This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.
Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.
A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.
Great prose and truthful. My brain heard it in James Earl Jones’ voice.
I really non ironically miss the friction of the old internet.
I prefer how it took time to find some bare HTML university website, slowly browse through an index as if it was a book, and then find one non-SEO optimized page with all the information you needed on a topic for your research.
The time to browse, being exposed to other terms, having to select the pages yourself, being skeptical by nature, and then having to copy it by hand... This is a much more positive scenario than having a gigantic company learn everything about you and everybody else and then make these decisions for you, using some hidden algorithm, and with the ultimate goal of pushing their newest process. And of course, the content has been rendered virtually useless to appeal to that algorithm.
when the internet was a wild and unexplored frontier, and we were adventurers charting the unknown.
I'll drink to that memory, my brother
Wild and magical, where we..upon getting our first connection to this wide world of wonder, would just explore. Clicking every link with wild abandon and discovering magic behind every one of them. No need for caution, Viruses were rare, Malware didnt exist, just spread wings gliding over vast lands of unbridled discovery.. Not even realizing 16 hours had passed and you had missed sleep, the adrenaline of adventure keeping you going, wide eyed and focused.
God I'm depressed now.
The Web was much better and more useful back before it had a business model. Good riddance.
So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!
Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link. Currently no ads, but just wait.
Apologies if you were joking.
"what should I do if I'm going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?"
ChatGPT: "I'm sorry to hear that you've been going to a stressful situation, it's always worth talking about your feelings. I've come up with a plan to help you:
1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black™ from a Pepsi official supplier"
Haha reminds me of Black Mirror
This is part of the larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue to pay for hosting. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in bot traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don't entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.
republicans and oligarchs are already going after wikipedia
I'm not buying whatever a billionaire nepo baby CEO monopoly owner is pedaling. Let's hear what some labor leaders have to say about it for a change.
i'd like to be a labor leader, but i'm not (yet). Yet here's my opinion:
Knowledge was meant to be free since the beginning. I look at ideas as human-cultivated, carefully cultured viruses. They're packages of information that live within a host.
They're a lot less aggressive than their feral counterparts, but they're still individual beings who want to spread. Holding back knowledge is unnatural, and the internet should be free.
peddling
But it's felony contempt of busoness model!!
The web doesn't have a business model, cloudflair, you do. And nobody cares because you suck.
Eh, Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.
But yeah, the web doesn't have a business model in the same way a town square doesn't, yet you can make a business work in both areas. Make a compelling product and people will pay you for it.
When Google itself is the one stopping you from clicking on a website you've got a problem.
It needs to get even nastier so that it affects all the big players in a huge way so they get to do something about it. While it only affects the indie web we are all just gonna keep suffering.
