'Please Let the Internet Die' (wired.com) 163
Slashdot reader fjo3 shares an article from Wired: The internet must be put out of its misery. Any rational observer can admit that the current iteration of the web -- and the social fabric woven there -- is not what they signed up for. Symptoms of advanced cultural decay can no longer be ignored. This thing is eating itself. Giants including Meta and Google have been forced to settle massive consumer lawsuits brought over privacy violations and mental health harms allegedly caused by the addictive mechanisms of their platforms. Schools are banning smartphones as multiple countries institute social media restrictions for under-16s. Parents are in a panic about their kids aspiring to careers as social media celebrities, losing themselves in a vast ecosystem of online casinos, or joining extremist movements. Generative AI, briefly considered an amusing novelty, is now a turbocharged slop engine for the web, filling feeds and comment sections with useless, grotesque content. As humans scroll past headlines about AI taking their jobs, confusing fantasy for reality, and contributing to cognitive decline, any consumer appeal the technology might have is turning to anguish. The data centers that power it have become increasingly unpopular, and politically radioactive.
To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited. In December, Oxford University Press declared rage bait to be the word of the year, noting that use of the term had tripled over the previous 12 months. The lexical spike represented a heightened awareness that monetized social accounts churn out bad-faith takes and extremist content, automating this abusive behavior with generative AI, simply to profit off hostile engagement. Billionaire oligarchs have opened the floodgates to such inauthentic activity, conspiracy-mongering, and hate speech by rolling back moderation. In short, when you hang around online in 2026, you see little worth saving. Perhaps a decade ago, you felt that the glimmers of community and joy, of artistic and intellectual exchange, were enough to balance out the toxic junk. No longer.
To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited. In December, Oxford University Press declared rage bait to be the word of the year, noting that use of the term had tripled over the previous 12 months. The lexical spike represented a heightened awareness that monetized social accounts churn out bad-faith takes and extremist content, automating this abusive behavior with generative AI, simply to profit off hostile engagement. Billionaire oligarchs have opened the floodgates to such inauthentic activity, conspiracy-mongering, and hate speech by rolling back moderation. In short, when you hang around online in 2026, you see little worth saving. Perhaps a decade ago, you felt that the glimmers of community and joy, of artistic and intellectual exchange, were enough to balance out the toxic junk. No longer.
Blame the correct thing (Score:5, Informative)
"The Internet" is not Meta and Google or whatever company we are talking about today. "The Internet" is not social media. The Internet is an interconnected network of servers and clients and other devices speaking a range of protocols but mostly TCP/IP and UDP, that communicate with one another. Should the interconnect die? No.
Should the bloodsucking companies manipulating people be punished? Yes, and this has just begun. It won't be enough for some people and others will say "buyer beware." But either way the headline is false and "The Internet" is a necessary communication medium.
Stop confusing social media and commercial services with "the Internet."
Re:Blame the correct thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Came here to say "kinda" the same. Every one of the problems stated aren't internet's fault. Its hypercorporativism and late stage capitalism taken to its most extreme ends.
Re: Blame the correct thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Your comment is 100 years out of date. It is no different than when you morons deny climate science with a straight face. We are living it now and you are telling us not to trust our lying eyes.
Re: Blame the correct thing (Score:2)
Climate change... Another fine product of the same capitalism that brought us racism.
Re: Blame the correct thing (Score:3)
You are forgetting slavery and and a wierd dependence on illegal labor. Americans use both to avoid paying the true cost of things. AI is also used as a distorted version of that.
I do not understand the urge of Americans to make it so normal people can't make a living making something, especially at the cost of the wealth disparity it brings.
You bring a dollar store into a neighborhood, and it destroys the economy of the stores around it. The targeted end game of AI is also similar.
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Without science, a hypothesis never gets rigorously confirmed and mainstream enough to ever be considered a theory.
Yep, this. (Score:4, Insightful)
People who don't like the toxicity of social media can stop using it. Problem solved, next!
