I only enjoy very specific hobby subs\forums. Beyond that you can’t find anything because all the search engines rank to by ads. Looking for a real review is a joke, its all AI\bogus.

YT is getting worse w/ all the AI slop. I just stick to my channels that again are hobby/interests I have that haven’t gone AI (yet).

I haven’t been on FB for over 10 years, no IG, no tic flop, or other social media because its a nightmare.

I’m not encouraging you to use YouTube, but if you do, marking stuff you aren’t interested in and removing every slop video from your watch history can help a lot. The YouTube algorithm very rarely recommends slop to me

Never tried that or considered it, thank you!

yw, also subscribing to the people providing good content should help too. Most of my feed is from subscriptions, with related content inbetween

This I have seen in action, one sub I like is Mount Baker Mining, which lead me to Dan Herd, then to Mine Operator, and others.

I do this at least 5-10x a day, and they keep showing me the same shit from a different “account” same fucking stick man, same fucking asian guy with glasses, same old white fucker with white hair and glasses. I’m tired boss

Lately, YT has been serving me sort of schizo-slop. On the one hand, it’s content I’m interested in, the base stories are good, the presentation isn’t bad - but it’s low effort and long running for no reason. A story that could be related in 15 seconds, well told in depth in 3-5 minutes is dragged out, repetitively repeating its few points for 20 minutes or more.

It’s a vast improvement over the teaser text stories that used to promise you’d read something interesting if you just scrolled past 500 ads and click forward 50 pages - those became rather instantly recognizable as time-waste abuse 15+ years ago, low cost low quality writing from low paid humans. The new schizo-slop has a core of seemingly verifiable interest (if it’s not actually verifiable it’s a core of a well written believable fiction), and seems to be filling in around that core with verifiable interesting context, it’s just taking 5-10x longer to present than is needed, or interesting, and I’m wondering what they think they’re gaining by sucking people’s attention in for so little in return?

YouTube paid by the time people actually watched the videos in the past (as far as I know this changed recently) so there was a real incentive for Youtubers to add a lot of worthless filler to the videos

The internet is in small communities we shitpost in along the way

2nd to last paragraph:

And this isn’t some anti-AI screed — I’m all-in on agentic software engineering!

let’s make them enjoy it less

To be fair the internet was already shit before 2023

Not to the extent it is now courtesy of AI.

I dunno man, in 20-23 all the ravings about Covid being fake or crafted by china and released on purpose and vaccines being a conspiracy to track you by bill gates were by almost all real people, it was pretty shitty even before ai built all the websites, all the posts, all the comments.

That is definitely true, but right now it’s as if that shit has been out in the sun on a hot summer day, right after rain.

IMHO using ai to automate tasks is not the same as using ai to generate sloppy content

That emdash tho

Emdash is useful punctuation — I use it all the fucking time.

On the other hand, “it’s not foo; it’s bar,” once a quirky rhetorical flourish, now scans lazy and sloppy as shit.

Also, swearing like a motherfucking sailor helps establish one’s humanity. So fuck off. No offense. Have a lovely day!

Llms swear.

The it’s not x it’s not y it’s z! Not x not y just z! Always been lazy. Don’t tell the reader what it isn’t

“Don’t tell me what isn’t so,” has to be something I say on an hourly basis when I use AI. If you ever correct anything, it just writes itself little notes like doing something dumb would be the obvious behavior otherwise.

“This service does not use JPA, it uses JDBC, so don’t add Hibernate to the dependencies.”

Motherfucker, what? Four words: “this service uses JDBC.” I swear it’s a gimmick to make AI use more tokens.

The emdash is a much bigger sign of llm slop than the semicolon. Leave my semicolons outta this.

Using AI to automate tasks that could be automated with a script is awful. And if the endpoints are there for AI to trigger actions, then a simple script could use those same endpoints to do the same thing.

Using AI to help write the script? (Strong emphasis on “help”) Ok, maybe in some scenarios.

