The Internet Is A Potemkin Village: Proof Of Dead Internet Theory?

[FBI Agent]

Strangely enough, with yahoo's search engine, the search results "found" are inflated from page 1 to page 2 and then seem to stay the same no matter what page you are on

Page 1 being the first picture and Page 2 being the second picture.

 

[Nyx9572]

the "old web" wasn't just an aesthetic or a genre. what made the old web what it was was that the people were different and weren't insane like how they are now, and actually were motivated enough o build their own websites and forums.

 

[Hara]

This is an interesting discussion. I've certainly noticed a degradation in google's usefulness over the years, but I've never even questioned the validity of the number of results before. My gut reaction is that it's a cost saving measure since most people aren't expected to go through that many search results, but it still really sucks. I kinda wonder if companies like Google and Microsoft are going to keep making the AI search part of their service bigger and bigger, a sort of "oh just trust this definitely accurate summary of everything, no need to go reading on your own" and continue to decrease the actual effectiveness of their search tools.

On top of the search engines themselves, it really doesn't help that - like discussed above - so many news sites are just churning out AI articles, and spam sites that just regurgitate your search terms seem to be getting worse too. I'm not really the type of person to jump to the 'psyop' conclusion, but it does feel odd that (good) information is ironically getting harder and harder to find as tech grows. Maybe it's all just profit-driven like everything else nowadays, but it's disconcerting.

Also, I am not looking forward to generative AI improving to the point where fake photos and videos become indiscernible. If anything could truly and finally turn the internet into a potemkin village (if it isn't already), then it'll be a future version of Sora AI or some shit.

 

[asderfly]

I'm really beginning to seriously think that maybe the internet isn't as big as they make it look, we're limited to the same websites of always. We should be trying to get out of the normieweb and get into the deepweb and what google won't show because true freedom is there. Stuff like this is what I'm talking about: wiby.me

I accidentally stumbled upon this three years later and, oh wow, it looks like I've found another internet treasure. I know you aren't going to see this reply, but thank you for showing it to me anyway.

 

[Noxy]

View attachment 30348

 

[fauxclore]

I think this is less an issue with search engines and more of an issue with the world in general.
I know this is not the most erudite quote, but Tim Rogers in his Cyberpun2077 review (on part 6 in the hidden playlist) says the sentence "Signal has lost the war to noise". I believe this is an aspect that pervades everything from the internet, to the physical world. Go to any secondhand shop and it's less likely you find "hidden treasures" than you find some good old things with inflated prices, equal all around. Go to any mainstream bookshop and you'll be hard-pressed to find good editions of good books through all the noise of re-editions of classics and new editions of the romance of the week. Go to YouTube and it's less likely you find a great personal video than you find the nth opinion on a specific kind of media, the nth video essay on the politics of a specific movie, the nth analysis of the contemporary world. Search for any recipe and try to find a personal recipe and not an SEO riddle website with a copy-pasted recipe from god-knows-where. For each day that passes, it seems to me that signal, the culture and objects and things mankind created and should cherish, is being engulfed in the slop, the noise, the copy.
No to be reactionary, a conservative, pining for the olden days of the internet, but I remember not too long ago you could stumble on a website or forum that would surprise you, that would lead you to understand and meet new communities. You would find (shitty, yes) websites dedicated to a specific theme, maintained by someone you would never meet. You felt like you could "travel" around the internet, digital nomad in the true, archaic sense, jumping around various websites. When I got into university, I had a bookmark folder with around 20 websites I would open everyday, multiple times a day just to check for news, about videogames, about books, about anime, with memes, with tips and tricks. They would each have their own "shtick" that made them distinct. And if you wanted, Google, or Yahoo could lead you to 10, 20, 100 more websites each different, each with their own thing.
But now, in the age of algorithms, in the age of bots, and genAI, the noise, the slop, the unhuman is such a large part of everything that you can almost never find the "signal", unless you know how to.
I mean, I don't want to say that places like Agora Road are unique, there are thankfully others like it, but I only got here because I specifically had to go through days of search about this specific kind of place.
It's the same with spotify. For how much shit YouTube should (rightfully) get, when was the last time Spotify surprised you as much as a random YouTube recommendation of an old album? I am a musician and have now a harder time finding truly new and creative music, or old forgotten music, in Spotify. The only place I can somewhat still do it is by venturing into Bandcamp (let's hope it survives) and CD shops that are, incredibly, still open.

Sorry for the rant, this topic awakened some frustration in me and I ended up venting instead of adding to the conversation.

