The web as we knew it — open, chaotic, full of real voices already gone. Free speech isn't what it was 15 years ago; it's filtered, throttled, and buried under bots and algorithmic noise. But AI isn’t the root of the problem — it’s just another layer. The real issue is that the current internet model no longer serves people; it serves platforms.
Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one—one that puts users, privacy, and real expression first.
rambambram · 6h ago
Just ignore the platforms. Use RSS on a body of self-curated websites/bookmarks. Click to read the articles and essays on their own domains (show the creators some love by doing that), and click around over there on that other domain.
I built my own system for that, but I know for sure this is possible with off-the-shelf (open source) software.
It takes some time to get used to this. No saturated video thumbnails, no infinite scrolling, no notifications. It's slower and feels more boring in the beginning. But it becomes a blessing very soon, when you go back to LinkedIn's feeds or Youtube's algo grid after a month and it feels like a punch in the stomach.
nchmy · 5h ago
I used to be a heavy user of RSS, back in the Google Reader days. I loved it for following a wide array of different blogs. I'm not really sure why I stopped with rss - I switched to viable alternatives to Google reader when it died.
Recently I've been keen to get back into this way of using the web, because I have evidently been sucked into scrolling on the platforms until the algorithms give me something I want to see.
The other day, one of my favourite web dev blogs (and one of the only blogs I actually seek out) created this fantastic compendium of Web Performance resources and blog links, along with an associated rss opml file. Surely this is the push I needed to get back to the glory of the web.
But I definitely need to put in the effort to discover other eclectic blogs. I really miss reading long, authentic things on diverse topics
nirui · 3h ago
Ignoring is not how it works. Internet is a basically huge social circle, if not enough people got on broad, a site can die out really quickly. I've observed quite few examples of small community closed down because no one was there anymore, some websites that I loved as a child no longer exists because of this reason too, gone with it is all the content they once hosted.
Here's the problem:
1. Software/Infrastructure have a cost: If you want to self-host, there's a consistent dread of maintaining things. It wears you down, slowly maybe, but eventually.
2. The problem of discovery: Back to the past, people used to sharing links and resource manually, often on a forum ("forum life", i call it). But now days people are more rely on platform recommendations (starts from "Just Google it"). If your content/link is not recommended, then you can't reach far. Also, people now days really hates registration (and memorizing/recording account/password), and they will not even try to use "strange" websites.
3. Government regulation: The government pushing laws upon laws that could restrict self-hosting content, by either making self-hosting difficult, or forcing websites to self-censor (which most personal sites just don't have enough admin to do).
4. Some people who has the capability and know-hows on solving the problem are "solving" it the wrong way. Instead of creating systems that modern users would love to use, they tries "being back the old way" so do speak, but not giving any consideration on why people abandoned "the old way" in the first place. The software they created maybe even quite hostile to regular non-tech-savoy people, but hey at least they themselves thinking it's cool.
There are few projects gets it right, like Mastodon, and maybe Blue Sky etc. But, then these project still don't earn a lot of money and political capital, meaning it still can't escape the point 1 above and maybe point 3 as well.
Over all, I think it's less that the platforms exploiting the Internet, it's mainly that most people just "moved on" to what could make their life easier. Internet is a tool after all.
P.S. If someone wants to solve the social media over-monopolization problem, I'd recommend that you make sure you're "user forced", user, user, user, regular old man/woman John/Marry Doe user. That's how you create social circle/network effect and that's how you grow and sustain.
627467 · 5h ago
I worry that AI/bot presents as a desincentive for proper RSS distribution. Authors may not don't want to provide easy access to their content by bots. Maybe paywalling? Maybe proof of work solves this?
j45 · 4h ago
That's something the few can do, but not the many.
As open source improves at user onboarding, and user experience, there might be a chance.
marginalia_nu · 6h ago
You're using the wrong tools to browse the web if it seems that is the case.
The weird, creative, bordering on unhinged part of the web is still very much around and alive. It's just that you need to depart from the major social media sites and search engines if you want to find it again.
larodi · 6h ago
Delete all social media immediately. It’s the equivalent of Neo unplugging himself, taking these tubes out of his throat.
barbs · 6h ago
Well said. There's a good search engine for that, maybe you've heard of it?
