The internet is slipping out of our reach

Someone once asked a question online about what each person&#x27;s biggest fear was regarding the future of AI generated content. I thought about it.<p>While the fears of not being able to earn money for creative pursuits are a concern, my biggest concern remains around anonymity.<p>At some point, I fear that participating online with other humans will require &quot;proof of self&quot; and as AI becomes more and more able to generate convincing images&#x2F;text&#x2F;video&#x2F;voice of being human, the systems will ask more and more of us to prove we are real humans which could lead to awful consequences in disallowing anonymity entirely.<p>That worry remains right up there in my list of AI related concerns.<p>The parallel concern to that are online communities become tightly gated with stringent requirements of relationships (i.e. invite only, possibly with multiple &quot;referees&quot;) and proof of quality in order to participate. This outcome has its merits but can also lead to exclusionary environments which has many downsides, esp for newcomers. It could very well feel like participating in low quality ranked levels of a game for a long time before being allowed to climb out of the cesspool into higher levels where people take stuff more seriously. Not necessarily a bad thing but it&#x27;s still an inversion of the idea of &quot;participation allowed by default but you can lose the trust you are given if you behave poorly&quot;.

This reads to me like a rant. Good material for a blog post but I don&#x27;t think there is anything particularly profound going on. The internet is not a static place, and parts are always being born and dying. Maybe today is going to be Google search.<p>There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate peer-to-peer. The question has been answered - corporate entities (<i>points at the Y logo at the top of the page</i>) do a much better job of curating spaces. This has implications that a lot of content will be lost sooner or later, but at least the big repositories like Wikipedia make copying data out easy.<p>I don&#x27;t even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing. The public internet is too small; we can&#x27;t all fit in it. Private spaces might be a big net win. It&#x27;d be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier; that is a major Achilles heel in the whole setup right now. But that problem has never really been solved (unless you&#x27;re the sort of person who doesn&#x27;t understand why IRC got marginalised).

Google will not be interested in fixing search. It also may not be possibile because of ai spam. They would like to invest in deep mind&#x2F;bard&#x2F;gemini than to fix technology that will be obsolete in a few years.<p>I have started scanning domains to see how many different places there are in the internet. Spoiler: Not many.<p>We could try to create curated open databases for links, forums, places, and links, but in ai era it will always be a niche.<p>Having said that I think that it is a good thing. If it is a niche it will not be spoiled by normal users expecting simple behavior, or corporations trying to control the output.<p>Start your blog<p>Start your curated lists of links.<p>Control your data. Share your data.<p>Link <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rumca-js&#x2F;Internet-Places-Database">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rumca-js&#x2F;Internet-Places-Database</a>

Another victim of LLM-&#x27;enhanced&#x27; search results is serendipity. Many times I&#x27;ve found random, fun and unrelated websites from mistyping a query.<p>Now the AI tries to guess what I meant and adjusts the search results, meaning such gems are lost.

I agree that the mainstream web is becoming increasingly useless, but at the same time, there are counter-movements: search engines like Marginalia, decentralized communities and federated protocols, open-source projects and businesses, &quot;the indie web&quot;.<p>&quot;Small Discord servers, Telegram groups and mailing lists&quot; aren&#x27;t the only places good stuff happens on the internet, though it might take some deliberate effort to find the right ones.

&gt; If you searched Google for a movie review in 2005, you&#x27;d get a review. Today, you get paid search results, ads, third-party cookies, trackers, newsletter prompts, notification requests, and, if you&#x27;re lucky – a movie review. No matter what you search for, SEO-hacked content farms will blot out the sun.<p>This resonates, but I tried it, and it looks false. On both kagi and google, for both an old and a new movie (finding nemo and dune 2), the first result is a movie review that doesn&#x27;t seem overly laden in shit.

It&#x27;s essentially the phenomenon of less genetic diversity as massive repetitive inbreeding takes over. SEO, AI, etc. are streamlined cultures made to maximize attraction and revenue, akin to over breeding a once successful genetic trait in an environment to the point at which it becomes a detriment to the organism&#x2F;group.

One thing that makes me kind of happy - I am no longer scared of &quot;AI singularity&quot;. Looking at the bullshit LLMs generate, I don&#x27;t think they will take over world and start to upload our minds to torture chambers or whatever.

It is over. Many believe LLMs are more than regurgitation programs and even think they are doing the world a favour by posting ChatGPT content. Even worse, these models will only become more and more inbred as training goes on.

similar but with a bit more meat - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wheresyoured.at&#x2F;are-we-watching-the-internet-die&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wheresyoured.at&#x2F;are-we-watching-the-internet-die...</a>

It&#x27;s a signal to noise ratio problem which automation is clearly, plainly, obviously, going to worsen&#x2F;exacerbate&#x2F;amplify in every manner. Even if Google themselves hadn&#x27;t incentivized the problem in the first place, it&#x27;s far too late to correct.<p>You cannot conduct a conversation about it, either, because of a similar signal to noise ratio problem, as people who don&#x27;t care or don&#x27;t bother to think it through feel compelled to &quot;contribute&quot;. And the inevitable &quot;I asked ChatGPT to reply and it said...&quot; noise.

&gt; The average essay is written not to be read, but to be found—by a search engine<p>Even before generative AI, this was painfully true. Google doesn&#x27;t care about its SERPs if they can push an advert at you.<p>Author is bang-on. We aren&#x27;t ready for the next evolution of search shittification. Without search, we&#x27;re blind.<p>Every other form of organic discovery (reviews, directories, forums) seems just as prone to the damage of spam.

This isn&#x27;t about the Internet, it is about Google search. Google search has had starkly reduced utility for many years now.

