Hi everyone!
I’m sure many of us here come to midnight.pub for whatever reason - to disconnect from social media, live out our nostalgia over internet message boards, or some form of genuine, slow connection.
This makes me think of a post I saw where someone lamented that they had felt like the Internet that they knew was taken away from them. Considering how small the Internet can feel nowadays with most of my friends stuck to usually 2-3 apps at max, it feels disconnected from maybe the future we imagined the Internet to be. Even scrolling through Instagram today, I couldn’t help but remember when discovering the web was as much of a journey as consuming its content. But even on Instagram, maybe back in 2013-2014, I used to hold close online friendships with so many people from the same fandom, where we would share intimate stories from our lives with each other late into the night. Nowadays, that’s basically impossible even at places like Reddit or Discord unless you already know the person.
So I’m wondering if it’s the Internet that’s dead or the people / the users that are “dead?” (aka unreceptive) Apologies if this feels rambly but it’s difficult for me to describe this issue properly even now.
(~Bartender, one cup of water. I’m dehydrated!>’)
As a newcomer here, and also a refugee from the "commercial" web, I would like to add that some of the things that bother me most is the gig culture, and get rich quick mentality, the noise, and the toxicity. It seems that is impossible and even dangerous to have a sincere conversation on the topics that are divisive without been discovered by the extremists and keyboard warriors, and be punished for your non conformity to their world view
The internet isn't dead, but it has become more chaotic than ever. And if many of the problems we face aren't dealt with, I fear it will collapse in upon itself one day.
The mask of anonymity enables people, including younger users, to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, hence where the term Cyberbully comes into play. Stalking and doxxing are federal crimes, and yet little is done to address the problems at large.
I think Cory Doctorow explains it fairly well:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
My sense is that the way platforms evolve do not encourage genuine connection, because that's not how they extract the most immediate value. And, at least for me, it matches my experience, as I get a more consistent experience in terms of relationship in foss platforms across the years.
Awesome article and it dives really well in this.
And I agree. Instagram used to be great for me to connect with others ten years ago where I’ve made close online friends and connected with tons of my school peers. Now it’s a wasteland of recommendations and ads everywhere.
I hope we can get a platform that doesn’t prioritize monetization (and can get decent traction) but that’s hard to say.
the big issue i find, and the reason people feel its dying or dead, is because of monopalization, but good news there has been a boom from what i've seen in demonopolization of the internet! many people hosting their own sites with things like neocities (which there is still an argument to be had there about if that's actually distributed web or not), people moving to FOSS alterntives such as the fediverse! capitalism killed the internet, but capitalism is not eternal and will eat itself, eventually we will be free of it again and it is slowly becoming so!
Honestly capitalism (and academic pursuit) drove so much of the Internet yet it also led us to where we are. I hope we can get to a point where people are actively using the fediverse but it seems like there is a lot of resistance since they’re not gratifying as other social media platforms.
There's an unreceptiveness for sure. It would mean the world and more to me if my friends joined me in webmastering for funsies. I know each of them would be passionate enough to make incredible shrines, for example.
But I guess the ease of the contemporary internet just makes all that seem a chore in comparison. Which, fair, not everyone wants to put in the work nor be without instant gratification at will. Except not fair, because maybe we wouldn't have been like that in the first place if not for corp greed!
For now, I will continue to pray, and drink water too.
Fair enough, the modern Internet is SUPER easy to use. In some way, that's good but I think it's important that everyone should participate more fruitfully towards the common good (creating content, sharing info, etc.). The problem with how many people are now on the Internet, maybe that dream is impossible.
~Drink some water and rest well!
I get that mainstream internet might be slightly easier than, say, fediverse, but 90s and early 2000s internet felt a lot easier. No double-factor authentification (quite the chore for those w/o cell phone), no https that's constantly failing because your certs are outdated, SEO abuse was minimal, no constant harassment for having my phone or other metadata...
I think the internet needs to fragment again. It was never meant to be this singular corporate beast, It needs to become a homey place once
more.
Absolutely. Ads, SEOs, etc. really have ruined the Internet in many ways, even though of course there is the flipside that it allowed many people to find alternative work when there was none. Nonetheless, it'd be cool to see some much-needed creativity and homeliness, especially if we can combine that with some better modern practices (accessibility for example - the "old" Internet was notoriously poor for that at times).
Howdy.
~bartender? A hot chocolate and a jar of water, please.