People who don't like AI slop filling up news articles can switch to a different news source (or, heaven forbid, create one of their own!). Problem solved, next!
If you agree that kids shouldn't have cell phones during school due to the distractions, and that social media is harmful to kids, then what's the problem here? Looks like "the world" is taking appropriate action on that front already. Problem being solved, next!
I think there *is* a greater problem in that huge numbers of people aren't recognizing this and remain caught-up in the toxicity and misinformation and radicalization and etc. that is going on online, and their poor judgment is motivating them to take actions that are harmful, to themselves and others, politically and economically. That problem has me concerned, but we aren't going to fix it by killing the Internet.
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Yup the next revolution is personal.
Whilst we are doing that our political leaders and merchants shaping our world are addicted to this shit.
We don't have to kill the internet, nor should we, but we can give people the option to limit their exposure for social media, they presently have none, and there is nothing like an abundance of conflicting information to upset a human monkey. It's an untapped use case.
I wouldn't want to live there, Russia and China, both have national firewalls, yes to protect an au
Re: Yep, this. (Score:2)
They don't want any competition for their own malevolent disinformation, which is redundant.
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I don't disagree. But even dictators can show us something, not least what evil looks like.
It's beyond me to decide what's more evil, making advertising money from advice for teen suicide as free/shit speech/social media has, or a government controlling the narrative for something like a general good. I can imagine horror stories that might happen to Chinese homeless and prisoners, but homelessness is less evident than in the US or UK, if we believe the stats. A lesser of two evils perhaps. I really don't
Re: Yep, this. (Score:3)
What's harmful is having information hidden from you.
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Yup the next revolution is personal.
Unfortunately, every detail of it will be documented and shared on social media:
"Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share so more people can be part of my personal journey towards freedom from invasive technology and living a more wholesome life! Behind the scenes, daily updates, and chats are available exclusively on my patreon."
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So...
-Stop using social media (Facebook, Insta, Snapchat, email, message boards, basically the entirety of the 'Net)... so, don't buy anything online, don't check your email, no phone, basically live like a guy in a log cabin a thousand miles from nowhere.
-AI slop filling up news articles: you can't really switch to another news source that doesn't use AI in their articles because there isn't really one (and, let's say you create your own news site... where do you get your information from... or is it just
Re:Blame the correct thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. The internet is not the problem. The problem is the walled gardens that have been setup by social media giants. These networks are not for your benefit, they are there to influence, manipulate, and control... yet some people deem them "essential". Using social media is a choice, not a life requirement. If you don't like social media, don't use it. If you don't like what some newspaper is writing, don't read it. Some people need to take some personal accountability for their choices, or lack there of.
I left social media around the beginning of the pandemic because that is when the crazy's went wild. Instead of letting their manipulative poison and propaganda mess with my mind, I checked out. No, I am not right or left wing... I'm just a person who doesn't want to be drowning in crazy talk by people who are clearly unhinged.
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It's not just the social media aspect. Londo is correct, but all of the major platforms have worked very hard to direct people away from the open Internet. Meta, for sure, but also Alphabet, Amazon, Tencent, etc.
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Millions of users don't have proper connectivity, they are stuck behind CGNAT and cannot self host or p2p. They are dependent on those walled gardens hosted by someone else.
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The continued use of legacy IPv4 and slow rollout of IPv6 breaks that notion completely. Now you have a two tier system of users with full connectivity, and many millions of second tier users with partial connectivity stuck behind CGNAT.
These second tier users can't self host, can't p2p, and become dependent on additional third parties for things that first-tier users take for granted. Many of these third parties are abusive in various ways.
Back in the day you could host a low bandwidth chat server such as
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Not like IPv6 solves anything with lots of ISP blocking inbound IPv6 connections.
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> "The Internet" is not Meta and Google or whatever company we are talking about today. "The Internet" is not social media.
Indeed it isn't. It's this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I'm not aware that any of the corporations which provide the actual "backbone" of the internet , which is to say all the relays and address handlers, are in any way blocking or deleting any traffic. I'm ignoring cases where a state government shuts down all traffic into or out of their country. Can you provide other data?
