sigh Here we go again with another “the web is dying” piece from the corporate propaganda machine.

Look, I get it - traffic numbers are down, ad revenue is tanking, and the surveillance capitalism model that’s been propping up the “free” web is finally showing cracks. But can we please stop pretending this is some unprecedented crisis?

The web has been “dying” since social networks, then mobile apps, now AI chatbots. Each time, the same voices cry about the end times while completely missing the actual structural problems. The issue isn’t that AI is “stealing” content - it’s that we built an entire internet economy on the absurd premise that eyeballs = money, and now we’re shocked when the eyeballs find more efficient ways to get information.

What’s really happening here is rent-seeking behavior disguised as innovation protection. These “licensing deals” between News Corp and OpenAI? That’s just the old gatekeepers trying to maintain their position in a shifting landscape. Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of small domains that actually make the web interesting get left out entirely.

The technical solutions are way more promising than the legal theater. Cloudflare’s pay-as-you-crawl system? Now that’s thinking like an engineer instead of a lawyer. Set proper rate limits, charge for bot access, let humans browse free. Simple.

But here’s what The Economist won’t tell you: the web isn’t dying, it’s decentralizing. While everyone’s panicking about Google traffic, we’ve got ActivityPub, IPFS, self-hosted everything. The corporate web might be having an existential crisis, but the actual web - the one built by people who care about information sharing rather than ad impressions - is doing just fine.

Stack Overflow seeing fewer questions because AI answers coding queries? Good. Maybe now we’ll get better documentation instead of the same “how do I center a div” asked 50,000 times. Quality over quantity was always the point.

The funniest part is watching Google try to have it both ways - claiming the web is expanding by 45% while simultaneously building AI overviews that eliminate the need to visit those expanding sites. Peak corporate doublethink.

Want to save “the web”? Stop depending on centralized platforms for discovery. Self-host. Use RSS feeds. Support decentralized protocols. The technical infrastructure for a resilient, user-controlled web already exists. We just need to stop pretending that what’s good for Google’s shareholders is good for the internet.

They just gonna put ads on chatbots

I wrote this comment after only reading the headline. After reading the article, i recognize it doesn’t fully fit, but here it goes anyways:

The question is should anything save it?

Probably not. Widespread internet (Facebook, Shitter, …) are rapidly turning into a right-wing propaganda instrument. Musk bought Twitter to practice “social engineering”, and basically every bigger tech platform has flanked Trump at inauguration. At this point, i expect that most people get more propaganda from their feed than actual knowledge or news.

I guess it would be better to recognize that the internet is simply a dangerous tool if it can basically tell everybody what to think, and i’m worried that with the very low critical thinking skill that most people seem to have, that’s definitely a world we’re heading towards. (I’m searching for the 196 meme about the bald officer pretending to be an e-girl for people deployed to iran but i can’t find it).

Not AI. Capitalism.

The web was well on its way to the hereafter long before generative AI came along.

No.

Edit - I mean. We could get rid of all the techbro oligarchs. Break up their companies with antitrust. And heavily regulate AI. But that’s about as likely as everyone implicated in the Epstein files giving themselves up to the police.

Terrible, we can’t track people with cookies and ads anymore, the internet is about to break!

If this is breaking the internet then please let it be broken.

Even gopher is still pretty much alive after being pronounced dead for a long, long time… so, I am not worried much

Nah

p e a c e

I guess the difficulty of monetizing writing and news is similar to the difficulty of monetizing software development.

Somehow, for the last 20 years, monetizing software development has worked well enough. People worked for Google or Facebook or idk who and they earned wages that way. Around 2015, i could notice lots of programming jobs being outsourced to India. In 2022, all big tech firms have issues rounds of mass layoffs. Last week, i’ve seen numerous posts on various platforms saying that it’s getting more difficult to find a job after graduating college in CS.

AI is threatening white-collar jobs. But it’s not just AI that’s a singular phenomenon here, rather you’d have to look at it in a wider context: AI basically copy-pastes what it has been trained on, while combining it into new material. This wouldn’t be possible if there wasn’t large amounts of training texts available. In a certain sense, once there’s enough reference material available, AI can always copy these templates and generate works based on them. As such, only a finite training heap of material is ever necessary to produce by human’s hands.

The situation is a bit different for news articles as they have to do research in the real-world, and that cannot simply be done by an AI. Still, monetizing texts is more difficult in a world where inflation is high and people have less money to spend on consumerism, ads are getting less effective, and newspapers struggle to be independent.

let it die.

Wow. When I think of all the things I’ve read about that were “killing” the web it’s a wonder my browser even works. And yet here we are.

Perhaps if the major sites and search engines had not spent the last decade filling the results with ads and SEO’d click bait trash people wouldn’t be embracing AI as a way around that mess. Of course it’s only a matter of time before the AI results get “optimised” as well.

Edit: not to mention, cookie prompts, notification requests, newsletter sign up requests, pay walls, and a host of other nags.

The internet was a mistake. We know that now. People have never been more connected yet never been more lonely. It’s a trap, a false oasis. AI could kill it and I’d sleep happy. There has to be a way to make the tech work FOR us instead of AGAINST us.

Can anything save it? Yes: REGULATION. Regulate all this shit (AI, online advertising, webcrawlers) down to the pixel if needed. Fine the companies and their CEOs into 3 generations of bankruptcy.

But, since politicians are either too stupid, too old, too corrupt, or any combination thereof, nothing’s gonna happen.

the internet as we know is dying.

A new net will be born from it’s ashes.

Either bitch about it, or let’s make the future net to our liking.

those who do not adapt die, the one universal law.