I’ve tried Marginalia about… probably 10 times, at this point? Every time I want niche search results. I haven’t found an interesting site through it, yet.
I love the concept and want it to work! I pay for Kagi; I value search.
marginalia_nu · 4h ago
The explore mode[1] is probably the tool you're looking for if you're just looking for something interesting / demonstration that the weird web still exists.
This is a step in the right direction. Thanks for this.
pupppet · 2h ago
It will never happen as long as Google is able to gatekeep the Internet with its search and browser. Even if you could find enough power users to break out and create something that hits critical mass, user-powered indexes don’t scale. Whomever swoops in to fix the problem immediately becomes the new Google.
lmpdev · 6h ago
The thing that stops me pursing this idea though is how do you verify contributors to this new internet aren’t platforms/businesses?
Where do you draw the line?
Who gets to draw the line?
sircastor · 6h ago
This is an incomplete thought, but a friend of mine has this idea around reputation built through a sort-of key signing. You get a key, your friend gets a key, you sign each other's keys. The key can serve as an indicator of trust, or validity that an individual's contributions are meaningful (or something). And if your friend suddenly turns into a corporate shill, you could revoke that trust. And if the people haven't established their own trust with that person, their trust goes when yours does. Transitive trust.
It obviously has some flaws, and could be gamed in the right circumstances, but I think it's an interesting idea.
Sounds like following people on a social media platform and only reading posts from in your network. Which is exactly how most people I know use Bluesky.
It works better than Twitter's algorithmic feed but it's still not foolproof because not everyone has the same idea of what sort of content they are willing to trust/ track.
salawat · 4h ago
Anything that requires the end user to internalize PKI is dead on arrival.
A) The interface won't get intuitive enough.
B) The asshats will still find a way in.
C) Ain't nobody ever met someone in the real world and gone "Yo dawg, what's your public key?"
Encryption is just a machine that turns already hard problems into key management problems.
asplake · 6h ago
Why that line in particular? It seems not to be about the quality of the content. Part of the issue is that businesses were advised to produce useful content, but the motivation for doing so is disappearing. A net negative, surely?
xyzzy123 · 6h ago
Even if you could do it perfectly (distinguish "authentic people" from slop merchants) the same old actors will do the same old things as long as the incentives are there. They will just wear "real people" like skin suits. Almost worse :/
tropicalfruit · 4h ago
> one that puts users, privacy, and real expression first
users aint that special.
belter · 5h ago
> The web as we knew it — open, chaotic, full of real voices already gone. Free
Commented on a site whose top pages are curated manually....
This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it.
Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
thom · 6h ago
I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same and it was still better than today, so I’m not convinced this is a fundamental symptom of our current problems. To me it’s more that the internet has lost any sort of physical, spatial, kinetic quality. There’s no time or place, no nooks and crannies to disappear into with friends. Just an unyielding cacophony. I agree it’s all undifferentiated but it’s not the aesthetics that are the problem for me.
nonvibecoding · 6h ago
Yeah, maybe you’re right. Could be nostalgia playing tricks on me. I just remember how exciting it felt to join a new forum, or discover something like eMule, Sababa DC, or random p2p tools.
Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.
thom · 6h ago
It's possible that various Discord servers, or obscure streamer chatrooms still feel like this, and we're just old. But it definitely feels like the default has become very top-down and public instead of bottom-up and intimate.
spacemadness · 41m ago
I think the difference there is streamers are just there to get money from their audiences. Doing something they like sure, but a vast majority are trying to make a living. That has a different context entirely.
thom · 12m ago
I think there's an extremely long tail of streamers and associated chat communities that are untroubled by any form of financial rewards. When I speak to people in those communities it sounds to me like the closest thing to IRC in the 90s - tight-knit groups with regular comings together at specific times and places, being their whole selves with each other.
pjc50 · 6h ago
"Context collapse"? The phenomenon that, no matter where you go and what the nominal topic of discussion is, it always comes back to US politics.
lmpdev · 6h ago
My memory of this was Facebook overtaking MySpace
I remember being 13-years-old and completely baffled people preferred the platform where I had no say over the HTML on my page.