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Don't have any mod points ATM, otherwise you'd get one, cellocgw.
There isn't one massive corporation that controls everything... the fiber and copper backbone (the fat cables draped along the ocean floor between continents) isn't owned by anyone, where that fat cable comes to shore and is dispatched out to the ISPs and cell carriers is (far as I'm aware) an unnamed entity. The internet that hits your house is Spectrum or whoever, they lease that bandwidth from whoever owns the trunkline that comes into you
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I'm not aware that any of the corporations which provide the actual "backbone" of the internet , which is to say all the relays and address handlers, are in any way blocking or deleting any traffic.
Straw man noted and sn!ggered at.
Oh look, the word filter is shit as usual.
Re: Blame the correct thing (Score:4, Informative)
The literal actual backbone of the Internet can be identified because the companies which provide it are literally called backbone providers and the links in question are literally called backbone links. HTH, HAND
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Like almost everything else you have, it exists because someone saw an opportunity to profit by creating it.
Re: Blame the correct thing (Score:2)
Yes, profit grew it... Into a monster.
You clowns who worship prosperity never will understand sustainability.
Jon Katz, is that you? (Score:5, Funny)
What is "the internet" (Score:2)
The technical person would say it's a collection of protocols and the hardware and software that implement them. The information that happens to be hosted there, other than of course the information necessary to keep the internet functioning (routing tables, DNS records, etc.), is not "the internet."
There is no need for the internet as defined above to die, unless something better has displaced it and almost nobody is using it anymore (BITNET anyone?).
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"There is no need for the internet as defined above to die..."
Which is why that's not the definition of interest.
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Since then, the chorus on various sites has become rather larger than merely fourteen thousand. The background noise is incredible. I'm amazed any
Re:What is "the internet" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know who you think "we" is, but I certainly understand that, the problem is that the OP doesn't. "The internet" here means what a layperson thinks, it is the content not the nuts and bolts. The internet is what you interact with, not the phone line you use to do so. No one advocates that data services should die.
"We just want web 1.0 back"
No, we don't. Ignorance is what has created the mess, it will not be the solution to it. Your opinion is based on your assumed personal superiority, an assumption at odds with your simplistic view.
There is no accountability on the internet, by design. Until that changes, "the internet" will be corrupt and "we", as in you, continue to think that's the right answer. Web 1.0 had no accountability, that was the part preserved to enable the corruption we face.
I have been saying these things since the 90's, for at least 30 years. Greed and corruption was apparent then, all that has changed is how obvious the social damage is. Back then, the enthusiasm was directed to how to exploit ad revenue devices to take money while providing no product or service, literally pure greed. That was what drove the internet then and drives the internet now, a return to "Web 1.0" does nothing to fix that even if it makes you feel better about yourself.
It should also be understood that it's not just "the internet". The computer revolution was driven by opportunities to improve productivity, people was interested because they cared what they could do. Computers and applications were driven by improved capability and that's what computer sciences focused on. That is not true today, instead computing is oriented around exploitation and corporate profit and that is now what computer sciences focus on. That's why modern software development sucks, it's entirely greed-driven. AI is the same, research used to focus on capability, now it's money grab.
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Re: What is "the internet" (Score:2)
The Internet is by definition a network of networks. Therefore how you define it will be defined by how you define networks. However, since a reasonable definition of a network includes all of the devices on that network, it is also reasonable to include the functions provided by those devices.
Agree, we started with villages (Score:5, Interesting)
With social media, what they perhaps mean by "internet", we tried to start with a global city and it turned out to be a tower of babble.
We proved to be not evolved enough to deal with a community that size. Anyone who says they like it as it is, is invested in the present chaos.
Start again with villages, little social networks, deciding what they want to let in and getting paid to be advertised to, if they choose to be.
If you want to build that, I can write the spec. The objective is a decentralised cooperative.
