most actors have never even visited Thespia

them state thespians are the worst

The internet isn’t the web/social media.

People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame.

Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.

The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections.

That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel).

I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.

I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.

I have to insert a quick joke: "guns don't kill people - people kill people."

> People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on that drive.

We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.

well said

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...

There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.

Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].

Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.

The road is neither public nor neutral, and that's where the analogy breaks.

This road is owned by a casino, and its signs are scientifically placed so that you take the wrong turn and reach their business. They place guardrails in the specific spot to hide places they don't want you to see. They actively encourage your children to grab a car and drive on it, even at risk of their health, to groom a new generation of casino clients.

> cars

Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.

While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.

Oh, indeed. There's been a real public reversal in tolerance for open racism, over the past (see date) almost exactly 25 years.

This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.

Also: Good users can be more easily harassed, because they use their real name.

It could be explained by the herd mentality. An angry man alone would probably not throw stones in the street with his face uncovered; But he would probably do so in a riot. Now, in social networks, is quite easy to simulate persons and have them starting a riot. Having a way to identify real persons could make this more difficult.

Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)

But why not? I want to make the distinction on public and private speech. In the physical world, no one should ever have their private speech scrutinized, that's why there are laws banning covert recording. But in public, speech is very much moderated. We don't allow hate speech and we don't allow harassment of others.

Social media is a public platform. We can't enforce moderation if we can't identify the abuser, they can always just make a new account. So deanonymize social media access, but for private communication? Let's leave that free from prying eyes.

To bring it back to cars, roads are public infrastructure, that's why you need a license. No one cares if you drive licenseless on your private track.

I generally agree with this, but a problem I can't solve is: at what point does a "large group chat" become a "public channel"? If, hypothetically, someone is organizing a thousand people in balaclavas to turn up outside a business they want to intimidate, over Telegram or Signal, is that "private" or "public"?

(also everyone in this thread saying deanonymisation does not on its own solve the problem is correct)

I draw the line on discoverability. Reddit? Public. Hacker news? Public. 4chan? Public. Facebook and Instagram are also public with a slight caveat, private accounts will be considered private, otherwise public. Even ye old public forums are considered public.

Discord and group chats will be considered private. Basically anything that requires an invitation / permission to view their content is considered private. To your example, I'm not sure if J6 members were organising publicly themselves. If the FBI wanted to, they could easily infiltrate these groups as an anonymous member themselves, so I don't see a contradiction there.

Legislatively, it means that platforms will be held responsible for their public content, which I think is fair. If there are too much content to moderate, it's up to them to find solutions. I hear rumours of a promising automating tool called LLMs.

Not all internet usage would be deemed public.

Social media sure.

What about what you watch on PornHub? Should that be tied directly to your government ID?

I know that's an easy one to cherry pick but just consider all you use the internet for and how an adversarial governmenft could use some of that info.

Personally I'd love to see all social media corps required to verify ID but leave the rest of the internet alone.

PornHub is a great example! It is a public platform and thus posters have to be deanonymized. For one, this would provide traceability to people who revenge post intimate content. It would not block anonymous viewers. While that means minors can still access porn, there will be a level of accountability to the creators of porn. Porn mags were a thing before the internet anyways, and the magazine itself was tied to real identifiable people.

And that's how you get Minecraft letsplays on PornHub.

Interesting question though, because IRL, before the internet, there was also ID verification to access that kind of content. And that was actually worse, because the person checking your ID lived in your city and could see you buying groceries.

I suppose what you would want there is a verification mechanism that proves that you're an adult, but gives absolutely no info on which adult you are.

This - to my understanding - is possible with the technology we have. But whether that will actually be what happens remains to be seen.

The internet would be a lot poorer, if all users had to be identified. I really appreciate it when people tell their personal stories and talk about how they have overcome crises. Anonymity empowers people to help others by sharing life lessons. Those same life lessons would be very harmful for the reputation of the internet user, if they had to be posted with the user's real name.

Not everyone has a life that is all sunshine. Not every use of anonymity is criminal or unethical.

I completely understand and actually agree with your stance. Consider this, the personal blog we love reading can remain anonymous, because it is private in the sense that it is ostensibly the writings of a single person, it is not a platform.

To bring it back to analog, newspapers are platforms, where journalists are identified members of the public and can be held accountable for their words.

If you would like more personal stories, by all means, search for the personal blog online and share them with your friends privately. But if you share it on a public platform like HN, you are making an editorial decision that this is worth sharing to the masses and thus should be scrutinized.

If the blog is publicly published, so the author should be unmasked.

