Are We Watching The Internet Die?
Are We Watching The Internet Die?
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
I think the advancement of LLMs, which culminated in the creation of ChatGPT, is this generation's Eternal September. In a couple of decades, we'll talk about how the internet "used to be" before free, public websites were abandoned because our CAPTCHAs could no longer filter out bots and device attestation and continuous mictopayments became the only way to keep platforms spam free.
Even when Microsoft and OpenAI stop hemorrhaging money by giving away stuff like ChatGPT for basically free, the spam farms will run this stuff on their own soon. I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services "enshittification", because people don't realise how much running these AI models actually costs.
I think this will also start the transition of not only AI being sold like Netflix or like mobile data caps, but also to an "every company that doesn't get the most expensive AI will start lagging behind" economy. After all, AI only needs to cost a little less than the manpower it's replacing. Any internet facing company needs good AI to outwit the AI trying to abuse cheap or free services (like trials) that they may offer.
We're probably lucky that AI spammers haven't discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we'll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.
66Part of what makes Twitter, Reddit, etc. such easy targets for bot spammers is that they're single-point-of-entry. You join, you have access to everyone, and then you exhaust an account before spinning up 10 more.
The Fediverse has some advantages and disadvantages here. One significant advantage is that -- particularly if, when the dust finally settles, it's a big network of a large number of small sites -- it's relatively easy to cut off nodes that aren't keeping the bots out. One disadvantage, though, is that it can create a ton of parallel work if spam botters target a large number of sites to sign up on.
A big advantage, though, is that most Fediverse sites are manually moderated and administered. By and large, sites aren't looking to offload this responsibility to automated systems, so what needs to get beaten is not some algorithmic puzzle, but human intuition. Though, the downside to this is that mods and admins can become burned out dealing with an unending stream of scammers.
36We had a bunch of Japanese teenagers run scripts on their computers and half the Fediverse was full of spam. If someone really cared about spamming, this shit wouldn't stop as quickly.
No Fediverse tools have sufficient spam prevention measures right now. The best we have is individually blocking every server, but there are thousands of servers that can be abused by a very basic account creation + spam script.
Manal moderation will lead to small/single user instances getting barred from participating, leading back to centralisation on a few vetted servers. We need automated tools, across all parts of the Fediverse, or the network will be in a constant flux between waves of spam and overbearing defederation to fight the spam waves. Especially once spammers start bypassing CAPTCHAs.
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I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.
I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I've turned around, for the past thirty years now, I've seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.
Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.
When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I'll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.
22These companies collect investment money from either investors or other parts of the company that do make money. They give away their product for free to create a user base, and figure out proper monetization later.
When the economy takes a dive and borrowing money costs money again (for years, banks had negative interests for huge loans, which means they paid you to take their money) the funds of venture capitalists suddenly dry up and companies like Netflix and Uber suddenly need to raise prices
Nine figure salaries are nothing compared to how much training AI costs. The same goes for most services, to be honest.
I don't get where the entitlement comes from, to be honest. Why should companies keep giving away shit for free? They're neither governments nor charities. These companies are flushing billions down the drain giving away free stuff to get marker share and attract more money they can put into free services, until they can grow no more. That's unsustainable and impossible to compete with fairly.
It's good for the internet to cost money. If customers need to pay for the stuff they're using, we maintain the possibility for fair competition. Without competition, billionaires and hedge funds control the internet. If you demand everything to come for free, you're only playing into Google's/Facebook's/Microsoft's/Apple's hands.
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We’re probably lucky that AI spammers haven’t discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we’ll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.
I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.
14The downside of that approach is that AI can pretend to be humans wanting to join quite well. It's possible to set up a lobster.rs like system where there's a tree of people you've invited so admins can cull entire spam groups at once, but that also has its downsides (i.e. it's impossible to join if none of your friends have already joined, or if you don't want to attach your online socials to your friends).
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Instead of being this gen's September 1993, I feel like the changes being sped up by the introduction of generative models are finally forcing us into October 1993. As in: they're reverting some aspects of the internet to how they used to be.
also to an “every company that doesn’t get the most expensive AI will start lagging behind” economy.
That spells tragedy of the commons for those companies. They ruining themselves will probably have a mixed impact on us [Internet users in general].
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I've been watching the Internet die since I was 10 years old. Fucker's really draggin' it out, being all dramatic n shit.
44I always find responses like this funny. You know how old you are, but (mostly) nobody reading the comment does. You could be anywhere from 11 to 50!
15I was going to joke "wow, a whole 4 years?"
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capitalism too, I've been hearing that we're in the "late stage" for a long time now
7Uhm ackshully the "late stage" in capitalism is in late stage in the same way a Cancer is late-stage. So it doesn't mean Capitalism dying, it means Capitalism killing its host (humanity)5
the corporate-owned part, hopefully. and I think we're actually witnessing the renaissance of the small, users controlled one.
42Lemmies unite!
5lets just hope we are not caught in the bot shitstorm.
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Habsburg AI? My sides went into orbit. I didn't know that I needed to know this expression!