I didn’t understand how people could prefer a boilerplate with profile picture and name over an actual artefact made by the person.
nonvibecoding · 6h ago
I loved Myspace. You could talk directly to bands members (At least the unknown punk bands I was following back then)
Once they lost all the pre-2016 content, I think that was it. Hard to make a comeback after something like this
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but I think we need less collaboration, less competition, and less team dynamics in general. Anything that does cross-pollination should be opaque.
More individuals cultivating personal points of view drastically different from homogenized masses.
Seems possible that one possible unintended consequence of AI could be a rebirth of the Web as something closer to what we knew. Because why use search at all for general inquiry when AI can satisfy much of that?
More critically, it’s not hard to imagine that, with AI-boosted boosted coding, a thousand bespoke search engines and other platforms being just around the corner, radically changing the economics of platform lock-in. When you can build your own version of Google Search with the help of AI and do the same with social media or any other centralizing Internet force, then platforms cease to be platforms at all. With AI, the challenges of self-hosting could become quite manageable as well. And while we’re at it, some version of the same, individual-centered computing economics on your own devices seems possible.
In these senses, it’s quite possible that Jobs’s vision of computing as extensions of individuals rather than individuals being extensions of computing is again at hand, with the magic of self-curated order from a chaotic Net not far behind.
kristianc · 4h ago
A huge chunk of online content (especially what ranked on Google )was already SEO churned sludge, and I'm not I buy the argument that elite publishers and creators like the New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic have ever really depended on Google. When the Economist sells itself to advertisers it doesn’t talk about its web traffic numbers, it talks about the fact that it's read by CEOs.
You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.
sofixa · 3h ago
The Economist and FT no, but a lot of the other more mainstream (read by a wider audience) media like Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro, etc. depend a lot on Google traffic. There were numerous legal disputes over this dependence, how Google circumvented it for users (the quick answers that made it so a lot of queries were resolved without even needing to visit the source website), and profit sharing.
kristianc · 43m ago
You see I even disagree with that. People don't accidentally discover the Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro via Google, their muscle memory is trained to these publications because that's where they go to get their opinions and worldview validated.
Of course they can get that from ChatGPT too, but it hits different when you realise ChatGPT validates everything you say anyway.
medion · 6h ago
No. All great things come to an end - artistic movements, cultural, nations, etc etc - the end of the internet is now.
mmcconnell1618 · 6h ago
I just read Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis which has an interesting perspective that "cloud capitalism" is replacing traditional capitalism and competition. A few players are assembling their own fiefdoms inside dominant web/mobile platforms.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal...
The internet doesn't have a clear, simple, micro-payment system that would allow people to reward value, so instead we have an attention based system where the number of likes and followers grants social status and financial opportunity.
jrexilius · 5h ago
When cryptocurrency first started getting attention (2010,2011-ish?) I was so excited that a potential micropayments system would come out of it and solve this problem. Sadly it did not go that way..
anilgulecha · 6h ago
Making it federated (so it's a true network of people's sites) is what can theoretically save things. But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work .. the centralized services are slated to win.
Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
IanCal · 6h ago
I feel like the barrier for self hosting could be so much lower. The resources required to host a static site are tiny and even a dynamic one with comments accessed by all the people I actually know could easily run on a cheap router.
jen729w · 6h ago
I think self-hosting is a distraction. You can make your own site using Astro and deploy it for free to Netlify and still get 99% of what we're talking about here.
If that was less scary maybe more people would do it!
zer00eyz · 6h ago
> But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work
The place where the web is still great is where you have to be invested to be a real participant. Everyone can yell about politics in a text box on twiter/FB/reddit/HN or post photos to IG/Dataing site Or videos to twitch/YouTube.
If you can host something, even for a small number of people your one of the rare few. If your "into" something where there is a focused community then your back into one of those 1% pools where people vibe and participate.