Identification schemes would be fine if there were never abused, but every single instance of them has been abused in the past. There is zero reason to believe it will it be different on the internet.

Are you familiar with how the DMCA gets abused? Do you really believe that bad actors will not find similar ways to abuse an identification system?

Oh, that's not what I meant. It's the person who shared the content publicly that needs to be deanonymized, not the author.

Think of it like advertising on billboards. When you partake in an activity with explicit intent to persuade others, you should declare who you are first. That's why my target has been solely focused on social media. Personal blogs don't advertise, social media does. Just like how a private business conducts themselves privately, but advertisements of a company should make clear if it is self advertisement or someone else advertising on behalf of them.

I definitely participate in a deanonymized internet social media platforms, especially for local issues, employment or niche hobbies. I also want anonymous internet, but having the choice between the two, for certain things may be great.

I hate to say it, but I do not see how else a nation state could act.

The goal of a state is stability. The free, open, anonymous global internet otoh is a force of change.

The west really liked that, back when it was useful to its geopolitical goals, but now, not only does it have outlived its usefulness, but also, it's suddenly being pointed at the west itself.

At least I do not see how it could be any other way. You cannot simultaneously have high-trust and low-filtering in a space.

I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that this was actually always kinda the case. It was just not enforced by law, but by the fact that computers were weird, expensive and complex.

As the technology matured, these core assumptions started holding true less, until, eventually, we've ended up where we are now.

___

This doesn't necessarily mean that we will have no more anonymous networks though. But they will be less global and less accessible.

Thanks to open weights LLMs, we will have more capabilities within them than we did in the 90s and earlier, but, we will lack the leverage of tidal proportions that social media held.

This, to me, sounds like the compromise to be found with the powers that keep the states we live in running.

The over-simplification and over-sharing natures of the current times do seem to fight against balanced positions, unfortunately.

I think you are ignoring McLuhan's very very famous point ("the medium is the message") which is that new forms of media do more than just allow us to extend ourselves in new ways; they change our mindset by enabling those new capabilities. It's not so much what we're using the media to communicate as it is what kind of communication that medium encourages. Television had disastrous consequences on what would seem to be unrelated behavior [1], including an increase in general antisocial behavior among children.

1: https://justinharter.com/my-god-it-was-awfulmy-husband-and-i...

But social media is like a car that drives faster if you’re racist.

Their algorithms promote the wrong posts for the wrong reasons.

Red pill content also gives you a nice speed boost. And xenophobia is very good for engagement.

Roads are neutral, social networks are not. Twitter is run by white supremacist openly trying to stroke racial violence. Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side before the genocide. And it continues to favor outrage stroking groups.

>Roads are neutral, social networks are not.

The gp's analogy maps better this way:

  roads = ip packet network routing, DNS, telecommunications cabling
  racist conventions/meetups = social media platforms like Facebook

Therefore, "I hate the internet" is analogous to "I hate the roads" because their perspective is dominated by seeing all the racists meetups that use the roads.

(Yes, people do "hate traffic" but that not's the same as "hating roads". Anyone who has travelled on unpaved dirt roads or gravel trails that make their teeth rattle will appreciate having paved roads. And that appreciation doesn't change even if a lot of KKK racist members also use roads.)

Agreed but the word is stoke not stroke.

I agree with "roads are neutral", but to be really precise, no they aren't; they are built by a polity at the expense of some other not-built roads, in a way that supports some types of traffic more than others. Compare Los Angeles to Utrecht.

The industrial age brought tech with enough downside to spark a reaction. Then there was a run of less-contentious tech. Recently, we've had a run of tech that looks to me like all downside for society. The conditions (neoliberalism) are still in place. People are not empowered by hf trading, web 2.0, social media. They could be, but the tech was co-opted. IMO, neither are they empowered, in the round, by crypto or AI.

Fritz_Haber, his inventions killed millions and his invention (Haber–Bosch process) helps to produce food for billions.

" It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

" Ammonia production is a highly energy intensive process consuming around 1.8% of global energy output each year (steam methane reforming accounts for over 80% of the energy required) and producing as a result about 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (about 1.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions) "

https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-...

Do you honestly think roads and the internet are similar? I don't think you've really thought that through.

I don't understand. Your comment seems to imply that the Internet has no effect on the ability of groups to organize?

The “good” news is that, if LLMs really do reach AGI, and if we still live under this same economic system that ruined the Internet, there won’t be this decades-long grieving process. It will be a short one, if we’re aware of it at all.

please end the suffering XD

seconded -- end it here and now :)

I yearn for the urn.

I think they hate the commercialized Internet, and I do too.

