How to Revitalize the Internet

inverse_square_matrix

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I don't really view the Internet as a single contained space anymore. It hasn't changed much protocol-wise, and what has changed has been mostly positive.
What happened was it's popularization, the amount of users increased and with that came the corporations. They set up a bunch of websites that centralized everything for the new waves of users that flooded the Web. But we are still here, we aren't really being forced to join those websites because the Internet still mostly works the way it used to, we can still create our own corners for likeminded people. Even when we do need to use the corporate websites, most of the times we can do our little hacks to make them bearable.
Maybe one day our corners will expand to swallow the rest of the Internet. Until then, we can keep chillin.
Just a positive counterview here.
 
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NeoTokyo Tempo

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Unfortunately i have to agree that it's neigh impossible to fix it.

But just because its unlikely to succeed doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Well, being here is at least a good start. There would have to be a complete reversal in the mindset of the average internet user and the tech companies (Not only social media, but hardware and software companies as well) in order to fix it.
 
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Hraelth

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Just make some old school forums (not just twitter for people banned from twitter), and make life for phoneposters as difficult as humanely possible.
 
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Higher barriers to entry. The large corporations & social networks can only survive as long as they have a raw material of normie souls to feed on. Create platforms/networks which are hard to use, technical challenges, invite-only, not talked about... private clubs, like how rich people IRL organize their social networks. Make it hard for the kind of people who only use FAANG websites to even know the existence of our networks, much less enter them.
 
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I don't really view the Internet as a single contained space anymore. It hasn't changed much protocol-wise, and what has changed has been mostly positive.
What happened was it's popularization, the amount of users increased and with that came the corporations. They set up a bunch of websites that centralized everything for the new waves of users that flooded the Web. But we are still here, we aren't really being forced to join those websites because the Internet still mostly works the way it used to, we can still create our own corners for likeminded people. Even when we do need to use the corporate websites, most of the times we can do our little hacks to make them bearable.
Maybe one day our corners will expand to swallow the rest of the Internet. Until then, we can keep chillin.
Just a positive counterview here.
I really like the positive counterpoint. As an addendum, my prediction is that the clearnet will become increasingly normiefied to the point where a loss of users will become inevitable.

Where they will go?
Outside -> Grass, Green, Fresh air
Darkweb -> A new frontier for the 4chan degen.
 
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Higher barriers to entry. The large corporations & social networks can only survive as long as they have a raw material of normie souls to feed on. Create platforms/networks which are hard to use, technical challenges, invite-only, not talked about... private clubs, like how rich people IRL organize their social networks. Make it hard for the kind of people who only use FAANG websites to even know the existence of our networks, much less enter them.
Eventually some do-gooder will come in and write software to simplify it for the masses and ruin the entire experience. If you make it source code only, they may distribute ready to use binaries.

If you make it invite only, they will blab all over the place via different accounts.
 
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inverse_square_matrix

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I really like the positive counterpoint. As an addendum, my prediction is that the clearnet will become increasingly normiefied to the point where a loss of users will become inevitable.

Where they will go?
Outside -> Grass, Green, Fresh air
Darkweb -> A new frontier for the 4chan degen.
The darkweb, as in Tor, is a pretty good barrier of entry since people are usually scared of "being hacked" or will just stop using it because it's slow, so things like anonymous imageboards can stay anonymous and open while still keeping out the masses and without resorting to random technical barriers or password protection.
Good luck trying to moderate anything there, though.
 
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VaporwaveVista

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I think the most important and hardest to accomplish step would be to decentralize the internet. If we could split up sites like Twitter, Facebook, >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk, etc. into smaller communities I think we would see a lot more meaningful interactions. I like posting on this site because there's a relatively small amount of people and I like getting to know you all.
Another issue, in my opinion, is that people seem to make content with the goal of making money rather than just doing it for fun. I really miss the internet from when I was younger and everyone seemed to be creating and sharing things just because they wanted to.
I guess I don't really have any ideas to accomplish this stuff, it's hard to compete with these giant corporations that have algorithms designed to keep you glued to their sites.
This is the agora road I am on, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), NFTs and Ethereum name service. I am currently looking into leaving my DNS for my ENS which is my Ethereum Name, vaporwavevista.eth instead of hosting on a central server I am researching about IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) for peer to peer node hosting and file storage. Lots of stuff to look into/research and start building in the decentralization space, I truly believe Web 3.0 is what comes next, just thought I would drop these images to paint a better picture for you about the idea you are yearning for. <3
 

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The darkweb, as in Tor, is a pretty good barrier of entry since people are usually scared of "being hacked" or will just stop using it because it's slow, so things like anonymous imageboards can stay anonymous and open while still keeping out the masses and without resorting to random technical barriers or password protection.
Good luck trying to moderate anything there, though.
Tor is good on paper but nowadays there are too many mentally ill people that want fame on small forums/ibs. Most IB's on tor are infested with extremely stupid people that are terminally online and post solely to ruin discussions. There is also the issue of pedos on tor, not only do they attract feds, they are also retarded and terminally online.
I think about bad minimal UI design on websites, check this website for example:
website.png

These bad looking websites with extremely basic designs filter most cancer, but attract some lesser cancer.
 
