	▲	throwaway5233 an hour ago
		Ya know a while back I intentionally locked myself out of my HN account so I'd stop egnaging with the drivel. But you have such a delightfully awful take I had to respond. I can't tell if you're trying to gaslight folks, you're too young to have used the "old internet", or if you're just a true believer but here goes. `Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now?` Ah yes the time honored tradition of JAQing off. What's missing? Fast load times. Everyone's hiding behind anti-bot crap now. Either because AI DDoS bots are making hosting unbearably expensive or because folks don't want their content being poorly repackaged for a profit. So now you have to go through some nonsense proof-of-life crap that takes a few seconds before you can even start to load the content. Anonymity. Used to be you could browse sites without having to log in. But in an attempt to thwart greedy AI companies all sorts of public sites like Reddit, Github, and Youtube require you to log in before doing much of anything. Accurate search results. I've yet to see Google or DDG return a remotely relevant AI response and actual search results are absolute garbage now. DDG in particular is putting drek like "DeepWiki" at the top of its results. `If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here, and nothing's stopped you from creating your own.` Except now you have to contend with AI DDoS bots which leaves people to either stop putting up small self-hosted sites or put them behind centralized anti-bot protective services. `If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube now` Except it's all buried underneath an avalanche of AI slop. If it's there you're going to have to put in a ton of effort to find it. For the most part I've stopped searching for things on Youtube and instead check in on known/trusted creators periodically. Discoverability on YT is terrible these days. Honestly I loved having domain specific forums that weren't beholden to a unified shareholder friendly content policy. Now they've been supplanted by a Reddit that's trying desperately to monetize content. `why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?` AI makes things less accessible because it centralizes power and increases the cost of publishing content. `There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, low-effort content, that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime.` Anal mods is oddly specific, if you don't like butt stuff you could theoretically just ignore it. But okay. My time is better spent reading and understanding than waiting for some anti-bot crap to finish before I pick through largely irrelevant AI slop masquerading as an accurate summary. Those scams and that "crap" largely still exist on the "new" internet. Only now you're going to have to prove you're a human to view them. Where things have evolved is that instead of human written SEO drivel you've now got AI generated SEO drivel. It's to the point that I have to add "-deepwiki -ai" to pretty much every DDG search. The problem is that AI companies are going full scorched earth. AI provides dog shit answers while ruining traditional search results. Or if you'd like a physical example they're physically destroying rare books to come up with poor, largely irrelevant AI drivel for the masses.