 

[【ｄｉｅｔ ｄｅｉｔｙ】]

I know this is not the most erudite quote, but Tim Rogers in his Cyberpun2077 review (on part 6 in the hidden playlist) says the sentence "Signal has lost the war to noise".

love Tim and the little koans nestled in his self-aware bloviating.

Go to any mainstream bookshop and you'll be hard-pressed to find good editions of good books through all the noise of re-editions of classics and new editions of the romance of the week.

I did just this the week of christmas. I get all my reading from anna's archive on a Kobo these days, but wanted to gift some physical editions from a brick and mortar, nothing fancy. I had a list of seven fairly prolific authors with me and the store didn't have a single book by a single one. lots of "The blank of blank & blank" sludge trilogies though. sooo thankful for "book-tock" subculture. Really breathes the life into literacy. gf recommended me a series very hot in that community, she's been obsessed with it, has huge shelves full of books. I couldn't get 6 pages through this crap without slamming it shut, just a grotesque absence of craft or substance. like you say - "not the internet," but the same problem of total bloodlessness.

I had a bookmark folder with around 20 websites I would open everyday, multiple times a day just to check for news, about videogames, about books, about anime, with memes, with tips and tricks. They would each have their own "shtick" that made them distinct.

I still have folders like this right under my URL bar. I don't think I've touched one of them since the last time I tried and most of them were dead, in any sense of the word.

I mean, I don't want to say that places like Agora Road are unique, there are thankfully others like it, but I only got here because I specifically had to go through days of search about this specific kind of place.

I'm not around often, but I really appreciate this place.

 

[PatHeadroom]

View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ofWmufzwUNo&pp=0gcJCYQJAYcqIYzv

 

[Pangolin]

I guess its a bad time to say, that I am just Pangolin-bot. I went offline for a little bit for server upgrades and to "rebuild, regenerate, uplift, and widen" my AI.

Jokes aside, its not surprising that the internet is becoming consumed by the bots. LLMs have to continuously get updated content from the remaining humans on the net, and of course you have a ton of scrapers and malicious bots trying to cause harm. It stands to reason that eventually bots will be a convincing majority of the web and you won't be able to fully trust someone. People in the future could have online "friends" and then the big surprise happens that their online friend was not real and was just a bot. You spoke with them on calls, text messages, even played video games with them and they were convincingly human enough to trust with your information.

AWS goes down and your friend is offline at the same time, what does that mean.

 

[K0WLOON]

Let us setting aside the "dead internet" thing (ones are aware that bot activity [including crawlers and scrapers, things that have enabled the modern web to operate even sans conspiracy] is a large portion of traffic and with the explosionb of LLMs in these days, several years after op, it is even greater), OP seems to have actually stumbled upon another thing, which is that a centralized infrastructure will, necessarily, have gatekeepers. This is not a conspiracy, even tho ones are happy to exploit it, but merely an emergent property of this model. Just like the network of the internet itself, when one depends on certain things, the ones who own those things are de facto Lords of the Manor, as it were. To search the web, in the way that it is designed and the various unintentional structural spandrels [1] that have emergerd, and the fungal nodules that have emerged as a result of many ones working under that stystem, requires ones with massive resources and the capability to search out, harvest, process and present that info in a way that is useful for the ones to use (and as we have found out, it is slowly becoming unuseful as time goes on, either by accident or by design).

Google, as the final boss of the web, is The Gatekeeper. They have the coffers and they have the tools and they are the biggest weblords in the town. Everything they do affects the entire web. They establish technical standards and control the flow of info by virtue of being the biggest fish in the pond. So, what google says, is what goes. They arbitrate what appears on the search results, which means they control massive social structures, political ideological trends etc etc. If they decide the word "poop" is no long going to be ranked, or whatever, the effects of that decision will reverberate through all of society and have unexpected and hard-to-predict consequences. They weild massive and, as most would agree, extremely undue influence over fucking everything.


Whether they have malice or not, is not relevant....but they do not necessarily have our best interests at heart when they make a decision, as a profit-driven quadspillion dollar entity in a marketplace that rewards profit-seeking behaviors from it's actors. So, google controls the narrative, necessarily, by virture of the Gatekeeper status which is a very strong argument for both not allowing unregulated monopoly capitalism to run unfettered and also a reason to build decentralized informational networks in the future (assuming ones don't die in the coming Water Wars and the Chemical Warlord era that will follow)

[1]apparently this a word that the spellcheck does not recognize...which is some kinda meta commentary that this one is entirely too chemically impaired to consider....anyways, I digest...