Re: Agree, we started with villages (Score:2)
What's needed is a web of trust moderation system which can be used to filter email, Usenet, and social media sites. Go forth and write!
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"With social media ... we tried to start with a global city and it turned out to be a tower of babble."
Except that is utterly false. Social media was always about villages and exclusivity. Tribalism was a foundational principle of social media. MySpace was about particular content creation, Facebook was exclusive to college students, this exclusivity drove popularity, a "global city" was the enemy from the start. "Birds of a feather" is literally the foundational principle of social media, it has never
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It was a pretence of villages, friends groups, or a topic thread. You could make a group like a village but it didn't mean anything, or it meant as much as a group of loosely acquainted strangers on a street corner listening to every random loon that walks by holding a bill board.
What was a lie, was it calling it social, it doesn't map to how we organise in society at all. You can meet with your friends down the pub without having ads shoved in your face and most importantly, you are not anonymous, you cant
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werent a typo .. that my friend was art
Blackwall Time? (Score:2)
Put all bot/agent/AI traffic behind a digital black wall and start Internet 2.0?
No. Just fix DNS, make the Web ... (Score:2)
... offline capable and redo E-Mail with default encryption and signatures. And in a universal time tick of 3 hours for message passing and updates.
Problem(s) solved.
Let the roads die... (Score:4, Insightful)
I largely agree with most of Klee's points, but there's a serious bias issue with his conclusion: "The internet" is just the road we use to get somewhere. Where we go is up to us most of the time. And in this case, the "old internet" is still mostly there - Case in point, I still have a crappy static personal website up that hasn't been updated since the 1990s.
Problem is, nobody wants to read my ramblings from 30 years ago any more than they did 30 years ago. People want FAANGs, even while they may openly resent those same platforms. Sure, Amazon is evil... But the alternative is leaving the house and going to a store, eew! NetFlix kills everything good after two seasons, but two seasons on-demand beats a 30-second stick-figure animation that takes six weeks per "episode" and depends on the unpaid hobbyist creator not getting bored with the project. TikTok is measurably destroying the attention spans of our youth, but we can't risk missing the next big "hold my beer and watch this" moment.
The problem isn't "the internet". The problem is us as a collective whole. When there's demand for trash, sanitation engineers flip to supply side.
I'm gonna go build my own internet! (Score:2)
With blackjack! And hookers! ... In fact, forget the internet!
Hmm, your ideas are... (Score:2)
So Mr Gore (Score:3)
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Credit where it's due.
There is a simple solution that nobody uses. (Score:2)
i2p and TahoeLAFS mean that anyone with five old ThinkCentres can have censorship-resistant hosting and their own experience curation. The internet never had to be beholden to payment processors, which are the parties responsible for the vast majority of the problems on it. But touching computers is boring and icky, and the people who do it refuse to front-end shit like that, so here we are.
Now for the serious post... amend the title (Score:5, Insightful)
I would amend the title to: "Please let the way that most people use the internet die".
And that has to start with individuals.
Are you ready to give up social media and clutivate a local group of like-minded friends who will put in the time and effort to socialize in-person?
Are you ready to shop locally for everything you can, and not order online unless you have to?
Are you ready to walk or drive yourself to your favorite local restaurant to pick up your takeout, instead of using a gig delivery service?
Are you ready to eschew LLMs, even to the point of pushing back on your employer if they insist you incorporate LLM output in your work?
The punchline to my little ol' rant here is that I feel most people are too comfortable with, or too addicted to, or whatever to, the kind of things I mention above, and that for most people, if they think about it at all, might have a passing thought of "why should I bother, some other activist will start the fight and then I'll just like their posts".
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Individuals are the ones inserting themselves into every conversation uninvited.
FB was great initially (Score:2)
At first it was a good way to connect with friends, once Zuck figured out how to Enshitify it it wasn't worth wading through the ads and slop to stay on. Two failings of the internet 1) Built in security in email and routing ( you should be able to have open internet but also trusted internet on layer 3 that doesn't allow connections if one enables it or even to route to your IP if you don't trust them) 2) No social networking (no one really saw this coming when the internet started, and it would have been
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Re: FB was great initially (Score:2)
The original model for Facebook was collecting information on women at college to make it easier for zuck to fuck them.