To make an analogy of it: The web is now a tourist town. Everyone is interested in making money off the visitors with the flashy lights and signs luring them into the over priced tourist traps. The locals, the natives, the REAL .01% know where the cheap places with great food and local flavor are.
SalariedSlave · 5h ago
The "web" is already just business infrastructure.
It already was, much prior to AI.
I would challenge the assumption that there is anything worth saving.
amelius · 5h ago
Maybe start a new movement, similar to the Amish. And have a completely separated version of the internet.
tobyhinloopen · 6h ago
The web was already dead.
> We care about your privacy. Can we please put a camera in your toilet seat for a personalized experience?
>
> [ ACCEPT ]
Browsing the web is a nightmare these days, I rarely visit "new" websites
> Subscribe to our spam for a 10% off coupon
>
> [ ] [SEND]
It is just a pain to visit any website these days... anyone involved creating these modern monstrosities should just fire themselves and go on a hike or something.
> We rely on invasive, tracking ads! Please enable your adblocker so we can get 0.00001 USD, please.
>
> [IVE DISABLED MY FIREWALL AND ANTI-VIRUS] [PAY 999 USD A MONTH FOR AN AD-FREE EXPERIENCE]
_nalply · 6h ago
AI is one sharp tool cutting slices from the old internet. But perpetrators have used different tools from the start: SEO spam, algorithmic feeds, embrace/extend/extinguish, building moats, the attention economy, and many others. AI is just the next newfangled sharp tool.
In other words, I don't think that AI is killing the web.
It's being profit-oriented and running amok in an unleashed way. It's prisoner's dilemma. You know, if you don't do it then someone else will do it and you lose. Enshittification is one consequence. The internet experienced it from the beginning. But only about fifteen years ago companies learnt how to squeeze the last drop out and, like in the tragedy of the commons, everybody is worse off.
And what's the most catastrophic? People are confused. They look at the tools but not at some famous people behind these rampages. Of course as leaders they just optimize the hell out of the internet with the target that their companies thrive. But in doing so they cause heavy damage.
austin-cheney · 6h ago
I thought social media killed the Web 20 years ago. RIP
bell-cot · 5h ago
Problem #1 - to "save it", you first have to define the idealized and/or snapshot-in-time web that you want to save. Don't expect much agreement here, especially on the details.
Problem #2 - if you aren't the Emperor of Earth or some such, how could you make your ideal web stable over time, in today's world?
senectus1 · 5h ago
I think the economics will save it.
AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices.
kkfx · 5h ago
We are many, search engines are the mean to discover things because even with usenet it's impossible for a human to discover via URLs and links enough information on the web, that's the real revolution: links are useful but not enough. Search engines are the best tool we have had so far to find knowledge around the web, now LLMs try to surpass traditional search engines milking knowledge from web contents, like we have many articles about wildfires in a region, but let's say not one about wildfire trends in that region, an LLM could try to spot a trend milking all articles in a significant timeframe. The Conrad Gessner's Biblioteca Universalis dream.
So well, LLMs do not kill the web, eat it. We are still almost the sole valid source of data for LLMs.
What really killed the web are social networks as proprietary walled gardens instead of an open Usenet with a web companion for stuff to be preserved for posterity or too long/complex for a mere post. What killed the web is the fact that ISPs do not offer an open homeserver instead of a closed box called "router" even if it's a limited homeserver. With an open version, with IPv6, anyone could buy a domain name and publish from his/shes own iron a blog with a ready-to-write software, with automatic RSS feeds, newsletters etc. If we give such tool to the masses the original web will be back but it would mean free speech and giants/politicians etc have free speech preferring ways to master public topics through their platforms to hide from most stuff they dislike and push ideas they like...
salawat · 4h ago
Search engine indexes being turned into copyright enforcement levers also significantly killed the net as it created scarcity in info dissemination for the sake of maintaining info asymmetry.