But just constantly running AI to do shit is like firing up your big diesel pickup to go down the block to visit your neighbors, except in this case the diesel truck can’t even be trusted to reliably take you to your neighbors every time you want to go there. There’s always the chance it’s going to decide to go somewhere else.

i’ve seen multiple “the internet is turning to shit, but i love AI!” posts this week. absolutely brain-dead.

Why is this on the internet?

Why shouldn’t it be?

Why are you?

there’s a typo at the end,

“These isolas are now much harder to find in the [pail] of slop, and I don’t see a way back.”

I’d expect nothing less from an evergreen guru gasp

Happy to show the way, as always. ;)

I feel like there has been waves of losses.

• Web 2.0 upgrades made everyone feel like they had to have a shiny polished site. We lost a lot of fun amateurs.

• Once apps started getting pushed websites started to get abandoned/empty. everything from shopping to small games. I shouldn’t need an app for the coffee shop.

• Bots and bad search operators made looking and finding a chore.

• Insta killed blogs, suddenly everyone wanted a insta or YT brand rather than a blog/rss

• Everything became sponsored =- say i wanted to find out how to polish my boots, the first 3 pages and everything everywhere suddenly tries to sell me boots.

This is why i no longer enjoy the internet.

you dont sound like old man yelling at cloud. you sound like sane man in madhouse.

Old man yelling at cloud was right all along. The cloud is genuinely trying to ruin us.

You kinda are yelling at the cloud, dude

Just because people remember a measurably better time doesn’t mean they’re yelling at clouds.

This wasn’t even that long ago.

Are you 12?

Edit: I have been regretfully informed that I have in fact, missed the joke lol.

I regret to inform you that you have missed the joke.

Oh god.

That’s hilarious lol.

Thank you internet stranger.

Am I 12? Physically - no

It’s ok, as demonstrated by my complete miss of your joke, we all 12 out here sometimes.

(Shakes fist:) Goddamm cloud! Git off my lawn!

as a former web developer, you nailed it.

I essentially taught myself how to build sites from Geocities. Back then the internet was awesome because finding a new site that was cool was like finding buried treasure. Things weren’t condensed. there was no central hub for news, media, socializing, etc. it was all spread out. you had webrings of similar interests, different forums you’d go to for different topics. different chat rooms like IRC, or The Palace, or Yahoo/AOL chat. It was better. it was easier to make friends online.

now it’s all condensed and boring. you go to less than a handful of sites a day, maybe only one or two, to get content. Forums are all but dead and social media killed them. We know too much about each other now, the “penpal” aspect is gone. blogs and livejournals don’t provide interesting and personal content anymore…they all have hidden agendas of essentially the author trying to get a job. Webapps killed creativity.

The internet is boring now and you really have to dig and dig deep for that “old school” content. because regardless of what search engine you use be it DDG, Kogi, Startpage, Google, whatever NONE of them are going to point you to someones Neocities or SpaceHey or blog anymore. They need to sell you something instead.

it’s like sites like this: https://www.manuelsweb.com/ THIS is what the internet used to be like. personal sites that just had links and posts about whatever was special in someones life.

It used to be so much fun mooching around and stumbling on things, like a site covered in rainbows that told you about a the best walks on a local mountain and then had a random ice cream recipe and some happy person taking a silly photo of themselves, followed by a review of their fav spoon and some instructions on how to fix a vacuum.

Same, taught myself HTML over a summer in high school. Literally went to a library and printed out a tutorial I found on the Internet.

I will say though, if you haven’t heard of it, there’s a small movement to get back to more organic web content. There’s the Fediverse for social media that isn’t algorithmically-weighted. There’s NeoCities for web pages. There’s Mojeek and Marginalia for search. (Marginalia is all non-commercial, so its search index is interesting.)

There’s still a lot of good out there.

Check out wiby.me for old-school stuff too. Clicking on ‘surprise me…’ is my favorite way to “surf the web” in modern times.

wow thank you! I absolutely LOVE wiby.me and I had no idea it existed. I’ve just been clicking on surprise me over and over all day. it’s great. reminds me of old webrings. easily my new favourite site/search engine.

wow thanks for these sites! I knew of neocities but never really spent time looking at the various sites, i’m actually starting to build one now. also Marginalia is great. saved all three to my startpage.

