The inventor of the World Wide Web still believes in the internet as a force for good.

  • vermaterc@lemmy.ml
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    24 hours ago

    Has it? If someone offered me access to the Internet from 20 years ago instead of access to today’s one, I would certainly refuse.

    No GitHub? With all open source software in existence presented in a standardized way? No StackOverflow? With giantic knowledge base presented ad-free? No Fediverse? No vod streaming? No interactive weather apps? Guys, c’mon.

    • oni ᓚᘏᗢ@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      We are in a social media app created exclusively to avoid the nowadays internet. That’s how is going on.

    • BertramDitore@lemmy.zip
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      20 hours ago

      To me it definitely has gotten much worse, though everyone’s internet experience is radically different. 20 years is too far back, definitely not. But 5 or 10 years? Absolutely.

      I don’t have accounts on and completely ignore all social media other than this, and have all my ads blocked everywhere. I don’t use streaming services, so no exposure to ads there either. That all makes my web experience (and I’m sure most other Lemmy folks) arguably way cleaner and content-focused than the vast majority of people who just use the mainstream internet as it is.

      And yet it’s pretty difficult to find out basic things, and I think that’s a very recent development. It has always been nontrivial to figure out what’s true and what’s not and sometimes you had to dig a bit. SEO did a great job of poisoning things before LLMs. But now? I feel like 99% of what I find is unconvincing and just bad, and the sheer volume of rehashed bullshit makes it super hard to find something useful, let alone something real and truthful.

    • Nelots@piefed.zip
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      22 hours ago

      They never said it deteriorated so much that we’re back to square one. Would you still refuse if you were instead offered the internet of 5 years ago? I don’t think I would.