Go ahead and try to find JLG equipment/service manuals on the open net anymore. I'll wait.
noiv · 5h ago
I think, the web was killed before by human slob search engines can't or won't filter. Now we find out, a little longer prompt in an AI chat returns better results. So what?
pknerd · 6h ago
I don't get why the articles behind paywalls are shared here.
aw4y · 6h ago
they killed the web, not the AI.
keyringlight · 6h ago
One of the things I've been wondering about with the 'digital detox' trends or one of the younger generations getting dumbphones instead of smart, is why haven't the papers found some way of turning back the clock to explore capitalizing on that when it's supposedly hard to sell news now. 24 hour news is decades old at this point and the constant firehose of events from every location on the globe is tiring especially if only a tiny fraction is directly relevant to you. I'd be interesting if they could make a more attractive 'news/analysis product' like a newspaper or the evening news broadcast which is distinct from what is readily available from all the other sources.
janice1999 · 5h ago
It's the other way around. Paywalls are a result of the web and the Ad companies which power it killing the revenue models of publishers. AI, which steals even more and repackages their content, will make it worse.
mdavid626 · 5h ago
Yeah, just share the archive link directly.
aspenmayer · 5h ago
Canonical links are preferred, per guidelines. Paywalled sites that are otherwise on topic with a workaround are usually allowed.
Because paywalls are optional, at least for a crowd such as the HN crowd. Information wants to be free.
sylware · 6h ago
Start to regulate the technical protocols to access the AI prompts.
Like regulated noscript/basic (x)html interop. Or 'curl' based simple APIs.
Basically, if the whatng cartel web engines are not anymore required to access and use "AIs", things will start to significantly move.
jillesvangurp · 5h ago
At the same time, apps are also a bit in decline. People still make them but the whole race for making it to the top 10 in the app stores seems to have faded away. And a lot of them are simple web page wrappers. People still install some apps but more on a need to have basis than that they are constantly adding/removing apps. So, I don't buy this "the web is in decline" framing.
Change is a constant on the web. Things were very different in 1995 (plain html, no good search engines), 2005 (no widespread web capable smart phones usage yet, Google, AJAX), 2015 (peak social media and app hype), and 2025 (social media has shifted to new apps and lots of people are disengaging entirely, AI is starting to threaten Google, content aggregators serve most web content).
For 2035, I would predict that AI will drive a need for authenticity. Existing platforms don't provide this because they lack content signatures. We've had the tools to reliably sign content for decades. But we don't use those a lot except for DRM content behind paywalls (for commercial reasons). So, you can't really tell apart the AI generated propaganda, marketing, misinformation, etc. from authentic human created content by individuals you care about. And that might be contributing to people disengaging a bit. But you can see the beginnings of this on platforms like bluesky and signal which push end to end encryption and user verification. People might share AI nonsense via these platforms. But they seem to be less about that as say X, Tik Tok or Instagram are. We sometimes watermark our images. We don't digitally sign them. Why is that?
Just speculating here but the web could use a big upgrade here and do more than just certify domain name ownership. Which is fairly meaningless if the domain is some big network with many millions of users. What about certifying content itself? Reliably tie content to their creators in a way that can't be forged. IMHO this is long overdue and the related UX challenges are there but solvable in principle. DRM is a prime example of a fairly usable implementation. Just works if you paid for the content. Signed content would make it very challenging to pass off AI gibberish as authentic if it's not signed by a reputable private key. And if it happened anyway, that would damage the reputation of that key. I don't exclude the possibility of reputable AIs emerging. How would you tell those apart from the disreputable ones?
deadbabe · 5h ago
Web is obsolete. Going forward AI is the first and maybe last step to getting information about a topic. No need to sift through ads, forum drama, clickbait blog posts, comments etc… just straight compiled information into your brain as quickly as possible. Yea sometimes it’s wrong, but sometimes things you find on the wild web are wrong anyway, just deal with it.
I find that when people pine for the old web, what they’re really asking for is some way to connect to other people and see things that people have written or made just for fun in a genuine way, without it being performative, derivative or for other motivations.
In theory social media should have been this, but people’s constant need to accumulate validation or tendency to produce meme-like content adversely affects the quality of their output, giving it a machined style feel that rarely feels genuine or true to their human nature. Instead of seeing people’s true personalities, you see their “masks”.