Government control, more. Continually restricting things that go against their viewpoint. Pushing digital ID online despite obvious security risks.

It's becoming an increasingly bad time to be hosting anything on your own, having to worry about whichever 0-day the clankers are going to find and/or exploit within minutes of it being patched. I'm not sure even nginx is safe in all of this. I used to think there was software that should be basically safe but I'm not sure hosting anything (open-source) yourself anymore (i.e. directly participating in the Internet on a personal level) is a good idea.

Having to go through 3rd party services (and rely on them to stay on top of things) to participate is not fun.

Is this actually grounded in real experiences and not headlines? Have real projects / people actually experienced this hyperbolic insta-hack you describe? People are getting DDoSed regularly sure, but no, you don't get hacked the instant you forward a port, in my experience hosting a few public services in my community.

Been doing it for years, decades even now, and IMHO it's like visiting a touristic place or any place public with strangers really : you have to keep your wits about you otherwise you will get mugged.

If you setup your Website you will inexorably attract spammers at least. Yes they are using new tools and new techniques... but so can you. There are plenty of tools to keep track of abusive usage, individually or collectively, and ways to both backup your data or containerize your services. As long as you keep up then I don't feel it's getting more challenging.

I'm not a doomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.

Are you implying the same people that are pessimistic about the internet are also AI hypers or tech entrepreneurs? Because HN isn't monolithic, it's entirely possible -- in fact, likely -- that these are two distinct sets of people who both read HN. I know I'm pessimistic about much of what the hype people like.

Edit: or if you meant the grandparent claims not to be a doomer but is pessimistic about something, I don't see the contradiction. It's more like "I don't generally like sweet things, but this cake is nice". Where's the contradiction?

Look at the top comments on ANY article on HN.

It's a bunch of people endlessly frustrated they never self actualized, hurling this frustration onto whatever random topic comes about.

Constant whining about anything new or any change in the world...because of course everything was better in the past and anything new is worse.

But things weren't better back then. These people were just happier in the past, because when you're young, the future is a horizon of boundless opportunity.

As you get old you realize that opportunity is over for you. So for the non-self actualized, it leads to shaking your fist at the clouds, telling everyone to get off your lawn, couching those emotions under supposed concern for abstract concepts like "societal moral fabric" instead of admitting you didn't achieve what you hoped for yourself.

The entire mood of the internet over the past 20 years has simply been a reflection of its biggest cohort (millennials) going through life.

World Happiness Report finds this:

"In general, most Western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010. Fifteen of them have had significant drops, compared to four with significant increases."

"In eight of the ten global regions shown in Figure 2.2 (covering roughly 90% of the world’s population), those in the youngest age group have higher life evaluations now than in 2006–2010, either in absolute terms or relative to those over 25. Youth wellbeing has only fallen in the NANZ countries [United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand] and Western Europe, both absolutely and relative to adults. [Emphasis added]"

https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/executive-summary-...

You're looking for data to validate your emotions, instead of the other way around. But the memetic emotional vibes of humanity are not objective.

The link you shared appears to me to be a conclusion in search of a evidence. Unfortunately the fields of psychology/sociology are ground zero for the replication crisis.

Only 36% of study findings in psychology are even replicable, and then that number drops even more for self reported surveys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Ditto for Jonathan Haidt's entire body of work, which was based on shaky foundations.

What's more likely is you're measuring the cultural mood of the youth today influenced by current media climates (hipsterdom), instead of objective reality.

But if you genuinely think the youth of today would be happier getting firebombed during WW2, living through segregation, or working in an auto factory in the 1970s, I'd be happy to send them back there and let them see for themselves.

> I'd be happy to send them back there and let them see for themselves.

I'm curious how you intend to do this.

Are you saying that nothing has ever gotten worse or just nothing in the last twenty years?

Obviously, any pullback in technology or society comes secondary to our psychologically rooted need to whinge.

Some things have objectively gotten worse. Not EVERYTHING as this site would lead you to believe.

"This site" doesn't exist. Individual people do. And you'll see plenty of people all hyped over AI or any new tech here.

I think your comment is dismissive of valid criticism. Sorry, but I'm not convinced by the line of (blanket) argument who goes "the old always complain about the young". It fails to engage with the actual details of the criticism.

What details of the criticism? The comment I replied to had nothing to rebuttal, it was communicating a general mood with zero supporting evidence.

Even worse: the comment was obviously referencing TFA, which your dismissive retort failed to address, falling back to the cliche of "every generation complains about the new and thinks old stuff was better".

It's a thought-terminating cliche that fails to add anything to the discussion. At least you could have made it a top-level comment about TFA, so it wouldn't read as (empty) criticism of the comment you were replying to.