I don't fully agree with the author but that was an enjoyable read. The initial chunk about Reddit is mostly there to provide context for the general trends and directions that the internet is following; the "core" is the impact of generative models into the internet.
Unlike the author, I don't think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It's a lot like the internet before Google Search.
If that's correct, the impact of those generative models was only to speed up the process, not to cause it. At the end of the day the main concern is that it works a lot like spam - as undesired content avoiding being detected as such, and tweaked to steal your attention from the content that you actually want to consume. And spam is not something new for us (or the internet), what's new is GAFAM and their vassals (Twitter, Reddit etc.) eating it for lunch.
28The author does have a way with words lol. I love this paragraph in particular, emphasis mine:
As we speak, the battle that platforms are fighting is against generative spam, a cartoonish and obvious threat of outright nonsense, meaningless chum that can and should (and likely will) be stopped. In the process, they're failing to see that this isn't a war against spam, but a war against crap, and the overall normalization and intellectual numbing that comes when content is created to please algorithms and provide a minimum viable product for consumers. Google's "useless" results problem isn't one borne of content that has no meaning, but of content that only sort of helps, that is the "right" result but doesn't actually provide any real thought behind it, like the endless "how to fix error code X" results full of well-meaning and plausibly helpful content that doesn't really help at all.
And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps" that "steals your attention from the content you actually want." Even moving from Google to DDG has only mitigated this problem, it hasn't fully gone away.
But yeah, one of his conclusions seems to be the Death of the Hyperlink? Which, I mean, not even LLM's can kill that. I doubt
<a hrefis going away any time soon.12And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, "content that only sort of helps"
Hello, my name's dgriffith. I'm a Fediverse Support community member, and I'm here to help.
Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.
If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.
Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.
Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it's probably more a case of "why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?".
That is, it used to be the case that you'd put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now 80 percent of it seems to be variations of my "helpful" text above, SEO'd recipe sites, or just AI hallucinations of stuff scraped from other sites.
16Yup, he does. And what he is saying in this excerpt is great (insightful) too, not just how it's said.
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Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.
It is definitely feeling like this is a trend, we are moving back to more curated ways of sharing information.
The Fediverse feels like a return to the old, open Web before it was captured by Big Tech, just with new bells and whistles attached. With all the enshittification, it seems like it is well-placed to be the solution to the problem. It's not there yet but it's a start.
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The internet, no. The world wide web, yes.
25Will we ever stop referring to the Web as "the Internet"?
23To be fair, the definition is a bit muddier nowadays. Is Lemmy on the Web? I don't use it via the website. Bulletin boards used to not be part of the Web, as they pre-date the Web. But nowadays everything is HTTP. There's so little non-web left, and the vast majority of users never use it, that the Internet is only used for accessing the Web.
17BitTorrent is a pretty big part of the Internet though.
5But it's not muddy though. The Internet is the infrastructure that the web runs across. And there are still plenty of other protocols out there beside the web that are in use every single day. Even if the average user were to primarily use the Internet for accessing the web, it doesn't mean the definitions of the two have become muddy. Interstate 4 is not Walt Disney World, even if you only ever drive I-4 to get to Disney.
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No.
16Whats the difference?
3Not sure if a serious question. So forgive me if your question was meant to be a statement.
The internet is a large set of computers connected via a set of protocols: IP and on top of that TCP, UDP or very occasionally SCTP (more common on mobile networks).
There’s 65000-ish ports (channels) available on the internet (IP network).
The web runs on port 80 and 443 via TCP (mostly).
The internet supports all sorts of other traffic/channels too: Time synchronisation, games, file transfer, e-mail, remote login, remote desktops etc. None of these run on the web, but is traffic that runs in parallel to the web, using either TCP or UDP protocols.
The distinction is getting blurrier as lots of traffic that used to be assigned (or simple chose) its own port number is now encapsulated in HTTP(s) traffic. But the distinction is definitely not gone.
17Think of the Internet as the US Interstate Highway system. The web is a chain of tourist attractions you can visit along those roads.
The Internet is the physical and logical collection of interconnected networks. The web is a protocol that runs on top of that infrastructure, just as email, ssh, ftp, irc, etc. do.
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Given there's people in this thread incorrectly using "internet" instead of "web"... Probably never.
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Betteridge's law of headlines answers this succintly: no
23The headline is 6 words. The article is 3,606 words. Expressed as a percentage, the amount of content you have decided to address comes to a grand total of 0.16%.
If you have no interest in interacting with the content, it would be simple enough to state that. But to dismiss the entirety of the article based on 0.16% of the content seems rather short sighted to me. Do you have any thoughts to share about the article?
10Nah, I'm allergic to clickbait. If it had a better, more serious title, I'd read it.
If you're the author of the article, you have to find that line between interesting and clickbait. Sensationalist titles like that are like smearing a distasteful substance on the cover of a book. No matter what you write in that book, I'm not picking it up.
Possible titles (without even reading the article) that would make me click with an open mind
- Threats to the open web
- How much has the web changed since $date?
- Where does the web go after $event?
- The future of the web - an opinion
- How do monopolies affect the internet?
