Realistically, we’ve seen the dying of the open web.
It may not be dead for good but it’s very diseased.
With LLMs/AIs now polluting all sorts of things with rubbish (the fake bug report for cURL is my “favourite” story so far) that is hard to distinguish from genuine human content …
… I’m now thinking it’s dead. Like, we are going to start thinking about using processes of getting and sharing information that don’t just go over the internet.
Closed online environments with gated membership. In person processes where humanity is physically verified. Live conversation to verify actual human understanding. Static sources of information like books and manuals etc.
Not for everything, obviously. But for some things it seems the open internet may soon have a new cost that undermines its value proposition.
I’m personally not interested anymore in just using the open internet. I’m sniffing for some verification that something is worth reading or interacting with.
I remember that what you are describing was already present in the “open web” of old.
You’d come to some place “openly”, but then (in case of RP forums)
until you’d write a long character description and discuss it with mods for long, you wouldn’t be allowed to post in most parts of that forum, and
until you had chatted over ICQ with a few people from that forum and knew who they are and they knew who you are, you wouldn’t be really welcome, people would just ignore your posts.
You would come to a place quite socially, not unlike IRL meetings. It wouldn’t be FB or Google confirming your registration and giving you right to post, it would be a real person you were going to communicate with later.
And maybe I’m not that asocial\autistic\etc, if that was fine with me back then and what’s now isn’t. Maybe I’m just afraid of silent eyes and silent hands managing my social interactions, which is sane.
I’ve said it a number of times else where … but it’s easy to forget that the era of mega corp online platforms was a weird time of rampant extraction and manipulation. We’ve got quite a bit of stuff to unlearn and relearn (like your examples).
And of course now with the big corps turning on us to extract more money and use the data they’ve milked from us build AIs to take our jobs away … we have the final proof of what we should have known the whole time … that social media should have kept its roots in organic human organisation.
Realistically, we’ve seen the dying of the open web.
It may not be dead for good but it’s very diseased.
With LLMs/AIs now polluting all sorts of things with rubbish (the fake bug report for cURL is my “favourite” story so far) that is hard to distinguish from genuine human content …
… I’m now thinking it’s dead. Like, we are going to start thinking about using processes of getting and sharing information that don’t just go over the internet.
Closed online environments with gated membership. In person processes where humanity is physically verified. Live conversation to verify actual human understanding. Static sources of information like books and manuals etc.
Not for everything, obviously. But for some things it seems the open internet may soon have a new cost that undermines its value proposition.
I’m personally not interested anymore in just using the open internet. I’m sniffing for some verification that something is worth reading or interacting with.
I remember that what you are describing was already present in the “open web” of old.
You’d come to some place “openly”, but then (in case of RP forums)
until you’d write a long character description and discuss it with mods for long, you wouldn’t be allowed to post in most parts of that forum, and
until you had chatted over ICQ with a few people from that forum and knew who they are and they knew who you are, you wouldn’t be really welcome, people would just ignore your posts.
You would come to a place quite socially, not unlike IRL meetings. It wouldn’t be FB or Google confirming your registration and giving you right to post, it would be a real person you were going to communicate with later.
And maybe I’m not that asocial\autistic\etc, if that was fine with me back then and what’s now isn’t. Maybe I’m just afraid of silent eyes and silent hands managing my social interactions, which is sane.
Well said.
I’ve said it a number of times else where … but it’s easy to forget that the era of mega corp online platforms was a weird time of rampant extraction and manipulation. We’ve got quite a bit of stuff to unlearn and relearn (like your examples).
And of course now with the big corps turning on us to extract more money and use the data they’ve milked from us build AIs to take our jobs away … we have the final proof of what we should have known the whole time … that social media should have kept its roots in organic human organisation.