You should become a doomer. Apart from the doom and gloom, the company is great and, I dare say, genuine.

I'm a coomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.

Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself?

I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.

I couldn't finish the book because my Kindle died halfway, but based on the opening chapters I agree with you.

I admire her for the stance she's taking today and the personal sacrifice it's costing her to this day, but I won't deny that her own account sounds like someone who thought "this will be big" and decided to help without thinking "should this be big?" first.

Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:

> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable

No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.

But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.

But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.

I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.

This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.

I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.

Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.

A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.

Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.

Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.

We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.

I wouldn't disagree if in-person service was even comparable, but nowadays, for the banks available to me in the area, opening hours are even worse than they were in the 00s, there are way less branches still opened than there used to, and there's barely any staff, most are just a room with a branded ATM. I wouldn't call it gracefully degrading so much as them keeping minimal service (legal reasons, maybe, I don't know).

> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable

I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist.

It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?

People consistenty act like they have no agency.

" If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..."

It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better.

So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".

> So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".

lol This is a wild sentiment to not only have, but to share with others.

Just in shock someone actually believe this. That you're so entitled to other people's stuff that unless they give it to you for free they shouldn't be doing it.

> It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture.

lol What? You're just making things up.

>It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?

It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.

> It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone

It is entitlement. Nobody forced you to visit a web site with ads. The thing I said about people pretending they have no agency is exactly what you're implying.

Thinking you deserve free stuff because you don't like how it's presented is nothing but entitlement. If someone has to pay for your traffic, it's theft. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to come to terms with this. Maybe it's because everyone wants to believe their altruistic and this challenges it.

What's worse is seeing the same people who claim LLMs are stealing but have no issue with ad blockers. That level of incoherence is nuts to me.

People who serve ads never ask whether the user whether they wish their computer hardware to be utilized for advertising. They just use it. Ads are 100% predisposed on trespassing. Your average ad supported site wants discoverability by being free, then when the hosting costs bite, hope the end user conveniently forgets that they (the end user) have ultimate sovereignty over what code the hoster hosts they (the end user) desires to run on the end user's own hardware. You (the hoster) don't have a right to eyeball monetization. Old school Internet before SEO & mercantilization worked this way just fine.

LLM companies never asked to train on scraped content when they damn well intended to rent the result back commercially.

There is no incoherence here unless you accept axiomatically the Internet should make money. That was never the original purpose. Nor should that become it's ultimate purpose. In fact, I argue that this goes beyond the purpose of the Internet. Society is not yours to monetize. Period. Commercial relationships are not default.

For the last 30+ years, I've watched as society has completely forgotten how to be humans talking to humans and building relationships in lieu of trying to discover the fastest way to plug into someone else's wallet by selling something that isn't theirs to sell.

> People who serve ads never ask whether the user whether they wish their computer hardware to be utilized for advertising.

People who serve ads don't force you to visit their site. You do this on your own free will.

You're not a victim. You don't deserve other people's stuff for free because one site has deceptive practices. It's such an immature worldview.

The relationship between People and Sites you're describing isn't as one-sided as you think.

A website wants visitors as much as a visitor wants to see the content of the website. If a website exists but doesn't get read, what is the point of it?

Personally, I would take readers using adblockers over no readers at all, the same way I'd want people reading a newsletter even if I had to print and pay for it myself.

Are you kind of implying that you can have a bank account without internet access in 2026? Extremely disingenuous

How so? I have 1 bank account with a local credit union and I have never logged into any of the online stuff. What do you take issue with, specifically?

They're inconvenient but physical banks still exist

You certainly can. My parents don't use online banking or even ATMs.

It is quite sad, isn’t it.

Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy.

High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet.

Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable.

Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.

In Australia the most commonly scammed demographic is under 25s.

I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.

On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.

Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.

I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.

I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.

I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)

I still use Reddit, but only see niche hobbyist subreddits for things I'm interested in. It's not bad if you use it that way.

I'm close to blocking it at the router. That might break the habit.

Internet and 24x7 connectivity is like humanity collectively having a seizure.

> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.

The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor).

Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me.

But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that.

> Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone?

It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time.

I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is.

Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept.

But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction.

I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones.

And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls.

P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.

The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.

Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.

It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.

And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up).

It's perhaps why I loathe it so much.

For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)

> I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years

This sounds great. What magazines do you recommend?

You could do a lot worse than starting with Popular Electronics.

Unless you have a lot of antiquated components on hand, probably a good idea to work in reverse, chronologically.

Nuts and Volts

Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.

Sure. But it didn't used to be as pervasive or hateful.

