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I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
We won’t unless we stop the source perpetuating this “culture.”
Big Tech.
Unfortunately, they kinda have a grip on everyone’s information sphere, so I think our chances are low :(
AI is spam
Try to look at it as the chapter of the internet as we know it is over. I feel the same way as this author but I hold out hope innovation will happen.
Someone will fill the void. How and when it happens remains to be seen. There was a time not too long ago when it was unfathomable for people to have computers in their pocket.
The simpsons will probably predict it.
Yeah, well it’s full of malicious actors now, an they generally out influence and overwhelm the ordinary user.
The internet was nice when it was a non-profit space for nerds, but now it’s the main way to peddle money and influence in the world so it’s nasty and corrupt.
the ideas of the early net were merely ideals and were never going to last once money got involved. very few ideals ever last once money and power become the currency.
Maybe all this bullshit is a needed step to bring back old internet
We need forums back… the fediverse is a good start in my book.
[email protected] and [email protected] and friends are your saviour
Edit: I forget how the fuck to link communities without putting the whole URL
Edit edit: oh yeah, ! in front of name
The internet isn’t the internet anymore. It’s walled off, corporatized, and exclusionary.
The internet used to be for people.
Now it’s for profit.
Everything gets enshittified - Capitalised, and nothing good ever comes out of those leeches and parasites.
The Capitalist religion crushed a new global, free and open digital community landscape. Say loud and proud: ‘thank you Capitalist believer’, for how it looks and works today…
Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge.
Just don’t consume it. Same for blogs.
It’s like junk food. It’s not going away, so just don’t consume it.
yeah, but you get socially isolated if you don’t consume it.
just like 30 years ago if you turned up your nose at mcdonalds everyone thought you were an asshole, because it was considered great thing and only weirdos would not eat there.
further all of this bleeds over into your real everyday life.
If you feel the need to eat McDonald’s because of what other people think, then you have worse problems.
The undernet is growing as the overnet is bloated and dying of it’s own poison.
And what would the undernet be? This Lemmy here?
Check out Neocities, it’s a revamp of the old Geocities platform.
All individual small sites, in the style of the late 90’s-early 2000’s web. Tons of animated gifs, sparkling cursors, hand-crafted HTML and CSS, web rings, shrines and fan pages, etc.
Very fun to just click random pages and explore, just like back in the day before search engines and algos curated our feeds and content for us.
Holy shit, that sounds good and will look into it. Thanks!
Oh man! Its been so long since I have seen geocities like sites. This is going to be a great rabbit hole, thank you.
Here’s a direct link to the gallery. Scroll and blindly pick one with your finger with your ur eye closed
I’ve actually started to enjoy internet more recently. I went back to IRC, found a nice network with a wholesome community which is growing all the time. Recently added a phpbb based forum, which is not very active yet but thats more because its fairly new. Lots of self hosting enthusiasts there, I’ve learned a bunch. Spent the last few weeks setting up Jellyfin and Navidrome for my dad to use, so he doesnt have to deal with repeats on the Telly or pay for stupid subscriptions. I did the navidrome with a old laptop, I put in a headless Debian and use it through SSH on my Fedora. A year ago I barely knew how to do “sudo apt install”, without this community I wouldnt have been able to do any of it. For the first time in 15 years, I’m enjoying my time online. Like properly enjoying.
So its not about internet being ruined, its about finding that spot that you can enjoy. Let people rot their brains in tiktak and facetagram, you find yourself a nice community of like minded people. It takes some effort, but the communities are there. And if they are not, make one yourself.
Also you are using piefed.social which aggressively filters out AI content, the topic of the article.
And I love you for that :)
It really makes a big difference.
I’ve greatly reduced my Mastodon usage because of the daily “oh shit this link goes to AI slop again, sigh, close tab” experience. It’s such a drag.
Yeah thats one of the reasons I enjoy a smaller community with the IRC network and forum I was talking about. Its so much nicer to converse when you know its a person on the other side of the screen. I spend more time and effort on responses when I know the user already, at least on some level. With reddit and mastodon its more like “send whatever, turn off notifications” type of deal.
Though with reddit even thats coming to an end, rumor is they gonna finally axe old.reddit. I’m sort of holding out until then, the formula1 sub is quite valuable for me still, even though even that place is full of morons now. With Mastodon I never got off the ground. I log in like once a month, if that, read a couple of posts and then log off again. Maybe its because I mainly use it with my phone, I dont remember my password and the mobile browser is the only place where its saved hahah
I feel like there has been waves of losses.
- Web 2.0 upgrades made everyone feel like they had to have a shiny polished site. We lost a lot of fun amateurs.
Once apps started getting pushed websites started to get abandoned/empty. everything from shopping to small games. I shouldn’t need an app for the coffee shop.
Bots and bad search operators made looking and finding a chore.
Insta killed blogs, suddenly everyone wanted a insta or YT brand rather than a blog/rss
- Everything became sponsored =- say i wanted to find out how to polish my boots, the first 3 pages and everything everywhere suddenly tries to sell me boots.
This is why i no longer enjoy the internet. I know i sound old man yelling at cloud.
as a former web developer, you nailed it.
I essentially taught myself how to build sites from Geocities. Back then the internet was awesome because finding a new site that was cool was like finding buried treasure. Things weren’t condensed. there was no central hub for news, media, socializing, etc. it was all spread out. you had webrings of similar interests, different forums you’d go to for different topics. different chat rooms like IRC, or The Palace, or Yahoo/AOL chat. It was better. it was easier to make friends online.
now it’s all condensed and boring. you go to less than a handful of sites a day, maybe only one or two, to get content. Forums are all but dead and social media killed them. We know too much about each other now, the “penpal” aspect is gone. blogs and livejournals don’t provide interesting and personal content anymore…they all have hidden agendas of essentially the author trying to get a job. Webapps killed creativity.
