The Future of the internet

The internet as we know it is dead but simultaniously alive. The only real threat left to the internet is AI, ehrm, "AI." The Surface level internet is dying a horrible death. More and more people are begging to ditch phones and social media and the trash heaps at the center of the internet. they are unhealthy and can even be out right dangerous. Wouldn't this mean that the future of sites like this one should be pretty bright? It would be nice to live in a world like they thought we actually would live in at the dawn of the modern internet age. A place where people have personal websites, host their own servers and probably lurk imageboards at the same time. The only real issue now is if AI keeps spreading across the internet filling everything with fake accounts. I mean, soykaf, I could be a bot right now and you wouldn't know it.

Don't you mean “the World Wide Web is dying”? I mean, for people who aren't too lazy to use the Internet with something other than a web browser, migrating to an environment less dominated by consumerism and junk content is entirely possible. Why on earth do people keep calling the “Web” the ‘Internet’? It bothers me much more when people say “the Internet” as if it were a collective entity or something like that. If the Web dies, honestly, it will be a good thing. And I go so far as to believe that the ability to connect to the Internet should never have ceased to be something for tech-savvy people, because its popularization has brought nothing but problems. People who are simple-minded and only use the Web for leisure or to act foolishly should return to television or gossip magazines.

>>89751 >And I go so far as to believe that the ability to connect to the Internet should never have ceased to be something for tech-savvy people, because its popularization has brought nothing but problems >People who are simple-minded and only use the Web for leisure or to act foolishly should return to television or gossip magazines Couldn't agree more. The same applies to every tech niche, including Linux distros. I will never get what motivates people to encourage lamers to get into Linux, they should really btfo. To hype is to trivialize and destroy. Loose lips sinks ships, etc. We went from "lurk moar" and RTFM to "here's the easiest way to get privacy and dank games with loonix desktop environment for dummies!!". It attracts normals and by natural consequence, propaganda, corporate/state surveillance and other glowing trash. Nevertheless, I understand OP's take. I consider this gray-area between extreme niche and the beginning of popularization (98-08), as the golden age of the www so far. It's very sad that it didn't last. The same thing happened to every significant subculture, they have all died of co-opt and mainstream contamination. I'm afraid that the original "internet culture" will have to go ultra mega underground to survive, way beyond .onion, which already glows.

>>89678 >The Surface level internet is dying a horrible death. That's an optimistic way to look at it. Most people don't even know that you can legally block the advertisements financing this whole attention economy. By (not) doing that, they continue to incentivize it with all its consequences. >Wouldn't this mean that the future of sites like this one should be pretty bright? A community consists of the people in it, but it only takes a relatively small number of bad people to ruin it for everyone. Those become more likely to join the larger a community grows, and attempts to mitigate that are rarely successful (see: 4chan), so Lainchan could be said to live and die with its obscurity. >>89751 >I mean, for people who aren't too lazy to use the Internet with something other than a web browser, migrating to an environment less dominated by consumerism and junk content is entirely possible. You don't know how bad things really are. Web browsers are arguably the least bad way to access the mainstream world wide web, considering that you can use an adblocker to at least avoid paying for slop. These days, most www traffic relies on phone based apps, where you're limited to an adblocking DNS at best and data harvesting goes absolutely wild. You can escape the mainstream web (.onion included) pretty easily. You just need to follow a manual or two. However, it's much more difficult to avoid the effect of attention based financing on the people around you. normal person brains are perpetually dopamine fried online, so they can't pay sustained attention to anything that fails to immediately entertain them in real life. normal person minds are algorithmically locked into a bubble of their own opinion online, so they are more easily irritated by anything that disagrees with them in real life. There's no way around fixing this. All it would take is cutting the ad revenue sustaining the problem. And when there's no more money to be made keeping people needlessly engaged, the web will return to being this place where people put what they want to be put out there for the love of the game.

>>89678 Is it me or have google search gotten another wave of degradation? It ignored all words in my two and three words requests today multiple time. It's been going downhill for many years, but today was the first time it was that bad.

