Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online.

But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time.

It's not enough to dissuade me from contributing to the public sphere, but the vibe is definitely different.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot about the early days of Amazon. It's hard to remember how optimistic the world felt back then, but I remember a time when writing reviews felt like a public good because you were helping other people find good products. It was like we all wanted honest product information and Amazon provided a neutral venue for us to build it. Like Wikipedia for stuff.

But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire. And as the reviews got more and more gamed by shady companies, they became less of a useful public good. The whole commons collapsed.

I worry that the larger web and digital knowledge environment is going that way.

I still intend to create and share my stuff with the world because that's who I want to be. But I'll always miss the early days of the web where it felt like a healthier environment to be that kind of person in.

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ryandrake an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire.

The Internet-circulating quote comes to mind: Planet Earth is pretty much a vacation resort for around 500 rich people, and the remaining 8 billion of us are just their staff. The Relative Few have got the system set up perfectly so that whatever we do, we're probably serving/enriching them. AI doesn't really change this, but it does further it.

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steveklabnik 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll have to chew on this. I certainly felt some shock on the IP questions when all of this came up. I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old.

Also I'm not a fan of billionaires, obviously, but I think that given I've worked on open source and tools for so long, I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think.

(Also, I didn't say this in the first comment, but I'm gonna be thinking about the industrial revolution thing a lot, I think you're on to something there. Scale meaningfully changes things.)

	▲	rafterydj an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I feel the future includes the sentiments you describe. It was a little before my time professionally, but I grew up reading that kind of thinking. I do think that the open web stuff, decentralized, or at least more decentralized than currently, is the path forward. I've been reading about the AT protocol and it recently becoming an official working group with the IETF. I feel a second order effect of making decentralized social networking easier, is making individuals more empowered to separate from what they don't believe in. The third order effect is then building separate infrastructure entirely. As sad as that can be - in my personal opinion it runs the risk of ending the "world wide" part of the web - it appears to be the only way society can avoid enriching the few beyond reason.
	▲	munificent 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old. Me too, 100%. But that was during a moment in time when that information was more likely to be enabling a person who otherwise didn't have as many resources than enabling a billionaire to make their torment nexus 0.1% more powerful. > I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think. Yeah, I've mostly made peace with that too. The way I think about it is that when I make some digital thing and share it with the world, I'm (hopefully!) adding value to a bunch of people. I'm happiest if the distribution of that value lifts up people on the bottom end more than people on the top. I think inequality is one of the biggest problems in the world today and I aspire to have the web and the stuff I make chip away at it. If my stuff ends up helping the rich and poor equally and doesn't really effect inequality one way or the other, I guess it's fine. But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it.
	▲	throwanem an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.

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bigyabai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If raw resources (tree cutting) and manufacturing (book binding) is saturated, a fully-realized economy has just one step left: financialization.

You have to start finding ways to keep people hooked on books and make it a part of their regular lifestyle. One book can't be enough, and after a while you have to convince them to replace the books they already bought. New editions, Author's Footnotes, limited run release, all of the stops have to be pulled out to get consumers to show up en-masse. Because that's what they are - consumers, not readers - wallets to be squeezed until they're bled of all the trust they had in media.

I think about the publications I liked reading as a kid, like Joystiq and Polygon. Some of the best games journalism the industry produced, but inevitably doomed to fail as their competitors monetized further. The rest of traditional media has followed the same path, converging on some mercurial social network marketing tactic as the placeholder for big-picture brand strategy.