Hey, you’re welcome. If you’re interested I also did a full breakdown of the Fediverse on my YT channel earlier this year.

Neocities I just checked it out and omg it feels like 2005 in the best way. Thank you.

OMG Love it. Thanks

Both the neocities and https://marginalia-search.com/ were very helpful.

I would love to hear more about this organic movement. If you ever want to do a regular post on it, i feel a lot here might respond.

It would be really good if we could have our neocities attached to our name or something….remember when everyone had a sig with 15 useful links. i forgot that

A good place to start is free and open source software. I made a video on it in April on my YT channel, and really spent that whole month talking about free alternatives to popular subscription services like Spotify and Netflix.

Here’s one of those videos. If you learn something new, I’d appreciate a like to help with the algorithm, but that’s totally up to you.

Have a great day!

I think we should bring back individual websites and blogs as well as web rings. Fuck the current state of search engines!

Love the link, i so miss this kinda stuff. I actually want to click each page.

Arrrgh! Point 3 puts me into Hulk Smash mode.

Me: “How do I start a fire?"
Site: 2 pages of what fire is, 3 pages of how fire was discovered, a page of uses for fire, a digression on how fire has impacted þe auþor’s life (which is utter fabrication as it’s written by an LLM), all interspersed wiþ lighter ads, and finally an answer of “go buy a lighter”.

It’s internet recipes taken to an extreme, and it’s all AI generated now. It is so infuriating.

Me either. Feels weird to be complaining about it on the internet though. It’s almost like the solution is self-evident. Oh, well. It’ll come to me.

The only thing that feels akin to early internet to me is the chat in video games. I miss being able to moderate things with my own brain thx.

I got called colorful slurs for being shitty at Deadlocked the other day. Kinda nostalgic.

There’s part of me that thinks this is pure nostalgia bait - we grew up on the internet, we’re middle-aged now, everything was better when we were young, shake fist at cloud.

OTOH, author isn’t wrong. The mainstream net genuinely ain’t what she used to be. The exact blame for that I don’t know and it doesn’t matter - we’re in the shit now.

That’s why niche sites like Lemmy, small web, RSS feeds etc are still so valuable. They’re messy and human, like things used to be ™. The trouble is finding them.

What I notice most is that I don’t really search anymore; I use the internet like an appliance. “Want info about A, go to X. Want info about B, go to Y”.

It’s all horribly efficient. In fact, in a recent !privacy comment (on best search engines) I basically said “I don’t really search any more. Search is shit. I use these tools instead”

aussie.zone/comment/24223554

So the author’s point about use of AI tools is worth chewing on (what with Lemmy being famously anti-AI). I think we’re now at the point where AI-assisted tools - self-hosted for me, thanks - are the best way to find those rabbit holes worth exploring. Even a small llm (Gemma-4-e4b) tied into good MCP tools can produce a really good “super Google, without the spam, find me X”.

In fact, one of the main reasons I self host (yes, mine’s solar powered) is that specifically.

aussie.zone/comment/24336560

OTOH, you could always mirror your own internet. With black jack. And hookers.

aussie.zone/comment/24257247

Ultimately though, I think smaller, more curated space (yes, like Lemmy and yes, please stop trying to turn it into the next Reddit) are going to be the last bastions of the old internet.

Thanks for your detailed post.

I’ve bookmarked many of the links to various tools you mentioned and will put them on my todo list to look into.

You’re most welcome. I hope they’re of some use to you.

Can we make a new internet?

Yes, we can!

Be the change you want to see!

Together, we can make it better!!!

I’ll be the motivator for the team, all we’re missing are the programmers. Or wait, should we vibe-code it?

Tap for spoiler

I am sincerely sorry about the vibe code comment. I threw up in my mouth when I read it out loud. I’m sorry.