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This is basically right, although no one should think the solutions will be easy or obvious. The internet is geared toward allowing people to do horrible things without consequence. It needs to be exactly the opposite. The ultra-rich won't want that to change, many are rich for precisely that reason.
Quit Whining (Score:3)
Quit whining and quit using the WWW. Problem solved.
But, the article's writer is intentionally participating in the very scheme he's complaining about. Hypocrite.
Wrong Diagnosis; Motivated Dishonesty. (Score:5, Interesting)
Tivo broke Civilization.
The olds will remember.
In the early 80s, every American watched the same TV programs at the same time. LIve, broadcast TV. It was the national American culture. Everyone at work and at school the next morning talked about their shared experience and varying reactions to the BroadCast that The Party had shown them the prior night.
Cable TV - by offering a few more channels - had _some_ impact on the "breakup" of America.
But it was Tivo - mass-scale consumer time shifting. Americans no longer watched all the same propaganda at the same time.
The monoculture started to crack.
The rest of it is downstream from there. The bigs tried to retain their control of culture and opinion, but it became too fragmented and too decentralized. They couldn't.
Nobody is mad about the internet. They are mad they don't control the internet.
How would you restructure it? (Score:2)
Sure, you can run your LAMP stack, and
It's still a good thing (Score:2)
Boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, boo hoo! The government can't control what people people see, read, or think. Psst... that's called freedom, son. You should try it some time.
Heck yeah (Score:2)
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So be a fucking grownup and walk away. (Score:3, Insightful)
TSIA
If you're upset about "everything":
a) take your ritalin or prozac or whatever cocktail of anxiety meds you're on; you missed a dose.
b) you control you. Nobody MAKES you addicted to the social media feeds; yes, absolutely they are CRAFTED to be the visual-cortex version of heroin. I get that, they are meant to be addictive as fuck. NEVERTHELESS you are (supposedly) a human with agency. Just. Put. The. Fucking. Thing. Down. Go for a walk. Read a book. Turn off your router for a while, if that helps.
Otherwise you're just a herd mammal bleating that you don't like the pasture YOU put yourself in.
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I swear to God the older I get the more people try to drag me into a Meta account for one reason or another. It is making me out to be some kind of luddite to them. They just don't care about the unseen parts of the Meta experience.
I'm going to go down with never having had a Meta account. Even if it ostracizes me.
Bring back the internet (Score:2)
And stop claiming corporate social media and apps were the internet.
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Shaking fist at clouds? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm old enough to remember the computer bulletin board system (BBS) days fondly. I ran my own BBS for over a decade, in one form or another. At the end, I moved it to kind of a hybrid setup where I had 4 dial-in phone numbers for modems, but also a 128K ISDN circuit to the Internet. Most callers used it as a way to access some Internet resources while others started connecting to the BBS itself via the Internet.
Ultimately, BBS sysops (the jargon for system operators) realized we were at the end of an era. The Internet simply made the hobby of BBSing obsolete. Why limit oneself to using a specific bulletin board system and whatever limited options it has on its menus, when a raw Internet connection allowed hopping all over the world to content of all types -- even accessing multiple screens of it simultaneously?
Even back then though? I think many of us mourned the lack of personal connection that caused. On a BBS you used regularly, you had typically 100-500 or so somewhat regular users to interact with. Most were in your same geographic location. It wasn't uncommon to organize gatherings so people could meet the real humans behind the screen names/handles.Message topics were more relevant to where you lived. People could actually request 1 on one chats with the sysops, and most people got to know them pretty well.