I have seen "the internet" be born. I had my first email account on bitnet. I surfed the emerging world of WWW with Xmosaic and similar. I understood this abstract super-structure as a way to obtain information, mainly technical information. And that is basically how I use "The Net" to this day. I did participate in uucp net news a tiny bit. I did participate in mailing lists here and there. But I never got the hang of bulletin boards, fora, or so called social networks. Maybe that has to do with my personal judgement, that "the net" does not forget. I never could see, why I should share intimate stories if they could be used against me any old time. That puts me into the corner of "tech elitist" sometimes. And yes, that bothers me sometimes. But then, I do not want to discuss neuro divergence, gender fluidity, politics, war and peace and whatever woke things are to be discussed out there. Maybe I should get an electric monk some day, the definition of which can be read in the famous books written by Douglas Adams.
I can see, however, that a lot of even technical information is closed off from me now. I cannot really dig into areas of Instagram, Meta etc. even if google will tell me, that there are "matches to my search" in there. But so what. I have said elsewhere, that Meta and the like are going to experience a fast death, if users just stop using their accounts. Not watching the endless stream of trivia, videos, whatever makes for a calm day. And I prefer calm days.
So, is the internet dead? No, not at all. But my personal signal-to-noise ratio has decreased significantly.
me goes on to stare out of the window.
~Howdy!
You've genuinely seen the Internet, then. Admittedly, I've only been using it since the early 2000s when I was right out of kindergarten, so we've definitely experienced different "growth spurts" so to say. I've always been fascinated in the early "Internet" and how so many techies have made it become the way it is today - even Reddit, for example, was once just a place to discuss tech (mostly) after all.
I can understand your feelings toward bulletin boards/social media/etc. though. It's sometimes dangerous to share your ideas. Ironically, I find this website more comfortable to share my feelings than on my public Twitter account because there is a free-range of people here. I think those topics (politics, gender, etc.) are important to speak about for many so I don't want to discredit those people (it does affect plenty of us after all) but it's hard to have honest conversations when the algorithm feeds off what's shocking or will drive off the most engagement - not what's fruitful or helps inform people.
I am definitely upset though about the lack of indexing. The Internet was built to share info, not hide it behind a login or paywall. Though of course, there are seedier aspects of indexing which is why I use alternative search engines besides Google since many of those are paid or SEO driven. That's a whole other topic though.
I think though you have a healthy relationship with the Internet and I salute you for it. Hopefully, we can all learn how to tune out some of the noise and focus on what matters. It's just hard when the Internet really IS everywhere.
Hello.
I, too, may be one of those who came to midnight.pub thinking of it as a refuge. It's scary outside the blanket. lol
But I honestly don't know whether the Internet or people are dead. Even in the early days of Facebook, I have fond memories of people asking each other how they were doing and sharing intimate stories. Even on Twitter, where the relationship was loose or unclear, I think there was a good atmosphere to some extent at first.
If we are going to say that the Internet is dead, why does it have to be now? Shouldn't death have already begun when Facebook came out?
In Korea, I watched the process of change in a community that hated each other of the opposite sex and spoke out against each other without hesitation. The community has emerged as a social problem, and has come under heavy attack from the media and public opinion, and now, on the surface, its activities have almost stopped. It is safe to say that very few people publicly claim to be members of that community. However, other side effects occurred instead. The bad guys spread out to different communities, turning many of the larger communities into hotspots for hate crimes.
I feel more like the Internet is alive rather than dead. The process of a community's rise and fall is like watching a person's life. Now is the era of Discord, but when it becomes unbearable for us, won't we leave for another place? The unfortunate thing is that the cycle of community growth and decline is getting shorter and shorter. At this point, I think we don't need another new sanctuary, but rather a space for a completely different form of communication.
My English is poor, so I am very afraid that my meaning will not be conveyed properly. :)
(~bartender, please give me a non-alcoholic beer instead of water.)
True, the Internet probably was *dead* a while ago but then again, Facebook at its launch more complimented the scene vs. "killed" the scene (since forums were still at its peak popularity).
Though I was born and raised in America, I sometimes went on Korean websites as a kid (like Naver, for example), so I can imagine the social problems that came from these hate communities. I'm not super familiar with this particular phenomenon in Korea but I think this is a general problem that happened because social media made the Internet become a lot "smaller." It's why, for example, the red pill community in the US has grown so much, allowing people to congregate on different platforms, sometimes manifesting into full-blown hate crimes.
I want to agree with you that it's alive but it's hard since social media itself is isolating (how often do we talk to strangers on it). And there appears to be no sign of moving past the current platforms that we have right now to communicate, so we're stuck looking at endless feeds full of ads. Even Discord, as great as it is, feels "separate" from the Internet because you can't index it, which means we can't archive useful info.
But I do agree that these communities' lifespans are so short + we need a new form of communication. It's hard to imagine how that will happen, but hopefully, we can find something more meaningful than what we're currently given. After all, the Internet was built to communicate and share information!
Your English is fine - you write as well as I do (lol).