It did. The Internet has always had awful views on it, because it was used by humanity, who also had awful views on things.

What is a hatred of the Internet seems to be a hatred of humanity or at least its ability to freely express itself.

The solution is to reduce the noise, in much a way someone 100 years ago would only visit clubs or establishments they enjoyed.

So true. I think the problem is not that there's more or less hate. I remember forums and chats with awful stuff.

The problem are the algorithms that put us into buckets and benefit from divisions.

You're affected by the choices others make too.

This is the part that I feel the “just turn it off” crowd don’t think enough about.

The algorithms helped give us the single most dysfunctional and corrupt US administration since the 1800s.

Nope, you hate what capitalism has done with it, not the internet itself.

Social media is a subset of the web, and the web is a subset of the internet. Don’t lump the entire internet into your hatred of social media.

> He was a good coder ...

Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.

Which two files were leaked in 2007.

https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406

>"Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php."

...Which was a perfectly valid choice in 2005. It was that or Ruby, more or less. Java, ASP, and ColdFusion were a thing for enterprise, otherwise it was Perl CGI, Python, or some crazy custom C++ stuff.

PHP was never a good choice for anything. Paul Graham and company made Viaweb in lisp. Good programmers find good tools to use. Ruby and python were the obvious choices in 2004. Even though the ecosystem was not what it is today.

Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it.

Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.

You know why? Because Acton and Koum arranged the carrier deals prior to the acquisition. That's what Zuckerberg bought, to enlargen his war chest. It's not his product, it's something he effectively stole

True, but here things went a little differently. Carriers here charged per SMS sent, and had plans with things like "includes 100 messages per month for free!!!" and extra SMS packages sold at a discount compared to the standard price, even years after they had began providing Internet (2G at the time).

People sought cheaper alternatives, and for a while several messaging apps were used, but WhatsApp was so convenient compared to everyone else (using the phone number as username, no password required, was a genius move), that it was already becoming the standard before Facebook came and acquired it.

Carriers noticed their error eventually, and stopped charging for SMS, but by then it was too late. They even tried using the tribunals to block WhatsApp, without success, and technical measures to degrade WhatsApp's protocol and block audio and video calls on it, which also failed legally. So they eventually relented, and now offer packages like "n GB/month plus free WhatsApp!!!" (and in small letters: "audio and video calls not included").

Yeah, I think people forget that before the internet there was the telcos. They had a "microtransaction" infrastructure, and they were determined to use it by gatekeeping everything. The power of the internet making almost everything almost free has been hugely net positive, although not without a few downsides.

> effectively stole

Could you say more about this? I'm not very familiar with the WhatsApp acquisition, or necessarily happy about it, but at first glance I don't see what part would come anywhere close to theft.

Zuck paid billions to buy it.

It almost all collapsed because of an airmiles ticket which couldn't be changed.

Ok, I have not heard about the airmiles ticket; elaborate?

Sure, but I fail to see where the theft comes in.

Same - WhatsApp has become mandatory in many nations like India even though I despise it with a passion. I wish the United Nations made a resolution to standardize messaging protocols and develop open-source common messaging libraries with no data given to advertisers.

The UN kinda already did. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is part of the UN. Its ITU-T H.350 recommendations include a famous one for instant messaging: XMPP. It's not only encrypted but also fully decentralized.

Which is why it hasn't been adopted. Everyone with any power, from governments to telcos to big enterprises, prefers centralized services. Hence SMS, its upgrade, RCS, and the many private protocols.

There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet.

It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people.

Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t.

https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_By...

There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself.

One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope.

We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them.

What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything?

But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.

Yes it's bad and it'll only get worse but how about thinking positive and towards ways out of the crisis? If your problem is with social media specifically, you could join the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed/Lemmy and co.) which while not perfect by any means is a bit more resilient and can be used to continue participating in niche interests while avoiding tribalism, doom, and propaganda.

I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was.

There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier.

In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.

> There has been a massive disintermediation of information,

How do you figure? Information is gatekept differently, but editorialized harder than ever before.

I also question whether "better optimized supply chains" is in fact a benefit. Optimizing a supply chain has meant just-in-time inventory etc; I'd argue an optimized supply chain is a fragile supply chain.

Is the implication here that it’s cheaper to build a house with lead, asbestos, and radium? I cannot see how those have any causal link to home prices, which seem to be much more heavily influenced by broader socioeconomic factors (area desirability, gentrification, housing supply, etc.)

It isn't so much that lead, asbestos, and radium were cheaper, but more that the risk assessment from lenders and insurers made it nearly impossible to use any known hazardous material in any way whatever within a residential building.