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i think alternatives like gemini (as mentioned prior) and something akin to zeronet would be a good way of revitalizing the internet, i know of some nice little forums on gemini, but haven't touched zeronet because i've heard its incredibly dead because no one wants to give over resources
i would love to see decentralized networks take off but i think that i'll be waiting a long time because people on the big social media sites don't seem to be giving a fuck

Most IB's on tor are infested with extremely stupid people that are terminally online and post solely to ruin discussions.
feels like most internet forums, i know of a smallish forum where some insane dude has kept on showing up for 10 years under various alts to harass the forum
 
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MorphedSnowman

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I usually don't understand why some think that we need some blockchain decentralized social media to make the internet a bearable place. Whenever you run twitter centrally or not doesn't matter when it's still essentially twitter. I mean, majority of these decentralized social platfroms are even worse than their centralized versions since usually they just attract computer nerds or people who think their personal boogyman is out for them, which is a deadly mix.

In my opinion all that is actually needed is few things to make social media obselete: A universal and decentralized chat application, which kinda exists if you've used XMPP or something similar, it just needs a better client. An application to deliver feed of what everyone is doing that you are interested in, maybe some way to rank what it shows too. Lastly a personal page creator that's easy to use. You can leave CSS and HTML for people who enjoy it, but majority of people just want to have a basic page that shows their name, pictures, etc.

If you have these things and they aren't dependent on any company, no one really owns the internet and there's no reason to use any platform. You just need to package that into something that's easy to use and can be run without any external service. Which is how the internet operates already tech wise. You can right now host a server and everyone who inserts it's IP or domain can access it. There's a reason that lot of nerds in the 80s/90s thought about internet as some technology which will erode borders and make censorship obsolote. It's because it already can do that tech wise.

and lastly, to bitch a little bit about all of these decentralized, libre and whatever else communities, I wish they actually set trends instead of picking a popular service and making it libre. The only thing the additude they have now can lead to is making a worse version of that service with less spyware. Which if you think about it, why would anyone switch to it? Majority of information doesn't need private. We don't exchange bank information or sensitive personal info 98% of time, and those times we do most likely no one sees it anyway. Maybe some algorithm scans these messages without really understanding their meaning. Which is not me saying privacy isn't important, but if that's the only reason you have to use some service, no one will switch. Why can't we have a community driven project that actually produces something new and exciting?
 
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s0ren

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Is there really any way to make a difference? The internet is just a part of normie life now, you can build small independent communities that are reclusive and exclusive but that won't have any impact on the overall culture. Once something goes mainstream it's basically ogre. For example, the profit incentive people are flagging in this thread, while certainly a contributory cause, it cannot be erased or reverted back.
 
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Bring back StumbleUpon, that site made "channel surfing" the web a fun experience! I would come across so many strange websites and interesting blogs because of it! I got shadowbanned from this site numerous times and had my account eventually permanently put under review as I was lowkey using the service for my personal gain by increasing my "power" by uploading a lot of pages from the same sites (which got blocked because of me oops)

Regardless of that, it was still one of my favourite sites out there, I know there are a lot of similar sites with a random site discovery tool, but StumbleUpon truly was the best of its kind.

They now have a new service called Mix.com, but I'm not feeling that at all.

On a different note, an aesthetic known as Webcore also focuses on the Y2K web, interesting term to look into.
Another thing that could fix the Internet (and even real life) is to bring back the neat and quirky logos which will always prefer over the overly simplified logo designs.
 
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Still a Youth

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Okay everyone, I have heard your complaints about everything that's wrong with the Internet. Now, let's hear your ideas on how to improve the internet.

To me, decentralized social media (i.e. Mastodon) and having the power to make our own websites on Neocities, leprd.space, and other free webhosting services are a start.
defi and dapps are the way to go. web 3.0 is happening. it's just a matter of which way it'll go
 
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Still a Youth

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Is there really any way to make a difference? The internet is just a part of normie life now, you can build small independent communities that are reclusive and exclusive but that won't have any impact on the overall culture. Once something goes mainstream it's basically ogre. For example, the profit incentive people are flagging in this thread, while certainly a contributory cause, it cannot be erased or reverted back.
i wish it weren't the case but i think i'm a "brown" here. or maybe a green, but i haven't told anyone about it. Hopefully i'm not contributing to agora road's downfall.
 
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This is an off the cuff idea so bear with me; what if there were more apps that forced or encouraged you to engage with the real world? a la Pokemon Go. I didn't even play Pokemon Go and people would come up and ask if I was the one in their gym, etc. etc.. Encouraged interaction with real, physical life.
Not far off the trail actually :)
 
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Still a Youth

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Too many people are clout chasers and trend followers, almost nobody is a trend setter. More trends need to happen and also people need to stop recycling memes so much.
I agree to an extent, but there's definitely a nostalgic appeal to older memes that shouldn't be considered just "recycling".
 
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We can start by removing 90% of internet users
After that, remove most websites
Basically, we'd have to rebuild everything from scratch
"The internet is dead, and we're the ghosts haunting the graveyard. God that's depressing" -Mister Metokur
Alright NeoTokyo, but who would be able to hinder the users from interacting with the current form of internet? How that's done? I mean, we are not in an administrative position. Also, shouldn't the new version be user-oriented? And if so, shouldn't they also engage in the process of building it up from scratch? And if they engage, that also means they would have to experiment with it while the building process. Experimentation is done by interacting with the New Version while it is evolving, as the two process is co-dependent.

At least that's what I think. Would you care to elaborate?
 
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