The internet feels fake now. It's all just staged videos and marketing (opens in new tab)

Also annoying is how any research about any product you are interested is mostly spent wading through a thick swamp of websites that are just affiliate marketing generators, which it seems every single brand has now signed on to. Who knew that CNN reviewed e-bikes, or that Parade Magazine was now in the business of evaluating keyboards? Here's Popular Science telling me what the 10 best floor mops of 2024 are.

Every product is amazing and a great value, click here to buy it.

Worth remembering that the "Eternal September" [1] was in 1993, which is over 30 years ago.

The internet has been "ruined" by bots, noobs and marketers for as long as anyone here can remember. All those AOL CDs you received in the mid-90s weren't from some grass-roots community organizer, they were from one growth-oriented corporation trying to connect as many users as possible to as many paid advertisers as possible.

Just like pop music, the "good old days" of the internet undoubtedly line up perfectly with the period when you first invested yourself in it, most likely from the ages of 15-25. That was when the communities you explored were humming with life and content was fresh and original. The fact this OP was in /r/millennials kinda hammers home that point. Millennials are no longer in that optimistic 15-25 age group, and the communities they once participated in have faded away and been replaced with new ones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

A lot of people thought the people they chatted with or watched content of on the internet were their friends, and not just bored strangers. Once money got legit it became profit seeking individuals/enterprises.

The solution is not to pine for the old days of the internet but to rethink your friendship/companionship seeking strategy.

Just want to point out the obvious: if the Internet was _all_ fake, then this post would also be fake and trying to get something from you.

The reality is the Internet isn't all fake, but lots is so you have to use your brain to not get suckered in, and accept sometimes you probably still will. Overall it's still a good thing, but just not as good as it used to be when there were fewer people and the nasty people hadn't caught up with how to trick you.

This probably speaks more about the observer than you would think.

I never "made friends" online. Forums used to be horrifically toxic places. I've mostly steered clear of dumb short form content. Anyone who has a fond memory of the old internet doesn't remember what searching for song lyrics was like.

Yeah, "the internet" is boring and lame, but our generation is also vapid and performative. And it's bled well past the internet. Buying books as decorations. Restaurants designed for photos over taste. Showers and parties for every occasion.

Plenty of weird indie internet still exists. Unfortunately, most people can't stay away from corporate mega-sites. Even HN is run by such a company.

This feeling has been accelerating for me. I get the sense that state actors are ramping up their use of LLM powered bots. Hacker news is a great place still, but Reddit has become a void except for some of the more niche subs. I also see more and more AI images being passed off as normal content. Soon video will be the same. Paid influencers were bad enough it at least the content creators were humans with their own minds and creativity. Very rapidly there will be nothing human left on the internet and I’ll have to go back to the fleshy smelly real world.

I was recently at a relative's house - at some point everyone kind of checked their phones and ended up on different apps - I couldn't believe how off-putting it was. Just flipping through the endless void of 'reels' on IG/TikTok/Facebook, many of which were just stolen videos from content mills with horrible AI voiceovers loosely describing the videos. "A man found a dog in a frozen lake, he jumped into action .. ". And they're incredibly addictive. Feels pretty problematic!

Re: Dead Internet Theory and related

Instead of linking to reddit discussions, we have our own Ask HN:'s and threads here for that purpose ...... and this has come up recently in a few discussions: Neal Stephenson was prescient about our AI age

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287616

A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949

Dead Internet Theory

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39437211

I think this is the reason social media like Discord has taken off. The new generation has started to realize that any large scale community on the internet is invested with bots. So instead they've decided to create their own small communities where there's still an assumption of good faith between users.

I wonder what the next generation of social media will look like if it starts to take that into account in its earliest stages of design?

The ratio of garbage to great content is greater than it has ever been in history.

But we also have more great content than we've ever had in history.

I'm a relatively old-timer (Internet from ca. 1992) and I love the stuff I get from Mastodon and Lemmy. Kagi is awesome--and has a small web search. uBO is a Godsend--there are multiple means to pay content creators directly. Hell, even comp.lang.c is still kicking and spam is down now that Google bailed on Usenet.

Will these things ever be as big as Twitter? No, at least not until Twitter dies. But that doesn't matter. There's still more stuff there than I can consume and that's on my personally-curated "non-algorithmic" feeds.

In short, just stay away from the garbage. Find the stuff you like.

Unfortunately I suspect reddit will join the rest of the internet soon enough. Once they're public, the money has to come from somewhere.

Anyone else find more time for enjoying NOT paying attention to any “media” anymore? Seriously, I peek every once in a while to confirm it’s still a train wreck and then enjoy closing the window.

It's surprising how until the early 2000s the web was a side thing, without much importance socially or economically. And since society re-rooted itself on top (or at least moved toward that) it's a cultural and political hell. Things had no real impact back in the days, weird stuff was kept inside, died rapidly.. no real name issue...

That's the www not the internet, which is much larger and more flexible than the www. We pay internet services providers for access to the internet. The so-called "tech" companies, backed by advertisers and marketers, are "web service providers" providing access to "websites" and in some cases the greater www. Generally, no one pays for these "services". There is no additional charge on top of what we pay to ISPs. (But there are plenty of exceptions where people do pay additional fees on topof what they pay for internet access. This is quite shocking considering the majority of www users do not pay anything.)

Hence if the www sucks, the internet offers the potential to use/create something better. Without the internet there is no web. But without the web, there is still an internet.