We here on the fediverse are currently trying to build it.

yeah, but fedi has lots of baked in issues, especially a virulent userbase that is glad to use bots and other tools to turn fedi not into a liberal space but an illiberal space full of extremist and exclusionary politics. they are bringing over their social media echo chamber stuff and just try to re-create it here rather than on commercial platforms where they were kicked out of or left due to censoring of their extremism.

the issue is a large section of the userbase here isn’t like 2000s tech libertarians, that founded most of the internet and the 'net culture we are nostalgic for… a lot of that mentality is essentially extinct or viewed as toxic now. recall that reddit never had a block feature until 2016… 11 years after it started and only when Donald Trump was already in office.

hell most of the devs who are building the fedi are different flavors of political extremists themselves… and there are already many scandals/debates over how many fedi projects have baked in controls or default settings to censor and block things.

more than the internet, the world itself and it’s viewpoints are fundamentally different from where they were 20-30 years ago. we had much more of a monoculture and a narrower overton window back then. the type of stuff that goes on cable news programs these days would have been un-airable 20 years ago.

even in using reddit from 2010-2015, there was a massive tonal shift as the site grew, and it became massively more miserable as the politics flooded the site and every other subreddit became people fighting over R vs D.

The undernet is growing as the overnet is bloated and dying of it’s own poison.

And what would the undernet be? This Lemmy here?

Check out Neocities, it’s a revamp of the old Geocities platform.

All individual small sites, in the style of the late 90’s-early 2000’s web. Tons of animated gifs, sparkling cursors, hand-crafted HTML and CSS, web rings, shrines and fan pages, etc.

Very fun to just click random pages and explore, just like back in the day before search engines and algos curated our feeds and content for us.

Oh man! Its been so long since I have seen geocities like sites. This is going to be a great rabbit hole, thank you.

Here’s a direct link to the gallery. Scroll and blindly pick one with your finger with your ur eye closed

neocities.org/browse

Holy shit, that sounds good and will look into it. Thanks!

Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge.

Just don’t consume it. Same for blogs.

It’s like junk food. It’s not going away, so just don’t consume it.

yeah, but you get socially isolated if you don’t consume it.

just like 30 years ago if you turned up your nose at mcdonalds everyone thought you were an asshole, because it was considered great thing and only weirdos would not eat there.

further all of this bleeds over into your real everyday life.

If you feel the need to eat McDonald’s because of what other people think, then you have worse problems.

so being a dick about mcdonalds and having no friends, is better than having friends and not being a dick about mcdonalds?

and we wonder why gen z is so lonely… maybe because they’d rather be alone with sticks up their ass than remove the stick, eat the mc, and just have fun and make friends with people.

Everything gets enshittified - Capitalised, and nothing good ever comes out of those leeches and parasites.

The Capitalist religion crushed a new global, free and open digital community landscape. Say loud and proud: ‘thank you Capitalist believer’, for how it looks and works today…

Same… I tried Kagi small web which kinda promised to fix it but so far every page is a hyper-focused version of everything I hate. It somehow made it even worse.

I think it can’t really solve the problem because the people that want that tight nit free and open. Internet are already retreating from engaging with whatever this is.

People have repeatedly called things “Web 3.0” but I think we’ve legitimately made it finally and I hate it.

The internet isn’t the internet anymore. It’s walled off, corporatized, and exclusionary.

The internet used to be for people.

Now it’s for profit.

Maybe all this bullshit is a needed step to bring back old internet

We need forums back… the fediverse is a good start in my book.

!indieweb@lemmy.ml and !smallweb@lemmy.ml and friends are your saviour

Edit: I forget how the fuck to link communities without putting the whole URL

Edit edit: oh yeah, ! in front of name

Try to look at it as the chapter of the internet as we know it is over. I feel the same way as this author but I hold out hope innovation will happen.

Someone will fill the void. How and when it happens remains to be seen. There was a time not too long ago when it was unfathomable for people to have computers in their pocket.

The simpsons will probably predict it.

Yeah, well it’s full of malicious actors now, an they generally out influence and overwhelm the ordinary user.

The internet was nice when it was a non-profit space for nerds, but now it’s the main way to peddle money and influence in the world so it’s nasty and corrupt.

the ideas of the early net were merely ideals and were never going to last once money got involved. very few ideals ever last once money and power become the currency.

AI is spam

I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

We won’t unless we stop the source perpetuating this “culture.”