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Dude. The 4th sentence of the page you linked says it doesn't apply to this type of open ended question.
The only possible answer to this (admittedly silly) headline is, "it depends what you mean by die". An answer yes or no could easily be rebutted.
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The current internet search is becoming obsolete. People are able to tell apart BS, though. This means, there's a possibility for a smarter filter. Hard to tell whether we will see one in the near-future.
20People are able to tell apart BS, though.
Please help me be optimistic. Why do you think this is the case? No matter where I go I see mostly confirmation bias and the lack of even the most basic level of critical thought.
7you're right. I should've written some people
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This isn't a new thing. It's been a long time ago that the internet shifted from being a level playing field and a means of connecting people, to a place where the big companies make money. And it brought some of the currently biggest companies on earth into existence.
Things changed a bit. Harvesting private data and selling information about the users used to be the dominating business model. It still is, but now it gets mixed with selling their content to train AI. I'd argue that in itself isn't a dramatic change. It's still the same concept.
But I also always worry about centralization, enshittification and algorithms shaping our perspective on reality more and more.
17Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/
LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and -- worse -- Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of 'compromised' media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/
That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.
Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?
10Corporate social media may be dying, but that's only one small part of the Internet.
7Yeah. The unpleasant situation this person is describing is also described by the Dark Forest Internet theory, which also includes more of a plausible solution, as opposed to purely terror and resignation.
3
Liked the article but the end was kind of a letdown for me. If capitalism-driven AI is ruining the web even further why would demanding that AI is better today already and not in the future help with any of the problems this article has described?
For me the solution is obvioisly rejecting corpo-spam social-networks and going back to the selfmade small-internet, the fediverse etc. Sure that's not a solution for humanity as a whole but neither is demanding better AI now.
Are have I completely misunderstood something?
6Personally I read it as a general "demand better", "don't accept crap wrapped in gold" as an offensive principle against (de)generative AI. Perhaps I'm inserting my own positive spin on their words, but it seems to me that their point is "don't let the hype win"; if these companies are pushing AI, forming dependencies on bad tech, then we need to say "not good enough" and push back on the BS. Deny the ability of low quality garbage to 'fulfil' our needs. It's not a directly practical line to be sure (how do we do this exactly?), but it does drill down past "AI is bad" to a more fundamental (and arguably motivating) point - that we, all of us, deserve better than to drown in a sea of crap and that's still important.
3Ok, yeah, but I still think that totally misses the point. At least for me even fully functional AI will still be a desaster and would be used for the most heinous stuff, eroding democracy worldwide even more and it obviously changes nothing of the social-media-silo capitalist hellscape most people live in comfortably (or less comfortably if it gives you eating disorders, depression and stuff).
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insightful question,
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it isnt just the internet, in case you hadn't noticed, it is ALL civil-rights that are being gutted, in the enshittocene.
"once the infection has moved the 'fulcrum', the balance between the involuntary-host & the infection, far enough, it can then switch from symbiosis to totalitarian rampaging growth-at-any-cost, excluding-all-vital-functions, enforcing its parasitic & fatal consumption, killing the patient"
A tipping-point is being crossed, though it's taking a few decades ( planets are slower than individual-animals, in experiencing infection ).
It's our rendition of The Great Filter, in-which we enforce that we can't be viable, because factional-ideology "needs" that we break all viability from the world.
Or, to be plainer, it is our race's unconscious toddler setting-up a world-breaking tantrum, to "BREAK GOD AND MAKE GOD OBEY" its won't-grow-up.
Read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow", & see how the imprint->reaction mind, Kahneman1 ( he calls it "System 1", but without context, that's meaningless ) substitutes easy-to-answer questions for the actual questions..
The more you read that book, the most important psychology book in the whole world, right now, the more obvious it is that Ideology/prejudice/assumption-river/religion/dogma is doing all it can to break considered-reasoning ( Kahneman2 ) from the whole world, and it is succeeding/winning.
"Proletariat dictatorship" the Leninists want, "populist dictatorship" the fascists want, religious totalitarianism, political totalitarianism, ideological totalitarianism, etc, it's all Kahneman1 fighting to break considered-reasoning from the whole world, and the "disappearing" of all comments criticizing Threads from the Threads portion of the internet .. is perfectly normal.
It's simply highjacking of our entire civilization, by the systems which want exclusive dominion.
Have you checked your youtube account's settings section, in the history section, to see what percentage of your comments have been disappeared??
Do it.
Everybody do it.
Discover how huge a percentage of your contribution to the "community" got disappeared, because it wasn't what their algorithm finds usefully-sensationalistic, or usefully-pushing-whatever-they-find-acceptable.
I spent a few hours deleting ALL my comments from there, after seeing that around 1/2 of what I'd contributed had been disappeared.
There are a few comments now, but .. they'll be removed, either by yt or by me, soon.
No point in pretending that meaning is tolerable, anymore, you know?
Only fakery & hustle remains, for most of the internet, & that transformation's going to be complete, in a few years.
1984, but for-profit.
Sorry for the .. dim .. view, but it's been unfolding for a couple decades, & it's getting blatent, fast.
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