Man, imagine how this person is going to feel in a couple of years when all of social media is just LLM bots talking at each other trying to build up enough karma to be used as scam accounts.

I think the web has been crappy for a long time because even when it was difficult to scam people online, there were still millions of people poor enough that they'd engage in what seem like prohibitively high effort/low reward scams like creating a fake Facebook account, spending months getting thousands of followers and likes, then selling it to someone for five bucks so they could use it to spam people.

With LLMs, the level of effort is rapidly approaching zero, which results in a huge increase in volume, which results in a huge reduction in returns which necessitates a huge increase in volume, etc. We're heading for a scam singularity. Scamularity, I guess.

One thing that I can’t help but to lament the loss of is the wealth of information contained within public forums. Everything is shut away in Facebook groups, discord servers, and other such private-by-default means. Most public forums, and many open Facebook groups, are relegated to answering the same basic, ill-informed question from the hopelessly clueless that appear to operate in a universe absent of any sort of critical thinking.

I would bet that one of the main reasons why organic (non-sponsored) Google results are filled with SEO optimized, nearly incomprehensible drivel is because there’s not enough content that’s valuable for its own sake. Going back to the hopelessly clueless, this makes it difficult to ask the right questions because anything they ask will be some word-spun or ai-generated nonsense that talks in a circle with no specificity and totally devoid of substance.

The troubling part is that this is going to get worse before it gets better. This “content” is going to be recycled through the digestive system of LLMs over as over again in the style of “human centipede” until there we reach the singularity of popular thought causing the entire World Wide Web to become somehow less useful than an airport newsstand self-help book.

I’m tired of being AI-splained why something I asked for can’t be fulfilled. We get it AI, you’re grossly incompetent and scared of liabilities, just spit out words for what we asked.

Related : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a guy that spends to much time online and get sucked into stupid things like this. Id be curious what his screen time metrics are and time spent on youtube everyday. This guy found a "woe is me" subreddit like millennials to spend time on. Glance at the front page and it's not a healthy place to visit.

I don't think this is the normal youtube experience.

We need to go back to the future of something like ODP[1]--human curated directory of weird sites written by humans.

[1]Open Directory Project.

The modern age is defined by the limited resource of attention (which is itself a representation of the ultimate finite resource: time). Most seek your grab your attention and influence you for financial gain, but even in the absence of financial motives, most of us are drawn to want attention for innate psychological reasons.

There is a lot of noise out there and it is only going to get worse with generative AI effortlessly pumping out hallucinatory mediocrity. It is up to all of us within earshot to boost the signal and suppress the noise.

In a real society, what mechanisms exist to prevent it from becoming a shithole?

Maybe apply similar mechanisms to the internet too?

There is a documentary which is somewhat related - HyperNormalization. It talks about how politics is fake now:

> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that governments, financiers, and technological utopians have, since the 1970s, given up on trying to model the complex "real world" and instead established a simplified "fake world" for the benefit of corporations and kept stable by neoliberal governments around the world.

Myspace and LiveJournal died when Facebook killed them. Facebook died when our boomer parents joined and killed all the fun. So we went to Instagram. Which died after everyone started caring about curating an image of themselves and stopped posting authentically. Now it's all influencers and suggested content. Tumblr died when they nuked the racy content. Reddit is the eternal September on steroids at best and manipulated narratives and bots at worst. I don't watch YouTube but from the comments that's what it appears like to me as an outsider. Google search has clearly lost the war against spam so badly that lay people are talking about it. Sadbeans all around.

Edit: and I know tiktok jumped the shark when it went from an app my gen-x colleagues complained about their tweens spending too much time on, to my older SIL, a teacher, sending me recipe recommendations she saw on there.

Honestly Reddit and Twitter feel like the only “real” places left online, provided you have a curated feed.

The web is practically dead. I use search less and less. Most content creators I know have abandoned/are abandoning blogs and written content because its just not worth competing with the SEO farms and Google’s whimsies.

Wait until generative "AI" gets better and can convincingly do videos from scratch. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Kinda looking forward to see the internet die, so AI efforts will plateau due to corrupted training data. It will live on in zombie form until we stumble into a nuclear war, at least.

No it’s not!

Also buy NordVPN

I completely disagree. Capitalism-led internet entities are fake, that is absolutely no surprise, that's how capitalism works: producing more and more garbage to make you pay for it in one way or another.

But there are vast fields of the internet where for-profit entities do not reign supreme. The Matrix rooms. The Gemini capsules. The personal blogs and the RSS feeds. The fediverse.

It's all up to you: do you really believe that giant commercial behemoths will give you happiness and you will find interesting content there ? I believe it is much more interesting to create human connections and never stray away from that. Forget capitalist individuality, come to the socialized communities.

Sounds like maybe OP is just bad at curating content for themselves? Try to recognize "staged videos and marketing" and dont click on them? These posts have become so tiresome the title should be changed to "The internet feels fake now. Its all just posts complaining and pining for "ye olde days"

Dead Internet Theory meets enshitification. The internet was allowed to grow into a network primarily designed to connect companies with consumers to extract value. The people who make waves (good or bad) are banned from platforms because such waves are hard to control from the top down. That "wave maker mold" is also the original reason people went online -- there were cool people with new ideas to discuss. Now discussion is mostly argument so cool people are replaced with people just gaming whatever meta the platform is currently running.

Reddit continually conflates the Internet with WWW. If they got off their virtual asses and tried to explore USENET they wouldn't be so depressed about their "dead internet theory".