The internet is boring now and you really have to dig and dig deep for that “old school” content. because regardless of what search engine you use be it DDG, Kogi, Startpage, Google, whatever NONE of them are going to point you to someones Neocities or SpaceHey or blog anymore. They need to sell you something instead.
it’s like sites like this: https://www.manuelsweb.com/ THIS is what the internet used to be like. personal sites that just had links and posts about whatever was special in someones life.
I think we should bring back individual websites and blogs as well as web rings. Fuck the current state of search engines!
It used to be so much fun mooching around and stumbling on things, like a site covered in rainbows that told you about a the best walks on a local mountain and then had a random ice cream recipe and some happy person taking a silly photo of themselves, followed by a review of their fav spoon and some instructions on how to fix a vacuum.
Same, taught myself HTML over a summer in high school. Literally went to a library and printed out a tutorial I found on the Internet.
I will say though, if you haven’t heard of it, there’s a small movement to get back to more organic web content. There’s the Fediverse for social media that isn’t algorithmically-weighted. There’s NeoCities for web pages. There’s Mojeek and Marginalia for search. (Marginalia is all non-commercial, so its search index is interesting.)
There’s still a lot of good out there.
Neocities I just checked it out and omg it feels like 2005 in the best way. Thank you.
wow thanks for these sites! I knew of neocities but never really spent time looking at the various sites, i’m actually starting to build one now. also Marginalia is great. saved all three to my startpage.
Hey, you’re welcome. If you’re interested I also did a full breakdown of the Fediverse on my YT channel earlier this year.
Check out wiby.me for old-school stuff too. Clicking on ‘surprise me…’ is my favorite way to “surf the web” in modern times.
wow thank you! I absolutely LOVE wiby.me and I had no idea it existed. I’ve just been clicking on surprise me over and over all day. it’s great. reminds me of old webrings. easily my new favourite site/search engine.
you dont sound like old man yelling at cloud. you sound like sane man in madhouse.
Old man yelling at cloud was right all along. The cloud is genuinely trying to ruin us.
Arrrgh! Point 3 puts me into Hulk Smash mode.
Me: “How do I start a fire?”
Site: 2 pages of what fire is, 3 pages of how fire was discovered, a page of uses for fire, a digression on how fire has impacted þe auþor’s life (which is utter fabrication as it’s written by an LLM), all interspersed wiþ lighter ads, and finally an answer of “go buy a lighter”.It’s internet recipes taken to an extreme, and it’s all AI generated now. It is so infuriating.
You kinda are yelling at the cloud, dude
(Shakes fist:) Goddamm cloud! Git off my lawn!
Just because people remember a measurably better time doesn’t mean they’re yelling at clouds.
This wasn’t even that long ago.
Are you 12?
Edit: I have been regretfully informed that I have in fact, missed the joke lol.
Am I 12? Physically - no
It’s ok, as demonstrated by my complete miss of your joke, we all 12 out here sometimes.
I regret to inform you that you have missed the joke.
Oh god.
That’s hilarious lol.
Thank you internet stranger.
Same… I tried Kagi small web which kinda promised to fix it but so far every page is a hyper-focused version of everything I hate. It somehow made it even worse.
I think it can’t really solve the problem because the people that want that tight nit free and open. Internet are already retreating from engaging with whatever this is.
People have repeatedly called things “Web 3.0” but I think we’ve legitimately made it finally and I hate it.
2nd to last paragraph:
And this isn’t some anti-AI screed — I’m all-in on agentic software engineering!
i’ve seen multiple “the internet is turning to shit, but i love AI!” posts this week. absolutely brain-dead.
To be fair the internet was already shit before 2023
That is definitely true, but right now it’s as if that shit has been out in the sun on a hot summer day, right after rain.
Not to the extent it is now courtesy of AI.
I dunno man, in 20-23 all the ravings about Covid being fake or crafted by china and released on purpose and vaccines being a conspiracy to track you by bill gates were by almost all real people, it was pretty shitty even before ai built all the websites, all the posts, all the comments.
IMHO using ai to automate tasks is not the same as using ai to generate sloppy content
Using AI to automate tasks that could be automated with a script is awful. And if the endpoints are there for AI to trigger actions, then a simple script could use those same endpoints to do the same thing.
Using AI to help write the script? (Strong emphasis on “help”) Ok, maybe in some scenarios.
But just constantly running AI to do shit is like firing up your big diesel pickup to go down the block to visit your neighbors, except in this case the diesel truck can’t even be trusted to reliably take you to your neighbors every time you want to go there. There’s always the chance it’s going to decide to go somewhere else.
That emdash tho
Emdash is useful punctuation — I use it all the fucking time.
On the other hand, “it’s not foo; it’s bar,” once a quirky rhetorical flourish, now scans lazy and sloppy as shit.
Also, swearing like a motherfucking sailor helps establish one’s humanity. So fuck off. No offense. Have a lovely day!
The emdash is a much bigger sign of llm slop than the semicolon. Leave my semicolons outta this.
Llms swear.
The it’s not x it’s not y it’s z! Not x not y just z! Always been lazy. Don’t tell the reader what it isn’t
“Don’t tell me what isn’t so,” has to be something I say on an hourly basis when I use AI. If you ever correct anything, it just writes itself little notes like doing something dumb would be the obvious behavior otherwise.
“This service does not use JPA, it uses JDBC, so don’t add Hibernate to the dependencies.”
Motherfucker, what? Four words: “this service uses JDBC.” I swear it’s a gimmick to make AI use more tokens.
let’s make them enjoy it less
The internet is in small communities we shitpost in along the way