Thus the issue is not rooted in a technical problem but rather a cultural one: people no longer naively share things that don’t fuel their ego in the most perfect way.
_hao · 5h ago
Until that same AI starts shilling ads and certain viewpoints peddled by their owners in the output... This will happen 100% (ads, the other bit has already happened). The economics of all of these models doesn't work as is. There will be a major squeeze down the line.
No comments yet
casey2 · 6h ago
It's still not as annoying as the assorted influencers who repeat The Economist headlines and articles back at me
Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web" which I would take as it somehow deleting or overwriting content on existing webpages. Or generating so much spam as to make the web unusable for the average person.
Large sites that can't exist without "traffic" already killed the web a long time ago. A paywall is the proper solution, not ads in content and content in ads. That means you will have lower traffic, it doesn't mean you are being killed. It just means you stopped assaulting passersby who are linked to your site.
rambambram · 6h ago
> Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web"
Indeed, exaggerating title. But we all have to get the idea the web is really dying, so we give up working on it. We have to get that idea because the genie of the web is already out of the bottle for 30+ years. That stuff is going nowhere. The open web is a hindrance for big businesses. Big business wants to keep internet infrastructure to push apps, AI and what not, but does not want to keep the open web.
I built my own system for that, but I know for sure this is possible with off-the-shelf (open source) software.
It takes some time to get used to this. No saturated video thumbnails, no infinite scrolling, no notifications. It's slower and feels more boring in the beginning. But it becomes a blessing very soon, when you go back to LinkedIn's feeds or Youtube's algo grid after a month and it feels like a punch in the stomach.
Recently I've been keen to get back into this way of using the web, because I have evidently been sucked into scrolling on the platforms until the algorithms give me something I want to see.
The other day, one of my favourite web dev blogs (and one of the only blogs I actually seek out) created this fantastic compendium of Web Performance resources and blog links, along with an associated rss opml file. Surely this is the push I needed to get back to the glory of the web.
https://infrequently.org/links/
But I definitely need to put in the effort to discover other eclectic blogs. I really miss reading long, authentic things on diverse topics
Here's the problem:
1. Software/Infrastructure have a cost: If you want to self-host, there's a consistent dread of maintaining things. It wears you down, slowly maybe, but eventually.
2. The problem of discovery: Back to the past, people used to sharing links and resource manually, often on a forum ("forum life", i call it). But now days people are more rely on platform recommendations (starts from "Just Google it"). If your content/link is not recommended, then you can't reach far. Also, people now days really hates registration (and memorizing/recording account/password), and they will not even try to use "strange" websites.
3. Government regulation: The government pushing laws upon laws that could restrict self-hosting content, by either making self-hosting difficult, or forcing websites to self-censor (which most personal sites just don't have enough admin to do).
4. Some people who has the capability and know-hows on solving the problem are "solving" it the wrong way. Instead of creating systems that modern users would love to use, they tries "being back the old way" so do speak, but not giving any consideration on why people abandoned "the old way" in the first place. The software they created maybe even quite hostile to regular non-tech-savoy people, but hey at least they themselves thinking it's cool.
There are few projects gets it right, like Mastodon, and maybe Blue Sky etc. But, then these project still don't earn a lot of money and political capital, meaning it still can't escape the point 1 above and maybe point 3 as well.
Over all, I think it's less that the platforms exploiting the Internet, it's mainly that most people just "moved on" to what could make their life easier. Internet is a tool after all.
P.S. If someone wants to solve the social media over-monopolization problem, I'd recommend that you make sure you're "user forced", user, user, user, regular old man/woman John/Marry Doe user. That's how you create social circle/network effect and that's how you grow and sustain.
As open source improves at user onboarding, and user experience, there might be a chance.
The weird, creative, bordering on unhinged part of the web is still very much around and alive. It's just that you need to depart from the major social media sites and search engines if you want to find it again.
https://marginalia-search.com/
;)
I love the concept and want it to work! I pay for Kagi; I value search.
[1] https://marginalia-search.com/explore
Where do you draw the line?
Who gets to draw the line?