They forgot to mention SaaS, and that everything is a subscription now.

Also, automatic updates that are forced on the user.

And of course that the internet is breaking down our democracies.

You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web.

The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.

An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible.

I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.

What seems more likely: There are literally zero people working on a web alternative, or all existing alternatives and forks are so unpopular that you have never heard of any of them?

I think the more likely reason is that there's nothing wrong with the web per se, but rather with the way people use it.

Even the argument against the Javascript/CSS/APIs explosion and browser complexity... all that can be "avoided" if you make a JS-less document-centric webpage, for example.

The issue is not that the web is bad for content producers, the issue is that it’s bad for content consumers. Consumers doesn’t do create the content (like js) that they are consuming.

I don't disagree at all, I'm just mentioning why I don't think people are gung-ho on a web alternative.

The latter obviously, you're right to pick that nit and better wording might be "The Web can be forked and I don't know why alternative models aren't being seriously considered by the tech community". Or something. You understood anyway.

Indeed, the Invisible Internet Project exists and works fine, https://geti2p.net

What's to stop this nu-web going the same way?

Arguably having numerous decentralized, small and insular sub-networks hostile to change and growth makes them not worth the effort of corporations to co-opt and control.

The biggest problem with the web is that there is only one.

>The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.

People are working on this: https://geminiprotocol.net/

And the fediverse and other decentralized protocols have yet to entirely succumb to the rot.

I didn’t know about Gemini protocol, thanks. Seems to have traction.

Inadvertently, Cunningham’s law helps me out.

It will take the thinking persons a while to realize that like the utility curve for wealth, the utility curve for modernity also has decreasing marginal returns:

A basic bit of modernity is very useful, but as we become more modern, it becomes more nuisance, less comfort.

I think we're reaching a level of maturity in tech that makes us question it for the same reasons it's great.

I think it's healthy for a society to question everything, as long as it doesn't get us stuck, but rather helps us conciously choose our path. We have more options than ever.

I used to be on social media all the time and always want the next shiny thing in tech. And I enjoyed that. But now I can choose to not be on social media and be on a basic iPhone mini. And I'm enjoying that now. All is to reiterate: we can choose our path, and that applies to many verticals.

I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community.

The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre.

I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit because I linger on them because my brain can't help but stare. I open X and it's all engagement bait from major creators I don't give a damn about. I can switch to the Following tab and it's a lot of political opinions I'd just rather not hear about.

Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I was having old internet fun. And then it just died, I don't know. All the energy left the room.

Hacker News and my very curated Reddit are about all I even use the internet for these days, and Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable.

There was a very popular thread on here the other day basically talking about how these modern algorithms are the product, and how they're actually great and everyone loves them despite denying it... I'm just like is my brain so alien? I actively want and desire these services to be interesting or fun to use and they're just... not. They're boring.

There's nothing I want to see, so I don't use them anymore. It's not a leave Meta/X/etc in a huff like some of my more reactionary friends. It's just I don't even think to open them anymore because there's nothing worth my time.

I keep thinking of phpBB.

I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people.

Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd entered the conversation more intentionally?

No, it's probably more that a given thread was one conversation, like a GitHub issue, not a tree of comments with nested branches. Linear forum threads are great like that, posting is like joining a group of people by the vending machine, you're now in the group because you interrupted everyone else when you chimed in with your two cents, but that also means you belong there now.

Oh, and even more relevant: upvotes have zero effect on what post gets seen first! So it's not a popularity contest for the most pithy one-liner that gets upvoted to the top. You can write long-form posts and people will see them and engage on a human level.

I guess you can boil this down to "the absence of an algorithm": nothing has attempted to optimize what to put in front of their eyeballs, and so they engage with your long-form post. But when we talk about "opting out of algorithms", remember it's not just ML/AI algorithms: even Reddit/HN style upvotes are already an algorithm! It's obviously powerful enough that it has quite an effect.

Not sure why modern alternatives to phpBB, like Discourse, feel so impersonal and boring. I rarely feel the urge to check back on a Discourse thread, but that may just be me.

More of a vBulletin man myself, but I get what you mean. There were so many small, autonomous little niche communities and people took their time to learn how each one worked. Forums had their problems but I do think the time before upvotes/down votes was a very different dynamic, where not every judgment felt like it was being transmitted.

Ah, vBulletin. I confess I don't recall if there was any important difference to me. And looking on https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com, which I like, it seems to run a thing called XenForo? Anyway, the look-and-feel of all three are similar.

I was very happy to discover someone is building a phpBB-clone in ATProto (the thing that powers BlueSky): https://atmobb.app/

There's some hope that a small facet of forum culture can come back...

