alt Hacker NewsI, 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.
While we're here exchanging old man stories, I remember the web before blogs existed! I guess we can organize the internet into these eras, each of which was in some sense harder and more expensive to find available info than in the previous:
1. Pre-web. Internet is mostly about messages sent to individuals or groups. USENET organizes group discussion into browseable topic-oriented hierarchies, IRC does the same but with lists in fragmented networks. If the discussion exists at all, finding it is easy.
2. Early web. Dominated by topic focused websites, early online shops and personal home pages. Search engines suck and face strong competition from manually maintained topic-oriented directories (did anyone else here contribute to DMoz?), content discovery is mutual and webmasters help each other out by joining "web rings". DoubleClick and AdSense start to funnel small amounts of money to creators, but it's enough to offset hosting costs and in many cases can make web hosting effectively free or even yield a small profit. This encourages an explosion of website creation. Discussion moves off USENET onto phpBB forums. Every organization decides it's a cultural imperative to have a presence on the information superhighway. Finding information is easy as long as you can figure out what topic it belongs to.
3. Blogging and centralization era. The internet starts to rebuild itself around people as the primary object, not the topic or category. Directories die because websites can no longer be categorized by content. Web rings die for the same reason. IRC is replaced by instant messengers that are about connecting people with pre-existing friends, not mutual interest groups. Outside of institutional websites that exist to promote the organization, things become hard to find without highly centralized search engines because nobody is putting any effort into organizing or indexing what they write anymore: maybe you get a few tags if you're lucky. Spam, hacking and lack of SSO causes forums to centralize onto Reddit. This is the peak of the search engine era because you are forced to use Google to find anything. The power eventually corrupts the tech firms and they begin political censorship to benefit the left in 2015 [1]. Enormous amounts of information is deliberately made unfindable as part of a large-scale programme of social control.
4. Social media era. All the same problems as blogging except now the bulk of the content goes behind login walls that stop search engines from surfacing them. Video and podcasts start to matter more, both of which are unsearchable by default. Eventually video completely dominates, as few younger people want to read when they could watch instead. Firefox starts to replace IE6, and then Chrome. They bring ad blockers in their wake which starts to choke off ad revenues, so many websites from the web's first era go unmaintained and eventually offline. This is somewhat but not entirely compensated by the falling cost of web hosting. Social media remains because it puts people's faces next to everything, allowing clout farming and viral notoriety that can sometimes be monetized by becoming an influencer. The only part of the web's first era that really survives into this era is Wikipedia and Reddit, which by this time substitute monetary rewards for power tripping by a small group of ideologically driven moderators.
5. AI era. Information is so heavily scattered over so many tiny sourcelets and search engines have become sufficiently useless that full neural integration of knowledge is required, with LLMs issuing massively parallel and complex search engine queries as a backstop.
What can we predict for the AI era? Institutional websites will remain because institutions still have an interest in getting their agenda into LLMs, but visual redesign efforts will largely cease as traffic stats seen by executives show visits completely dominated by AI. There will be lots of conversations of the form, "why redesign our website to look more modern when 99% of traffic is AI which won't care?" Blogs will go the same way as the thematic websites they killed, disappearing as the authors age out. A lot of effort will be put into finding ways to block AI crawlers to create 'human only' spaces, especially by social media firms, but these will fail because AI will just be integrated directly into browsers and become unblockable - and anyway, the incentives to create will be ignored. ChatGPT style text oriented interfaces will last until inferencing capacity catches up, being eventually replaced by voice interaction and on the fly video generation for nearly all users.
Where we go from here is hard to say. Content creation was most pure in the web's first era, where people with knowledge were incentivized to share it with the world by the promise of a bit of fame combined with ad clicks to offset hosting costs. Ad blockers, social media and AI killed that world. You could however bring it back by producing a new platform that isn't like the web, one where AI and search engines are blocked via technological means (e.g. confidential computing). How much anyone would actually enjoy such a web is unclear.
[1] https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-inter...