It obviously has some flaws, and could be gamed in the right circumstances, but I think it's an interesting idea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
No comments yet
It works better than Twitter's algorithmic feed but it's still not foolproof because not everyone has the same idea of what sort of content they are willing to trust/ track.
A) The interface won't get intuitive enough.
B) The asshats will still find a way in.
C) Ain't nobody ever met someone in the real world and gone "Yo dawg, what's your public key?"
Encryption is just a machine that turns already hard problems into key management problems.
users aint that special.
Commented on a site whose top pages are curated manually....
Clients:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)#Software
Some links to find content:
gemini://sdf.org
gemini://gem.sdf.org
gemini://gemi.dev/xkcd/
gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
gemini://skyjake.fi/~Cosmos/view.gmi
gemini://calcuode.com/gmisub-aggregate.gmi
gemini://tinylogs.gmi.bacardi55.io/
gemini://sl1200.dystopic.world/juntaletras.gmi
gemini://tilde.team/~khuxkm/leo/
gemini://raek.se/orbits/space-elevator/
gemini://fediring.net/
Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.
I remember being 13-years-old and completely baffled people preferred the platform where I had no say over the HTML on my page.
I didn’t understand how people could prefer a boilerplate with profile picture and name over an actual artefact made by the person.
Once they lost all the pre-2016 content, I think that was it. Hard to make a comeback after something like this
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-l...
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Myspace
More individuals cultivating personal points of view drastically different from homogenized masses.
That extends way beyond the web though.
More critically, it’s not hard to imagine that, with AI-boosted boosted coding, a thousand bespoke search engines and other platforms being just around the corner, radically changing the economics of platform lock-in. When you can build your own version of Google Search with the help of AI and do the same with social media or any other centralizing Internet force, then platforms cease to be platforms at all. With AI, the challenges of self-hosting could become quite manageable as well. And while we’re at it, some version of the same, individual-centered computing economics on your own devices seems possible.
In these senses, it’s quite possible that Jobs’s vision of computing as extensions of individuals rather than individuals being extensions of computing is again at hand, with the magic of self-curated order from a chaotic Net not far behind.
You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.
Of course they can get that from ChatGPT too, but it hits different when you realise ChatGPT validates everything you say anyway.
The internet doesn't have a clear, simple, micro-payment system that would allow people to reward value, so instead we have an attention based system where the number of likes and followers grants social status and financial opportunity.
Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
If that was less scary maybe more people would do it!
The place where the web is still great is where you have to be invested to be a real participant. Everyone can yell about politics in a text box on twiter/FB/reddit/HN or post photos to IG/Dataing site Or videos to twitch/YouTube.
If you can host something, even for a small number of people your one of the rare few. If your "into" something where there is a focused community then your back into one of those 1% pools where people vibe and participate.
To make an analogy of it: The web is now a tourist town. Everyone is interested in making money off the visitors with the flashy lights and signs luring them into the over priced tourist traps. The locals, the natives, the REAL .01% know where the cheap places with great food and local flavor are.
> We care about your privacy. Can we please put a camera in your toilet seat for a personalized experience? > > [ ACCEPT ]
Browsing the web is a nightmare these days, I rarely visit "new" websites
> Subscribe to our spam for a 10% off coupon > > [ ] [SEND]
It is just a pain to visit any website these days... anyone involved creating these modern monstrosities should just fire themselves and go on a hike or something.
> We rely on invasive, tracking ads! Please enable your adblocker so we can get 0.00001 USD, please. > > [IVE DISABLED MY FIREWALL AND ANTI-VIRUS] [PAY 999 USD A MONTH FOR AN AD-FREE EXPERIENCE]
In other words, I don't think that AI is killing the web.
It's being profit-oriented and running amok in an unleashed way. It's prisoner's dilemma. You know, if you don't do it then someone else will do it and you lose. Enshittification is one consequence. The internet experienced it from the beginning. But only about fifteen years ago companies learnt how to squeeze the last drop out and, like in the tragedy of the commons, everybody is worse off.
And what's the most catastrophic? People are confused. They look at the tools but not at some famous people behind these rampages. Of course as leaders they just optimize the hell out of the internet with the target that their companies thrive. But in doing so they cause heavy damage.