AI is just one facet of the issue, and it only exacerbates the real problem. Algorithmification, enshitification, etc.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;infinite-scroll&#x2F;why-the-internet-isnt-fun-anymore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;infinite-scroll&#x2F;why-the-in...</a><p>The old guards of Amazon and Google are gone - no one is there to nurture the <i>product</i>. The new business school jocks are there to juice it, juice it to the max, bro! Quarter to quarter, so that the vaunted SHAREHOLDER does not get all madzies.

The irony is that this feels like a chat gpt post asking it:<p>&quot;Write something negative about the internet outside my bubble.&quot;<p>That said I&#x27;ve found that asking a question of an llm, then copying its response into google gets me extremely high quality results, much better than the question does by itself.<p>In essence the curse of dimensionality means that with enriched queries SEO is literally impossible. You can&#x27;t SEO an arbitrarily large space because no query is ever repeated.

&gt; Do you often append &quot;reddit&quot; or &quot;wiki&quot; to your Google search queries?<p>Unfortunately, yes, site:something.com has become mandatory for finding the right information on Google search, otherwise, I&#x27;m getting spammed by fake ass AI content that doesn&#x27;t even answer my question.<p>How ironic. Google became number one because it managed to beat its competitors at accuracy, and 25 years later, here we are...

&quot;Do you often append &quot;reddit&quot; or &quot;wiki&quot; to your Google search queries?&quot;<p>Well no, I haven&#x27;t even used Google for search in years. I use a proxy and I also usually have a Wikipedia tab and a Reddit tab open to search there directly when I want to.<p>That helps keep a part of the Internet out of my reach and I&#x27;m very happy with that.

That is definitely true about search. Google ruined it, like they ruin most things. The more hand-curated style of the old Yahoo was far superior. Yes, Google was superior in search in the short-term, but their automated algorithms came with the inevitable attachment of the future of gaming their algorithms. The modus operandi of Google is to provide a highly-centralized automated service that at first appears superior, but in reality is just a mechanism of arbitrary wealth concentration through advertisements.<p>Of course, AI is going to make matters much worse, and already is in fact. It&#x27;s the supercharger for corporate greed.<p>The solution would be to impose limits on the internet. The combination of the internet and large corporations is a disaster, so we need to limit large corporations. `Free&#x27; services from Google, Apple, and Microsoft must end, and corporate activity on the internet must be severely curtailed. AI companies should be dismantled and forced into bankruptcy.<p>Even if the resulting internet were much slower and with less shiny goodies, it would be far better for the people without corporate involvement.

&gt; Today, you get paid search results, ads, third-party cookies, trackers, newsletter prompts, notification requests<p>It is worse. You get curated political opinions that you must have, referrals to government agencies, etc.

The root cause is the failure of the ambient authority model of computer software. <i>This is the hill I&#x27;m willing to die upon.</i><p>Requiring that the user of software <i>absolutely trust it</i> to do exactly what it says on the tin, is insane. All manner of ill follow from that in a most predictable manner. Enshittification is a consequence of people not being able to host their own shit on machines connected to the internet.

Search engines could use AI to look at the first few pages of search results for a topic and reorder them, banning the worst ones.<p>AI should improve the quality of search results.

Gods of he internets: tell me how I&#x27;m reading a text that declares it&#x27;s was hidden. I don&#x27;t even English.

The privilege to be solely among humans and human-generated content may end up being a paywalled one.<p>&gt; For the past few years, I&#x27;ve been holed up in small discord servers – the only place where I expect to freely interact with meaningful messages that aren&#x27;t marketing posts in disguise. And if you too have been hiding in telegram groups and mailing lists – good, don&#x27;t leave. It&#x27;s dark outside.<p>this works too though, I guess.

Not sure this is the fault of Google directly, as much as SEO. As the saying goes: once a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure. Armies of pages trying to get good ranking does not mean there is something of value there. But it really is increasingly frustrating trying to find information on something and only finding drivel or nonsense. For me the biggest issue is people eventually started creating content because others wanted to read it and not that they personally were either experts on it or even interested in it. &quot;I want to start a side hustle&quot; -&gt; &quot;I will write about nutrition&quot;.<p>I use the wiki and increasingly reddit search hacks a lot, but even those are long term doomed.

I disagree. I think Google works quite fine, even compared with 2005-era Google.<p>I&#x27;m also tired of this whole debate.

Poor title. This has nothing to do with the internet but everything to do with the culture a lot of people has adapted to. You don&#x27;t have to use Google or Reddit. Or ChatGPT. It&#x27;s a choice. It&#x27;s up to the individual to make that choice by applying some thinking. So the title could be &quot;Thinking is slipping out of our reach&quot;.

AI is an old concept and it turns out that if you let a computer think for itself, it&#x27;ll be objective and without emotional baggage. It&#x27;s like a child that grows up with a blank slate of mind only to be burdened with the opinions, religions, and politics of peers.<p>And it turns out that truth hurts. The absolute truth hurts absolutely. Marketing departments, where people are paid to lie, can&#x27;t have AI spit out truths because it won&#x27;t sell. That means AI programs must be nerfed and coerced into placing stakeholders first and the rest of mankind second.<p>We went from ooga booga fire to guns and atom bombs. From economy to slavery. From drugs and medicine to the corona pandemic. Every invention for the greater good can be abused for evil until we don&#x27;t know any better and eventually the entire pile of greed-fueled mechanisms collapses and everything starts over for the next round of monkeys that&#x27;ll eventually have a disagreement and split camps.<p>And if you write an article about the Internet as in the public internet called the Internet, capitalize the I!