future of ~the internet~

I still use RSS feeds as much as I ever did; that and Twitter is still taking me to places across the web but definite drop in the non-homogenous weird-little-site I rock up to

outside of work, where I spend a lot of time on Slack and stack(overflow|exchange)-type sites, I find my internet usage decreasing to almost nothing in my spare time. A few social sites (ILX being one of them), hobby Discords, and a handful of kinda-trustworthy news sites. Search engines have gotten to the point of being almost useless unless a person cares enough to get good at filtering out the vast sea of seemingly “AI”-generated dreck that try to pass as how-to or product review articles.

basically i've become the fulfillment of the ad-based internet economy, pretty much everything i do on the internet leads to some kind of purchase. idk it's helped me to be honest about that rather than think the information i consume is "important" in any way.

even after spending a lifetime on the internet and using it to escape the shitty culture i was born into, i frankly just don't believe that "actual" community can exist solely through the internet, and that it never did. internet can be a support but there has to be bodies in shared space or there isn't community imo.

I still go to a fair number of sites, don't know if there's much point listing them tho as they're so niche - mostly to do with comics, food in London, a few movie blogs.

What I've stopped doing tho is exploring - hardly ever find a new site via links from one I'm reading, never google a term to find sites associated with it. That's def been supplanted by YouTube, sadly.

Hanging out in discords has a bit of that old message board feel and is def superior to facebook and twitter.

I got on the internet in the mid-1990s, when anonymity was not the default - people posted to Usenet with their real names and indeed email addresses - so I suppose in that respect Twitter is a bit of a throwback. It was smaller then and perhaps because of that it felt more information-dense, but I'll concede that there's a lot more content nowadays, it's just that the ratio is unfavourable. And people were assholes back then. Massive assholes. Not in the way you'd expect, but still massive assholes.

As for general internet use I am occasionally reminded of how bleak large chunks of the modern internet are whenever I have to use a computer that doesn't have adblock, or I'm abroad and Google insists on making me use the non-personalised version of Google News. Google News' default is its own take on what is relevant in the US, which almost certainly isn't what people in the US actually want to read. I have met people from the US in real life - I was going to say "Americans" but you're going to complain that I could be talking about people from South America or Canada etc - and neither of them were dummies.

Also, simple technical queries. What's the difference between Crucial's MX and BX SSDs? Google presents page after page of links such as Crucial BX500 Vs MX500 - Which Is Better One? [New 2021], which is supposed to make you think the page was made with love and care by a human being, or alternatively "robo-content", which usually goes e.g. "SSDS are solid state drives. There are many differences between them. You might be looking for the differences. I'm going to tell you the differences. It's important to understand the differences etc" without getting to the point. In which case Reddit etc are the only option, because they're written by real people. For the record Crucial's MX SSDs have on-chip write levelling, or some kind of memory chip that looks after the SSD, whereas the BX models don't have that.

Meanwhile professional media organisations are a wasteland of poor-quality writing by unpaid interns, or on-message rubbish written to fill a quota. I don't want to hear what a 21-year-old man has to say about human society. You're 21, you're a five-year-old sixteen-year-old boy. You've memorised a lot of command line switches and facts and figures. You don't have a soul yet! You aren't conscious, or self-aware, and more importantly you aren't in a position to speak your mind because you're sackable. Totally sackable.

This is one of the reasons I participate on Ilxor etc. Firstly because it sets my mind in motion, and secondly so that I have something to read in the future. A few years from now I'll forget that I wrote this post, and I'll stumble on it and think "that was entertaining" and "that man is witty but could do with proofreading" and of course that man will be me. I am lighting a candle, but it's my candle, and it's actually a tape, as in Krapp's Last Tape, and I mean some of you are pretty good as well.

It has to be said that the internet circa 1995 was also filled with assholes, but a different kind; petty little fifty-something engineers. There are a few relics of that demographic on e.g. Airlines.net or Photo.net, because they've been around since the 1990s and have some of the same participants, now old men. Also blu-ray.com, which is full of people boasting about their collection of 4K blu-rays that they bought to replace their original blu-rays that are now junk. The same people in the 1990s would have had a large shelf with Star Trek VHS tapes, two episodes per tape, total spend £700 etc.

But this was predicted. I remember an old essays from 2001 or so called Content is Not King. It argued that the internet was email and social connections, not newspapers. It's one of those "too early to say" topics twenty-one years later:
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742

I've been covering bad parts of the internet for long time now.

For years, there was one site extremist researchers warned me not to cover because publicizing it would be dangerous.

But it's time people know KiwiFarms—and how they're chasing political enemies around the world.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 2, 2022

#legs are coming soon

search results are SO TRASH it’s driving me bananas and AI seems guaranteed to make it worse, help me i used to really like the internet

Time to start publishing printed books of cool links again

xp i tried to talk about this on another thread and somebody told me "just go to the library"

https://i.imgur.com/6x1qcOA.png

Google Image Search is especially impressive in how frequently it fails completely.