The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)

Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV.<p>It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.<p>Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.<p>That makes my old hacker heart smile.

Abandoning is not the answer.<p>I see the effect with my father, he never got much into it in the first place and now he is completely lost when he need to order stuff. So many scammy website featuring first in Google result thanks to seo optimisation or just advertisement.<p>Then he is completely oblivious to the fact that people can make deepfake video and believed one to be true when it was shown to him on someone else phone.<p>As much garbage there can be on the internet, you have to force yourself to keep up with it and overall technology otherwise you&#x27;re just left behind at the mercy of those who adapted.

For those not familiar, this post is by John Walker[0] one of the co-founders of Autodesk who made AutoCAD. He passed away last year[1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;John_Walker_(programmer)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;John_Walker_(programmer)</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39297185">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39297185</a>

&gt; But I fear the cure may be worse than the disease, so much so that I penned a 25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers.<p>This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the intelligence of content on the internet.<p>However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and spam would stop internet use.

There was not even an AI back then, what would he say now?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;chriswestfall&#x2F;2024&#x2F;12&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-dark-side-of-ai-tracking-the-decline-of-human-cognitive-skills&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;chriswestfall&#x2F;2024&#x2F;12&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-da...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phys.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-skills.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phys.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...</a>

&gt; When I&#x27;m feeling down I call it “Internet Gated Communities”, when in an optimistic mood, “The Faculty Club”. This may lead to what many observers refer to as “the Balkanisation of the Internet”—a fragmentation of the “goes everywhere, reaches everybody” vision of the global nervous system into disconnected communities. This may not be such a bad thing.<p>This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn&#x27;t a gated community, but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is &quot;walled gardens&quot;, and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.<p>The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and &quot;old web&quot; nostalgists need to recognize why these services are popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the openness they care about.

A group of humans (with all kinds represented) blurs out all refined qualities almost by definition.<p>Eventually some of them (of more similar thought) will leave for greener pastures. Perhaps naively so as it involves a lot of work or perhaps working on something together brings people together. If these few heretics succeed others will follow until the new place truly becomes as wonderful as imagined. More and more will follow, even people who don&#x27;t want to be there will show up until eventually everything blurs out again and the process continues.<p>Besides the new place where interesting people gather there is the old place left behind where the interesting is undesired or made illegal. Meanwhile they also want to bring back the old days.<p>There are countless examples of this process from IRC and the USA to TV and Facebook. The Moon and Mars colony will also start out stupid then turn into something wonderful... for a while :)<p>This will be the only thing I write on the internet today eventho I shouldn&#x27;t bother. The point use to be to get some useful intelligent response to refine or correct my perspective.<p>Solving world hunger costs only 35 billion per year. It&#x27;s a great bench mark. If the internet is the sum of human knowledge we must be short of something else. Apparently we can type text into inputareas ad infinitum without accomplishing even this simple, cheap and easy goal. What a bunch of losers we are :)

I haven&#x27;t abandoned it at all, but I do try to regulate my internet time.<p>I use it to read articles, trade equities, play chess, communicate with colleagues, and do market research for my company. Of course, I engage with a few communities, particularly HN and a few private Slack &#x2F; Discord groups that align with my company.<p>I also try to get out a lot, touch grass, read physical books, and exercise. I try to avoid bringing my phone with me to places where I won&#x27;t need it, such as to the gym or to the running track.<p>The crux is that we&#x27;ve completely surrendered ourselves to social media.

I already did. I don&#x27;t use the Internet anymore.

Bots now make most internet traffic. I wonder how many Reddit stories are written by bots. Answered by bots. Interesting to read, don&#x27;t get me wrong.<p>This is why worldcoin may have a bright future: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;world.org&#x2F;world-id" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;world.org&#x2F;world-id</a><p>I think we are moving to gated communities again. The internet will split into several parts. Microsoft always wanted the internet to be a Microsoft thing. So maybe we move into this direction.

The Internet is BGP, IP, and the like.<p>Systems that run <i>on</i> the Internet come and go: the open web, the siloed web, social media, private overlay networks, etc. All of those still exist but there&#x27;s definitely been a progression of the ages in which these things have been dominant and then faded into the background. I&#x27;m sure this will keep happening.<p>I don&#x27;t think the Internet is going anywhere.

@dang, it&#x27;s small, but there&#x27;s a spelling error in the title. Intenet -&gt; Internet

That&#x27;s like saying you should abandon the Earth. There&#x27;s a multitude of ways to be a part of and use The Internet.<p>Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.

The internet is the new daytime TV.

If for internet we think of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like...then YES.

see also: Pandora&#x27;s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;folksonomy.co&#x2F;?permalink=2299" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;folksonomy.co&#x2F;?permalink=2299</a>

You don&#x27;t need to abandon &quot;the Internet&quot;. Maybe we could improve on the TCP&#x2F;IP stack or the ISP model but it&#x27;s hardly a priority. What we need is to abandon the web and start a divergent platform.<p>It&#x27;s not your average Chrome-with-no-adblock user that&#x27;s ruining the web. It&#x27;s the &quot;slumlords&quot; if you will. For those slumlords it&#x27;s all about the money and they&#x27;ve already invested into building a slum on the web. They already have all the users on that platform. They&#x27;re happy to milk them. They don&#x27;t care about capturing profit from techies - if they did, we would see companies do a much better job of providing hacker-friendly services. If the hackers all move to some other platform where they don&#x27;t have ads, trackers or JS bloat the slumlords will ignore it like they ignored the internet in the 80s and 90s. Only if there is potential to bring the non-technical users in droves on that platform will they care, but those users already have the current Web, so why would they bother?<p>Unfortunately so far it seems like everybody wants to try their own take on the &quot;next&quot; platform. Experimentation and diversity of opinion is great and all, but ultimately we can&#x27;t leave the slum until everyone agrees on one place to go instead. Best I can think of is Gemini that has some traction, but in its current form I doubt it will succeed - the creators put too much of their idiosyncrasies into it.

&gt; &quot;As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside the rule of law.&quot;<p>I wonder how much of VC thinking skewed this way, encouraging Facebook and others to try and become AOL-like walled gardens, and eventually lobbying governments to make exceptions for them.

Betteridge&#x27;s law in full effect

Well I sort of abandoned it now. I visit here and, occasionally, the articles posted here. Also a thin slice of very curated youtube content. And software documentation. And porn. That’s it.<p>Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in <i>all that</i>. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise.<p>Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.

Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners.<p>What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person. Americans won&#x27;t understand this but many European countries are already primed for it.<p>If you want to go slumming you&#x27;re free to do so, but I want a stable and safe social media as an alternative.