ChatGPT to solve it for you, lol!
There is a concept called community computing. Tech savvy people host their own VPN with big tech replacement services and share it with their communities.
Reject Internet
Return to Ham Radio
(Meshtastic-Net? 👀
I have no clue how to do soldering stuff… where do you get a pre-built btw?)
You don’t need to solder anything. There’s a bunch of devices ready to go. For instance, the Liligo T-Echo.
But also don’t expect it to be a replacement for the Internet. Right now it’s just a local chat app, more or less.
Also, AI can talk and listen, so what’s to say radio won’t have the same problem if enough people start using it
I have a n8n workflow that automatically posts to my local meshtastic network when the space station is going to fly over (and be visible). Not AI, but if I can do it with python it would be trivial for AI.
Ah soldering a french word for wait till hot and poke.
There will be two internets: the first will require proof of identity and everything you do will be tied to that identity - forget anonymity forever. The second will be an “underground” one that is significantly more difficult for the average idiot to get onto. It’ll use wherever replaces TOR since TOR is known to be vulnerable to tracking as well. There will be complete anarchy, and it’ll be a real PITA to do anything. Nobody & no site will be trustworthy, and you’ll have to exchange encryption keys & whatnot offline IRL with anyone you want to communicate with in a vaguely trustworthy fashion.
You read about Digg, didn’t you?
That sounds exactly like I2P.
However, I think a global mesh network with an encrypted layer would be better. With micro transactions for delivery.
You read about Digg, didn’t you?
Busted
I could see, eventually, a public key reputation system where content is signed and you can filter what’s coming at you to just keys you trust, keys your friends trust, however many Kevin Bacon’s of separation you want, or just the entire firehose.
Society will have to get better at managing their private keys first. And then publishing tools will need to bake in signing features.
On the server-side you tarpit the AI bots, and on the client-side you use Kagi to make internet usable again.
Should we accept votes from accounts that never post or comment?
You can give unlimited upvotes but you earn one downvote per post or comment to give to another post or comment (so you can always downvote if you explain).
I think votes are a bad idea in general.
Voting seems to have the objective of popular/good rising, the mediocre staying in place, and moving down the “junk”.
Are you suggesting just get rid of voting and replace with nothing or is there something better?
I’m thinking I’d like to try doing without it. The Fediverse isn’t so large yet that it’s really needed, maybe later when theres’ multi-thousand-comment threads like Reddit has.
It only works when it’s small because you’re usually reading all responses on a post anyway. It really didn’t matter what order I read all four responses.
I would expect communities to grow over time if they can evolve in healthy ways. More diversity is usually good but then you’re digging for gold, the good comments, and the work digging was not only part of the fun but it made the find even better.
I think the difference is those were all people talking for the audience. If you and I have a direct conversation and try to avoid our audience, we might realize what made those comment threads better. You watched a conversation between two people and not a performance to be observed.
Then how do we keep these communities just the right size to make it work? To be fair, there are times I’m good with the easy dopamine hit and social media puts the pre-filtered pre voted treasure right there. No effort needed on my side.
It’s like there’s glimpses of the old internet here and there.
Yet the reader is already here.
So, if I understood him correctly, you should upvote the parent comment.
Yes, as I said, the Fediverse isn’t so large yet that it’s really needed.
Ironic coming from someone who once told me to vote for the lesser of two Nazis.
You’re equating votes on comments on a small Internet discussion forum with votes for the political control of your country? I think you’ve rather lost your perspective here.
I2P
