Ed’s got a long post about the internet dying. Paraphrasing:
A small section of people have profited off the value generated by billions of humans. These humans were originally fed a mission of “betterment of the world.” While there’s been some value, it’s now being accrued to a select few and shareholders
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All of this signals an end to the internet.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die
I empathize with Ed and respectfully, don’t hold the same opinion.
I have conflicting thoughts about LLMs. I believe they are useful in some cases – even today1. I also don’t believe that the companies that provided platforms or utility like search are only evil2.
The internet, specifically the web that he and I grew up on and willfully participated in changed. It first changed by bringing in a lot many more people into activities that were originally limited to the super-motivated34.
The scale was achieved by the über platforms of today. They were certainly useful. They helped more people bring their thoughts online. Personally, I believe that it is a good thing, warts and all. More people are online and reading folks like Ed as a result.
I also believe that capitalism also is its own destructive gene as the bent towards monetization also eventually sucks the life out of these platforms. Sure, they hold power now, but one only needs to squint a little to see where the puck is heading.
So, I am more hopeful than Ed.
You can see the seeds of a new internet (web) where your content and your network is yours5. There are millions of digital gardens blooming in the internet that one only needs to look for. Heck, blogrolls are making a comeback.
The internet seen through the lens of newsfeeds of Existing Platforms or Google search is on the path to an über monetized seppuku. It’s not just limited to internet content either. Will it continue to be painful and slow? Yeah, likely.
Should we mourn it? Yeah. All these platforms started with noble interests. Google wanted to organize the world’s information; Facebook wanted to connect humanity; reddit wanted to be the home screen for the Internet; and WhatsApp just wanted to build a great messenger. They were incredibly successful in their original missions. On a good day, one might argue, there are good people in each of those organizations trying to continue that mission. However, my biggest learning continues to be:
All the Existing problems in these existing platforms are going to exacerbated by the incoming change in the cost structure to “generate content.” Catalyzed further by monetization, they are going to topple.
People don’t need more content, produced cheaply. I am confident humans will appreciate care, quality and craft. Our humanity will save the web that we want!
Maybe it’s a good thing that the old internet is dying. I am ready for something even better to take its place: a fediverse where you are not beholden to platforms; a slew of digital gardens you want to visit; review sites that do the testing versus being optimized for affiliate fees.
Let a million flowers bloom!
- Especially for purposes of summarization, coding, effectively finding content in help manual pages etc. None of this is error free. However, it’s helpful enough to change behavior from just searching on Google to using LLMs for specific purposes. ︎
- Please don’t discount my own biases as a tech worker here. ︎
- People wrote online because they either really wanted to write or because they really liked computers and wanted to figure out how things worked ︎
- Figuring out how computers worked, how the internet, how the web worked is how I got started ︎
- ActivityPub and AT Protocol ︎
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