>>89765 I think a lot of search engines have been getting worse to be honest. I wonder how much is deliberate enshittification vs "optimisation" in a world(internet) full of slop content

>>89759 >it only takes a relatively small number of bad people to ruin it for everyone One hype could ruin it in a matter of weeks. People, including lainons, tend to underestimate the power of a well coordinated psyop, such as a fabricated scandal that goes mainstream or even a call for normals to get a load on SEL which would lead them to flood this imageboard and kill it. Protecting cool things that are dear to us (aka: not bringing unnecessary attention, positive or negative) is absolutely vital at this point, if niche communities are to survive. >so Lainchan could be said to live and die with its obscurity I certainly hope so. >You can escape the mainstream web (.onion included) pretty easily. You just need to follow a manual or two. However, it's much more difficult to avoid the effect of attention based financing on the people around you. This. You could invest your time on getting some experience on other decentralized networks a call back to Gopher or exploring the GNUNet for instance yet the society around you lives on corporate platform media and big tech services. It's very difficult to live outside for a mere day, if you don't live in a rural environment, without using one of these services. >There's no way around fixing this. There is, theoretically. But that would be considered illegal and disruptive. Actual attacks don't require popular approval, only the appropriate tactics and pragmatic coordination. The same way the establishment can coordinate silly attacks on wholesome things and utterly destroy them by weaponizing common people, independent computer geeks could do it to the establishment. Even if the current infrastructure is based on high availability CDNs, containers, APIs and whatnot, services are already going down constantly because of bloat and poor programming practices. And by consequence, considering that the web today is largely interdependent, any BGP "failure" could seriously damage online operations worldwide. It literally only takes the implosion of one critical node and the soykaf gets real really fast. Not mentioning a terror/war scenario where power grids could get physically wrecked. Logically, it would only take volition and coordination. The internet was once populated by services and activities delivered by many benevolent and genius middle to upper class kids that didn't thought about profit and almost all they did was later destroyed by a few not so benevolent rich kids. Even if cybercrime became an elite professional niche recently, low level wizards, SIGINT nuts and network enthusiasts could fuarrrk things up any time if they worked together. And that's precisely why the system is giving them hell, starting by how rigged and retarded the tech industry has become, a programmer that could tackle a personal project or two a few years ago is now being compelled to dedicate their whole lives to their heavily bloatted library dependent sojadev jobs if they want to pay rent and eat. If free time was possible, I believe that the internet wouldn't be this way. Many people still don't understand that people like us are the real targets. The tech enthusiast that could become a dangerous hobbyist is now an overworked slave with total fatigue and suicidal thoughts. They were trying to suffocate the tech working class for a long time and they have largely succeeded. However, poverty can be both the factor that benefits tyranny (which is happening right now) and the trigger that starts a worldwide fire. Now the only thing lacking here is the "enough is enough" factor. If computer geeks starts becoming poor and oppressed, the "what's in it for me" question slowly stops making sense real quick. And then we enter the true cyberpunk scenario, in the near future. Extremely qualified computer geeks that are badly payed tend to become quite the apt criminals. Mid 90s to early 00s Russia is an example of this.

All you need is a community, an identity for that community, and the technological means to mercilessly enforce conformity to that identity.

>>89777 In other words, all you need is another totalitarian system?

>>89778 Yeah, but this time you get to be the tyrant! Congrats on your new promotion!

>>89778 Within today's hyper-individualistic zeitgeist any kind of community seems repressive, oppressive and totalitarian. The forgotten truth however is that only within a community - which is not a state, a nation, a race or an ethnicity - with clear rules can we attain the freedom to express ourselves and grow into autonomous individuals. It's just a matter of to what degree does the community exercise its repressive tendencies - too little, and the result is the atomized, egotistical and viciously competitive society we're currently living in the West. Too much and you end up making a society of weak, spoiled man-child drones who cannot operate outside the Hive - symptoms of which, ironically, we also can see the West exhibiting to some extent.

>>89767 it’s all Prabhakar Raghavan‘s fault, man

>>89678 No, i believe something very different is happening, currently the internet is dying out because of personalized recommendation algorithms and sensationalist clickbait creating a self feeding loop of mental illness and social atomisation where algorithms slowly personalize you to your niche to such a degree where you find it difficult to connect with other people irl and in some cases even on the internet which causes you to be detached from reality and fall for said clickbait more easily which is nowadays compounded by the existence of AI and all the misinformation it brings which causes even more detachment from other people. These all cause people to engage less with others, be more on edge, or just become straight up delusional. Which leads to where we are now, where people don't see much of a point in expressing themselves and more often don't have the ambition to create a website to do so, causing further decay of the internet and perpetuating the cycle. And i didn't even mention the effect the state of the economy and propaganda created by companies and goverments has on all of this, but i think you can guess.