alt Hacker NewsThe Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with other teenage OS nerds like me, and of course participated in the nascent osdev.org forum. To note that all of those websites were readily found through Google, and interlinked with their own topic webrings.
Today everything has disappeared or has been conglomerated into siloes, sanitised, focusing on engagement. You have YouTube videos about it (which is more cheap entertainment than actual education), you get some posts here once in a while, there’s Reddit where all intelligent discussion goes to die. IRC is a wasteland of idle bouncers. Then the LLMs arrived to kill what is left.
Who says the Internet is a vibrant place today mistakes flashiness with depth. It’s all empty calories, just makes you hungry for more, never satisfies.
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I, too, look back fondly on the early web. Lately, though, I have been thinking that one reason for its decline wasn't just corporate interests like we often talk about here. A significant number of early bloggers were middle-aged and elderly people. After decades, they simply aged out. The younger generation that replaced them (albeit not so much among OS nerds like yourself) was less likely to use a real computer and keyboard as their interface to the internet, just a smartphone. Hence long-form text died.
Most hobby communities in my spheres of interest have been subsumed into Discord. It is yet another silo, but it does feel lively. I don't think I'm contradicting you here, I just feel less negatively about it.
Well, just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines (gosh those classic gaming mags), and broadcast television for many people,
and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them,
why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?
Why should I have to suffer through Fandom raping me with screen-obscuring banners and "PLEASE ALLOW ADS" just to make some sense of fucking Warhammer 40K lore (written by unpaid volunteers anyway)? instead of just asking ChatGPT what the fuck Globriznaroks is/are.
Why should we support shady companies by sitting through their ads on YouTube videos for minute topics instead of just asking AI for the shit I want to know about?
Why should we submit to the whims of 3 mods on a subreddit deciding what thousands should get to see (fuck /r/AskScience) and then getting low-effort answers or outright trolling anyway? instead of just asking AI?
Bury me, I am ready.
On a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filter. For no reason at all other than to feel that again: me, watching packets, having total control. Hitting a wall and having to read a manpage.
I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.