The Internet doesn't "need to die", but maybe more people should make the effort to seek out and use web sites offering quality content, vs a habit of spending most of their time on big-name social media sites? I know for me, a good example for this is cars. I've always been kind of an auto enthusiast, and I used to always seek out a web message forum for any vehicle I purchased, and immediately join as as new member there. These days, I see all these enthusiast type groups popping up on Facebook -- but none of them offer the depth of information the dedicated web forums have. You just wind up with thousands of people in the Facebook group asking the same questions and wanting to show off photos of whatever they did cosmetically to their ride. The message forums always seem to have a few regulars who REALLY know the car inside and out. I'm talking master mechanics who have taken the whole vehicle apart and put it back together again, in their own garage. And they post a LOT of "how to" type message threads and more.
Old School (Score:2)
The Wired article is essentially about the impact of the Internet.
I remember when compute systems did "just enough" to help with business, home office, etc. We had dial-up, BBSes, but it was pretty well contained for the most part. The relative slowness of our connectivity had a "regulating" effect -- we still had to go out and do things ourselves, more often. Once compute ability became more powerful, and the Internet as we know it evolved, things changed. The "technology boom" of the 90s felt like
Title correction (Score:2)
Title should be 'Please Let Social Media Die'
What a negative post! (Score:2)
Sure, the internet has its problems, but there's also a lot of good places.
There's websites, blogs, forums, which cater to a variety of interests. No need to deal with the likes of facebook, X, youtube, google, chatgpt, or reddit.
There are alternatives to them. What needs to happen is that these companies need to be sued by the USA, which is the home country of all these mentioned companies/sites, into oblivion for monopoly abuse. These are companies which genuinely need to disappear from the market because
sounds like pebkac (Score:2)
To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited.
well, that's on you. your kids may still have an excuse, but if they let themselves be manipulated and exploited that's likely on you too to great extent.
there's no denying that the vast majority of the internet is a a rabbit hole of superficiality and toxicity, nor that it can have a quite destructive effect. for those of us that saw it being born it's also a huge disappointment, specially for those who hoped for it to be the catapult of human enlightment and understanding, albeit also a healthy reality ch
The funniest part of all this is the two-facedness (Score:2)
The funniest part of all this is the two-facedness:
When the tech bros are doing the Democrat's bidding, all is good in the universe.
When the tech bros are with the Republicans, it's faciscm, it's the return of the reich, it's this and that and the other thing.
Because of that, none of you two-faced twat's bitching is of any note. FOAD.
FWIW, I saw the Obama / Biden / Tech relationship as insidious, fascistic, and Orwellian, just to illustrate my point.
And I will always view it as such. Tech was colluding wi
Not all data centers are AI data centers (Score:2)
The data centers people hate are the ones powering the AI slop engines, not the Internet. There's a reason traditional data centers never bothered anyone.
Pro tip (Score:2)
This thing is eating itself.
Don't Google that on the family or work PC. :-)
Here's The Plan To Kill The Web (Score:3)
1. Make it easier to make new apps. Visual Basic for AI.
2. Stop using browsers. For every thing you normally do with a browser, make an app for it.
3. Open source versions of every service people depend on big companies for. Chat, forums, events, pictures, videos, marketplaces, email, file sharing, news, etc. This leads into...
4. "Local Internet". Your town, city, state, etc, all have people running the FOSS services. It's not run by big corps, but volunteers and municipalities. It can connect to other services though "Federation". You choose who you connect to. Same people and events you care about but owned locally.
5. "FOSS Devices". Apple and Google still control all our devices, what apps we can install. They will stop the plan, to control us and the internet. So we need to control our devices. A truly open, unrestricted OS for mobiles. Nobody can tell you what to do with it. Install what you want. An ecosystem will rise up to protect people and give them only the apps they need.
And that's it. New Internet. Once you have the local services you need, and can federate-connect to any others, and none of it runs Ads, there is no more financial incentive to do the fucked up shit these companies do. We can be normal people again.
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Time to bring back Gopher (Score:2)
Hey, none of these problems existed with Gopher. Could someone please draft an RFC for secure Gopher so we can have a modern implementation to start building on? The secure protocol can be called... wait for it... gophers.