Big Tech.

Unfortunately, they kinda have a grip on everyone’s information sphere, so I think our chances are low :(

Escape to the smøl web! The tildeverse calls.

It’s a good post, I agree with it. And I guess The Pale is a good description of what we are noticing.

I got to experience the internet before it became like this, so at least I have memories of greatness. But the desire for great profits ruins everything. Not only the internet but the world.

Greed for excessive amounts of money is the root of evil, the bible got that right. But humans are not aware enough to see a future where greed is not the driving force of society.

Humans billionaires are not aware enough

VRChat still has a little old internet. Some worlds are weird, but some communities engage in stimulating discourse. Of course, avatars and such are monetized to some extent, but not the spoken content (please don’t monetize speech).

I don’t know who are they, but they could just curate their online experience by looking for something that is actually organic and genuine, and drop their anchors on that.

i do. games have matchmaking, reddit and startpage searches help me a lot. even microsoft has basic excel videos uploaded. easy to find torrents, easy to customise your phone experience. i dont have to suffer with irc or msn.

you just need to set up a strict browser and some blocking rules, and you are good to go.

i have to admit, i never cared about blogs, never felt the need to read anything. i like to browse forums tho. xda, vogons, mobilism, stuff like that still exists.

Humanity may never see anything like the 90s-2000s era again. That was a distinct milieu of nearly unbound creation and discovery. Not only did corporations remained skeptical of the internet. People were highly averse to being manipulated because the internet was untrustworthy. Paradoxically that’s what made the internet trustworthy. Once trust was established of course. It was a perfect mix of factors that made it a unique period in history.

I’ve long thought that we need a web 3.0 that uses a different protocol entirely and is techie and difficult like getting on bbs’es was in the 80s . For a good 20 years until that one gets enshitified too we have another chance.

Check out project Gemini:

geminiprotocol.net

“Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That’s not a new idea, but it’s not old fashioned either. It’s timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn’t about innovation or disruption, it’s about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We’re not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader’s privacy, attention and bandwidth.”

No auto playing media. No cookies. Nothing tracking you. And they built it, as I understand, to be deliberately difficult to add new features to, to prevent enshittification.

if all you want is static webpages and text documents you dont need a new web.

I want privacy, and long form thought.

Neither of those things thrive in an environment where everyone is trying to extract value from thought and personal information.

I like this. I’ll check it out when I get home or if I hide from work today.

Not a bad post and has some good points but I think they’re reacting to broader social changes. Not just the Internet. That mentioned co-workers, and that to me indicates a broader issue.

IDK what. Internet and people are usually shallow. Internet is shallow since like 2005 when it became more widespread and accessible. Sometimes I find myself raising autistic kids on it.

There was that video game Prey. Where the people had their stuff outsourced to flying toaster AI robots called operators. So they can be present patiently and persistent everywhere. You could have like a doctor flying toaster. I want that. I have seen how limited are human doctors under these current circumstances of being in an overly monetized system.

Also human connections are important, but they are usually flawed and backfire.

Not like that people are wrong, they just suffer from this fetal alcohol syndrome and pregnant smoking related innate oxygen deprivation and stuff like that.

It’s always refreshing to read something that I can be 100% sure was not written by an AI.

I like that too. The authentic experience, everybody being compassionate for everyone.

Yet sadly that cannot happen. Time of people usually go for survival in this modern world.

On the AI line, let’s take like an autistic kid in this new age. Having like 3000 unique question marks and unique drives.

Instead of his/her family relatives, failing him/her not giving enoungh attention. It can bash an AI. How to be car mechanic, how to be a doctor.

Bash everyting, it feels good.

He will get then easy answers nobody never got before. Are they a bit uncanny, jagged and choppy. Yes they are. But they are a bit better than nothing. But it is just the begining phase of this.

Sure there will ample places devoid of this blasphemy as it is uncomlete, jagged and glitchy.

How does he create these cool pictures?

Dithering!

tanks

I’m reminded of the video game Disco Elysium (spoilers ahead).

Welp, two paragraphs in and done with this blog I guess.