We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation.

Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.

You're idea is well intentioned, but this legislation will be used by the well known platforms to burden the heterogeneous web and kill it with legislation.

What we need is a 2nd renaissance of small discussion forums. You don't need to use X, Facebook, instagram and the rest of the commercial web. Seek alternative, REAL COMMUNITIES.

What you’re arguing for is essentially a return to pre-1990s enforcement of antitrust laws. Not new legislation, just the pragmatic application of existing legislation.

This was announced three days ago in Australia, the world's ban lab. Or at least the upcoming proposal of draft legislation was announced.

please no more legislation, especially for 'thing i dont like'

Yeah, looking around at society today it's obvious the main problem is the government trying too hard and passing too much legislation.

I mean I do think regulatory capture is at least in part what's allowed corporations to conquer the web

Everything. It is what allows corporations to conquer everything.

Anti-competitive tactics aren’t in play at all?

Won't somebody think of the struggling megacorporations?

> Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute.

I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.

The problem with X is it forces you to hand over personal information to sign up, and even then many have said it leaves them in a "we're having difficulties" loop.

It might be a fair trade if this exchange of info helped them eliminate bots, but it sounds like bots on X are more rampant than ever, so no thanks to that.

> but it sounds like bots on X are more rampant than ever, so no thanks to that.

I used to get a lot of spambot followers, but that has ceased entirely in the past year. I would say the bot problem is no longer that relevant at the moment, but rather people posting AI replies are.

For some people it might be hard to tell or may even be non existent in their sphere of it.

But if it's blanket rejecting certain signups based on identity, that suggests the company is interested in censorship and echo chambers, which means who knows what other dark patterns and less-detectable bot nets it has behind the scenes.

Doesn't seem worth it imo, except maybe for people who want their opinion echoed back to them (as well as other momentum that takes time to dissipate).

Bluesky has gotten considerably more tolerable by... adding an algorithmic feed ("For You"). It's developed by just some guy with the server running in his living room or something. I know people in this thread are down on algorithms, but a non-attention hacking algorithm is super, super nice because it helps cut out crap and show content in the niches I care about.

The reason that algorithmic feeds were introduced was essentially that Zynga and various heavy posters were killing Facebook (but mostly Zynga).

Back near the dawn of time, FB's feed was chronological, and that meant that Every.Single.Farmville.Notification showed up in your feed (and there were a lot of Farmville notifications).

This was actually causing real problems for Facebook, and they introduced an algorithmic feed to fix it. Back then, it was actually relatively simple, and mostly just ranked posts based on how connected you were to the person on Facebook.

Obviously things have changed since then, and algorithmic feeds have had a host of weird impacts, but a ranked feed is not necessarily bad in and of itself.

Algorithmic feeds make large "pile of all posts everywhere" social networks like Twitter and BlueSky viable IMO.

The mentioned "For You" feed for BlueSky appears to be a variation of LinkLonk's algorithm (by the same author), so how it works is partially known: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288

I get a LOT of untagged NSFW and political posts in my For You. I'm guessing it's influenced by the likes of people I follow. I don't know WHO to unfollow... and I don't really want to unfollow anyone.

I kinda wish I could influence my For You with rules:

> No more than 2 degrees of separation from me

> Posts with fewer than 150 likes

Really this is the problem: the internet has enabled the global Hater community, who come together and find common cause in their hate, and that radiates outwards into everywhere else. Even if you're trying to define your place as "not that", it is influenced simply by trying to be negatively defined.

Not even specific to a type of Hate. Obviously it's the "big Hates" which are dangerous (and can get people killed), but even the "small Hates" such as "pop star gets cancelled for wearing the wrong outfit" or whatever nonsense is going on in kpop fandom are annoying.

> Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable

Lemmy/Piefed are a pretty good approximation of the "old" reddit: community of people you remember, geek-centered for the most part, better discussion. It fills the void for me, and there's no algorithm to monetize or incentive for advertising. Well worth the few bucks a month I give my server admin.

Your experience resonates.

This gives me a ray of hope, if a bold enough group of people are willing to give it a shot:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

What's wrong with the Fediverse[0]? Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc?

It's (relatively) simple to run your own instance and/or connect to other instances as well. It's still pretty small and has no profit motive.

I get that Meta and X leave a really bad taste in your mouth, but that's because they want to use you to make money.

Not telling you what to do, just suggesting an alternative.

[0] https://fediverse.party/

Edit: Fixed formatting.