I love the Internet (Score:3)
The Internet is a robust global interconnected network of peers able to communicate with any other peer on the network for the cost of admission.
Protocol specifications and world class implementations are freely available to everyone.
High performance hardware enabling single peers to provide information to millions is cheap and (was) readily available.
High level world class server and client stacks and related technology are also freely available to everyone.
There is zero excuse for anyone here to be whining about the state of the Internet.
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Do you think past tense is an accident, rather than a necessary and prepared-fore consequence ? Peasants, peons & serfs are supposed to eat soylent-green not porterhouse steak.
The [technology] must die (Score:3)
The TV must die
The telephone must die
Video games must die
The audio book must die
The pager must die
The cellphone must die
The laptop must die
AI must die
VR must die
The internet must die
Just maybe the problem isn’t the technology. Maybe the problem is how you insist on using it and what you expect from it. There is a vast space between Luddite and techno addict.
Technology is more engaging and pervasive than ever before. But that doesn’t mean we need be slaves to it. Maybe that is easier for me than someone half my age or younger, because I remember the world before the WWW, smartphone, social media, endless streaming, and the internet in your pocket. But I do use all of those things on a regular basis. However, I also make to take time every day to be away from it. And try to pick one of the weekend days every week to mostly do the same. I also make sure my kids turn the technology off and do other things too.
There is s great big world out waiting to be experienced if you can pull yourself away from your screens.
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Yes, you would think that. Aristotles' middle-way wins out. Yet the inter-personal & creative advantages of eliminating all but radio & dial-fone are so great a just First-Cause would have supplied gallons of pine-tar with every steam-powered loom. Sociopath leveraging of auto-functioning tools drives modern cultures toward a dystopian feudal dead-end.
The internet suffers from cancer. (Score:3)
The internet is a victim just like you and me. But sheep don't know to fight back before something is lost.
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A weak attempt to vilify free speech
It's not free if everyone can't make it. Curated by janitors with particular agendas doesn't qualify as "free".
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Free speech has never been free as in beer, or at least not at any meaningful volume level. Talking to a single person was free, but that's not going to spread your ideas very far or very quickly. In the early days, you paid scribes, but that would cost you money. Later, the printing press brought the costs down, but you still needed money. Radio and TV made it possible to reach even more people more quickly, but at a significantly nonzero cost.
The Internet is no different in that regard. In theory, y
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly right... I used to have my own webserver (complete with a message board and WiFi), and it used to even be included in Google's search results... at best, it maybe got a hit a month.
You can post a link to it on your Facebook or Instagram, but with all the AI slop, it'll get lost/buried so fast that nobody ever has a chance to see it (other than the AIs seeing it and using your content as training data and stealing every ounce of useful data that it can).
Re: Self described article (Score:4, Informative)
I used to get quite a bit of Google traffic from web search results. I have good metadata and my content makes links to relevant resources, I did no other "SEO" type activities. Now it's nearly nothing.
Re:Self described article (Score:5, Informative)
Billionaires do most of the censorship in this world.
citation:
Jeff Bezos: Owns The Washington Post.
Rupert Murdoch (and family): Controls News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times (London), and The Sun.
Patrick Soon-Shiong: Owns the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune.
John W. Henry: Owns The Boston Globe.
Michael Bloomberg: Owns Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Marc Benioff: Owns Time magazine.
Laurene Powell Jobs: Owns a majority stake in The Atlantic.
The Newhouse Family (Advance Publications): Owns Condé Nast (including publications like The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair)
U missed the HUGE one (Score:3)
Re:Self described article (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd have more credibility if you understood that censorship doesn't apply to reading, it applies to writing.
"I don't read any of them, so I am not censored by them."
Fabulous.
Re: Self described article (Score:3)
Clearly the blogs have provided everything you need to be an informed citizen.
Re: (Score:3)
A thousand outlets shouting into their megaphones drown out the independent voice. That is censorship by avalanche.