Problem #2 - if you aren't the Emperor of Earth or some such, how could you make your ideal web stable over time, in today's world?
AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices.
So well, LLMs do not kill the web, eat it. We are still almost the sole valid source of data for LLMs.
What really killed the web are social networks as proprietary walled gardens instead of an open Usenet with a web companion for stuff to be preserved for posterity or too long/complex for a mere post. What killed the web is the fact that ISPs do not offer an open homeserver instead of a closed box called "router" even if it's a limited homeserver. With an open version, with IPv6, anyone could buy a domain name and publish from his/shes own iron a blog with a ready-to-write software, with automatic RSS feeds, newsletters etc. If we give such tool to the masses the original web will be back but it would mean free speech and giants/politicians etc have free speech preferring ways to master public topics through their platforms to hide from most stuff they dislike and push ideas they like...
Go ahead and try to find JLG equipment/service manuals on the open net anymore. I'll wait.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Like regulated noscript/basic (x)html interop. Or 'curl' based simple APIs.
Basically, if the whatng cartel web engines are not anymore required to access and use "AIs", things will start to significantly move.
Change is a constant on the web. Things were very different in 1995 (plain html, no good search engines), 2005 (no widespread web capable smart phones usage yet, Google, AJAX), 2015 (peak social media and app hype), and 2025 (social media has shifted to new apps and lots of people are disengaging entirely, AI is starting to threaten Google, content aggregators serve most web content).
For 2035, I would predict that AI will drive a need for authenticity. Existing platforms don't provide this because they lack content signatures. We've had the tools to reliably sign content for decades. But we don't use those a lot except for DRM content behind paywalls (for commercial reasons). So, you can't really tell apart the AI generated propaganda, marketing, misinformation, etc. from authentic human created content by individuals you care about. And that might be contributing to people disengaging a bit. But you can see the beginnings of this on platforms like bluesky and signal which push end to end encryption and user verification. People might share AI nonsense via these platforms. But they seem to be less about that as say X, Tik Tok or Instagram are. We sometimes watermark our images. We don't digitally sign them. Why is that?
Just speculating here but the web could use a big upgrade here and do more than just certify domain name ownership. Which is fairly meaningless if the domain is some big network with many millions of users. What about certifying content itself? Reliably tie content to their creators in a way that can't be forged. IMHO this is long overdue and the related UX challenges are there but solvable in principle. DRM is a prime example of a fairly usable implementation. Just works if you paid for the content. Signed content would make it very challenging to pass off AI gibberish as authentic if it's not signed by a reputable private key. And if it happened anyway, that would damage the reputation of that key. I don't exclude the possibility of reputable AIs emerging. How would you tell those apart from the disreputable ones?
I find that when people pine for the old web, what they’re really asking for is some way to connect to other people and see things that people have written or made just for fun in a genuine way, without it being performative, derivative or for other motivations.
In theory social media should have been this, but people’s constant need to accumulate validation or tendency to produce meme-like content adversely affects the quality of their output, giving it a machined style feel that rarely feels genuine or true to their human nature. Instead of seeing people’s true personalities, you see their “masks”.
Thus the issue is not rooted in a technical problem but rather a cultural one: people no longer naively share things that don’t fuel their ego in the most perfect way.
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Anyway this article is about AI replacing web search, not "killing the web" which I would take as it somehow deleting or overwriting content on existing webpages. Or generating so much spam as to make the web unusable for the average person.
Large sites that can't exist without "traffic" already killed the web a long time ago. A paywall is the proper solution, not ads in content and content in ads. That means you will have lower traffic, it doesn't mean you are being killed. It just means you stopped assaulting passersby who are linked to your site.
Indeed, exaggerating title. But we all have to get the idea the web is really dying, so we give up working on it. We have to get that idea because the genie of the web is already out of the bottle for 30+ years. That stuff is going nowhere. The open web is a hindrance for big businesses. Big business wants to keep internet infrastructure to push apps, AI and what not, but does not want to keep the open web.