I’m a 2000s kid and feel the same way. The internet was so different even just 10 years ago. I’ve come to the conclusion that smartphones ruined it. They brought the masses online who didn’t care for internet culture. They also gave more access to children, leading to the sanitised environment we have today.

Also: something something every village had their idiot, now they form (online) villages

Twitter has the “Following” tab that only shows stuff from the accounts you’re following. Facebook has something similar, just a bit more hidden.

But IMHO the bigger problem is that people became less social in general. I remember those fearmongering messages doing rounds which made people lock up their profiles and not post anything about their holidays as burglars could use that information to break into their houses.

Then there’s this thing where most people try to craft this perfect online presence with only carefully (and often heavily edited) photos and nothing too personal.

And in general, people seem to be much less open than “back in the early days”. Say “Hi!” to someone in the wrong mood and you’ll just get insta-blocked. Everybody is just caressing their profile but don’t want to have anything to do with the “social” part of the social network. Well, apart from collecting likes.

Facebook IS NOT the internet. Meta is NOT the internet. Neither is Google or Tiktok. And everyone who knows tis not these folks, laughs at people who think world starts and ends with social media. Besides, yes, one can live without all this shit, and live well.

Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.

That internet and almost all the people from it still exists.

They are hidden behind the enormous mass of bullshit, so its much harder to find. I keep trying to find new blogs to follow and I find it very hard to do so. HN is basically the last place I can find it.

I think this a problem for which the solution would be extremely valuable.

Yes, the problem is the 99% of the other people and stuff that got added.

I think we're finally realizing that the Internet is just one thing in an infinite universe of things. You, at any point, can go outside and do something else. Or don't go outside and still do something else

You don't have to "hate" the Internet. You can just choose not to participate in it.

Its the not internet, its bad incentives (profit) making once ok platforms shitty. But there are alternatives

Whatsapp - https://signal.org / http://element.io

Instagram - https://fotoapp.co/ / https://glass.photo

Twitter - https://joinmastodon.org/

Substack - https://tuhat.net

Facebook - maybe replace it with a mix of the others

Could not have said it better.

I feel like the author is a mind-reader and somehow read my mind.

Like how Maduro kidnapped from Venezuela affected RuneScapes[1], maybe our dislikes of internet today is just a reflection of the reality itself.

[1]: https://youtube.com/shorts/3D6LRLwraLg

Can you summary the video? I cannot change the audio track and the AI dubbing makes my gut bacteria cry.

This Internet experience has convinced me that intelligent people need a safe place separate from everyone else. I grew up on BBSes as a kid, a sort of hateful misfit, and learned to write, code and made friends I still know today. Local message forums and meetups, and FIDOnet and other distributed message forums for the wider reach. It took effort to even learn what these were, much less use them. As a kid computer nerds weren't running billion-dollar companies yet (Gates being the first obvious one in the late 90s), were made fun of at school, and were even the butt of jokes (if you remember from those 80s American movies).

The early commercialisation of the Internet killed BBSes but there were web forums. But more people could access it, so more problems. More stupidity, noise.

The dumbing down has fully transpired. Violence, anger and salaciousness are not only the noise in the noise to signal ratio, they're the investor's friend - the engagement hook that we pattern everything after.

Instead of nerds we have plastic faces with big fake lips posing for pictures or recording selfie videos in public.

I have painful nostalgia when I see an old VGA screen with an old operating system or Sierra game on it, and I wish I could find through the slop where the nerds went.

HN is for me the last bastion. And I wholeheartedly agree that intelligent people should have their own separate space from the rest. I used to be a very progressive guy "everyone deserves equal chances" but the older I get, the more elitist I become.

Seems like a random rant to me.

> What is the internet now to me? In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.

It's so much more annoying to do any of these things without/before internet. I don't do half of the other things in the rest of that paragraph. Like for phones I just get a used CAD$400 Android phone with good audio output.

> Seems like a random rant to me

I think this applies to all personal blog posts

I still find the old Internet in a few ways. Mastodon, Signal group chats, quiet local (geographically) or private Discord servers, RSS, email, XMPP or IRC if I feel like it. Definitely use uBO. I sometimes even surf Neocities.

Stay away from "algorithmic" social media and all 24-hour news—if something important happens, it'll show up on the HN RSS feed.

If you want to stay politically active and informed, subscribe to political activist newsletters and write your congresspeople.

> For racists to find other racists and amplify their unsavoury views. For paedophiles for groom children with anonymity.

Sounds like yet another call for government overreach to amplify mass censorship even more (which is also used against things like abortion information), and ban anonymity to "protect the children".

Except for the part where the author never actually calls for government censorship to "protect the children" or anything of the sort, sure.