You can still find a blog or a Substack if you already know where to look. That does not change the fact that the high-authority cluster—owned by a short list of billionaires and running coordinated or mutually reinforcing framing—dominates the backlink graph, the search rankings, and what institutions treat as the default. Identical or near-identical language has already been docum
Re:Self described article (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of free speech is shit speech as you demonstrate. Knee jerk, emotional and tribal reactions, your ego wanking into a bucket. You had a bad day, go rant at people on the internet and call it an abuse of free speech if you get called an asshole or get cancelled.
Freedom is chaos without some sense of personal responsibility. When you can publish anonymously any bollocks you wouldn't say to someone's face in the street, bereft of any courage, accountability or responsibility, that's a perversion of free speech, how humans have communicated since the start of civilisation. It's not free speech, it's graffitti.
Shit free speech, and that's what it is, shit, where no one is prepared to stand by their words, left us wide open to the destruction of our institutions of trust, they weren't perfect, but they were better than no trust at all, and that is where shit speech has brought us to, total mistrust, prey to any shill with the means to shout loudest.
Re: (Score:2)
100% agree that ones speech is also ones responsibility.
But not one you take seriously. I use a pseudonym, you use a generic one, I am at least vaguely identifiable. Responsibility is not possible with anonymity and certainly not something cowards are known for.
If all humans were capable of categorizing speech as speech
Have you put yourself on a pedestal, human?
100% of speech on the internet is anonymous in the absence of an agreed, formal verification of source.
you're forced to apply trust based on my words, not my name
What you have written might be your opinion today, I trust that at least. But it is not a truth to trust. I don't have a body of your work to reference to see
Re: Self described article (Score:2)
I don't ever trust that any AC isn't a liar. They often are.
Re:Waaaah! More censorship! Waaaaaaaaaa! (Score:5, Interesting)
This works in normal life:
A> yay hitler
B, C, D> fuck you nazi piece of shit
onlookers E-Z> wow nobody likes A, I shouldn't be a nazi
But it explicitly does not work when the Social Cancer algorithm is in control:
A> yay hitler
B, C, D> fuck you nazi piece of shit
Social Cancer algorithm: "Wow, A really got a lot of engagement on that post, let's push it to more people."
random people E-Z: "huh, this nazi guy seems to get a lot of attention...
Just like bad money pushes out good and lies spread faster than the truth, negative garbage content pushes out good because we've introduced a curator who is a sociopath that was never taught the difference between good and bad attention. To give a concrete example: There is an entire industrial scale operation that revolves around posting fucktarded "hack" videos to youtube because it doesn't matter if you're posting "this is a bullshit hack because [obvious things]", you still clicked on it and engaged with it and that's all the Social Cancer algorithm cares about.
Forget censorship, I just want to go back to the world where shouting bad shit down means it's shouted down, not actively promoted.
Re: (Score:3)
It sounds like your problem is the algorithms used to show content. A Nazi prick on here would get put down to -1 and you can EASILY browser at a higher level. If facebook were setup that way, the nazi prick wouldn't be getting any more attention for being inflammatory.
So really, the problem is censorship by the platform owners. Since it is their platform, seems fair. Don't like it? Setup your own and recruit your friends and family and have them do the same, etc.
I'm not even on Facebook. It's a simple choi
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget the right whinger wankers.
Re: (Score:2)
"And quit trying to force your views on everyone else."
Even when those views are about social media designed for force views on everyone else? Do you not get the irony, talk about a "simpleton point of view"!
"...so they think everyone else should be forced to give up the Internet as well. Fuck off."
Considering that no on is advocating that, we should all see your post for what it is, an attempt by a simpleton to express contempt for what he doesn't understand.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes but the overarching tone of it is blaming the public for what corporations have lined up for us. The claim that the public is induced into extremism like ISIS is especially absurd considering the US and its allies created ISIS, which explains why they are now good friends with one of its bloodthirsty former leaders al-Jolani, who is allowing Syria to be bled dry.
But yeah, sure, some private facebook group is the problem--thanks a lot, Rita Katz.