Posted by awnird 12 hours ago
I still have hope though. Maybe the Internet will be better. Currently everything has to be monietized. Everything is ad heavy. At the beginning it was not so. People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme.
I have seen neocities, personal blogs created and maintained in this year. I know I run my own "Internet index" https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
The internet was never ad free. The first ad was posted online in the 1970s (for DEC)! It pissed people off but not everyone: supposedly it generated $18M in sales. There was very little advertising back then only because the internet was restricted to a handful of large companies and universities.
The web itself was launched in 1991 and the early web was inaccessible to basically everyone as it required an extremely expensive NeXTStep machine. Windows didn't even ship a TCP stack in this era, iirc. So took a few years for the web to reach the point where it was usable at home. By 1995 the web was starting to become barely usable thanks to Win95 and Netscape, and DoubleClick launched immediately in the same year.
My memory of the early web is that basically every website had DoubleClick ads on them, it was notorious for that. "Punch the Monkey" was an early campaign. Almost every topic oriented website carried ads, partly because bandwidth and servers were very expensive so that helped defray the costs. GeoCities took off because it handled the complexities of running ads for you, so you could publish for free.
Turns out, people want food and shelter more than entertainment. And psycho billionaires want money more than fun.
Probably not.
And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer.
I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.
I tried out Google search for a few technical searches recently and it was surprisingly ad and AI free. Not bad at all and much better than I remember from last year.
Then I put in some non-technical searches and it was all ads and AI and basically unusable.
I am a happy subscriber of Kagi though, they provide a really excellent service.
The most famous one was probably Benjamin Franklin’s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Richard%27s_Almanack
Paper encyclopedias might make a comeback for the same reason.
Seems difficult to produce nowadays as even well researched topics are constantly attacked. Climate change papers as a small example.
So many former regular Fox News viewers have reported changing their mind when confronted with some alternative information sources for a while. News is also one-way, and most Fox victims aren't people who discuss issues with all sides.- they're in bubbles.
This clickbaity headline format cannot die fast enough
Now Google just gives you an AI answer with random values pulled from blogs and Reddit. It's almost always blatantly incorrect. I genuinely can't understand why Google would destroy its most valuable search features. Disclaimer: I work for Ecosia, so I know for a fact that users really value these search widgets, and it was often cited as a reason they couldn't leave Google.
A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture".
Case in point:
> Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.
For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory."
If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.
There probably are some important hidden discord groups that would explain the origin of many political positions. Unlike smokey meetings in scummy bars, that exists now and is on a database somewhere.
And that's public announcements. Do we really need to archive more than a few of the "I'm in this city, look at me I'm so rich and beautiful" short videos?
It does, but do you think that people at that time thought anywhere near as much about preserving their scribbles as we do?
I'd venture a guess that we've created more "content" since the advent of the internet than in all of human history prior, and most of it is stored on things that aren't even designed to last a human lifetime without failure.
The idea that we're going to save every piece of digital junk for posterity just isn't realistic or healthy.
> What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.
You're right, but you're also assuming that they're going to care that much, and that we're going to survive that long.
Well as far as digital letters, photos, menus, etc. are concerned, there's nothing stopping someone with the means and motivation from investing in a doomsday storage facility specifically designed to store these things for posterity. If people can do this for crypto they can do it for digital content.
As for physical items, do you know how much junk Americans have in storage units? The US self-storage industry generates over $40 billion in annual revenue. We're probably keeping more "stuff" in storage units where it has a chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse than at any point in human history.
I don't necessarily think all this digital stuff is worth saving, i just see how it could be that we are essentially erasing our modern historical record by putting 100℅ of it in private data centers with no permanent records.
And then you see how plenty of contemporary digital media from the last 30-40 years is actually already lost to time just in our short timeframe. I don't think acknowledging that this could be detrimental is necessarily an argument for trying to preserve all of it. We, as a society, went very rapidly from preserving a lot of it to preserving none of it. I don't see the harm in thinking about the implications of that.
Nobody actively preserved letters and menus and postcards and photos, they just persisted by nature of being physical. Digital records only persist with continuous effort to preserve them. So the record for future historians will be highly curated and likely much more limited.