Don't romanticize the internet. The modern internet has torn society apart at the seams. It's made the world less tolerable and made civic discourse impossible.

If AI forces people to re-weight their priorities (i.e. be less on the internet), perhaps that's a good thing?

I don't understand why people talk about "the internet" as if it was a static thing. The internet when I grew up using it prior to the dotcom bust in the late nineties and early two thousands was a set of GeoCities websites where people made their own content. I remember reading the green "great websites" HTML book with examples of beautiful websites (with backgrounds that looked liked notebooks etc).

The modern internet has just become privacy scraping and adverts if you visit websites that do such things and serve such content, but that doesn't stop anyone setting up and running their own domain, which is what the old internet was? If anything, it's easier than ever to "be on the Internet" with your own VPS or Pi at home. Far easier than it ever was. Just stop putting all your content into someone else's locker.

The lack of discoverability has always been a problem on the internet, which is why Yahoo had their category pages and why search engines exist.

People keep talking as if "the internet" is a thing that came and suddenly disappeared. But it hasn't. The only thing that has appeared are apps that use specific domains, where the services behind those domains are colossal vacuums of data. A lot of people use those apps, but it doesn't mean I need to. And it doesn't mean I can't go and search for some specific website holding specific data about a given topic. People keep talking as if that was lost? Am I missing something?

As for it "tearing society apart", society has always been fractured. It just means more people can speak now, and more people can listen; if they're not choosing who they listen to or weighing concepts in their own mind, that isn't the "internet's" fault - that's their own, any more than someone writing a newspaper article in the 1980s would be held responsible for "tearing society apart"?

That's what happened to me and I'm happier than ever.

For the past five years I made an effort to seek out and finish long posts or videos that seem interesting at first in the name of exercising my attention span.

I'm now quick to bail on anything when I don't know the author, and bail on authors if their quality starts slipping. When the daily fire hose started running out, I realized I was mainly looking for distraction and spent more time being healthily bored.

You're describing the 2010s era of algorithmic social media, I think OP is referring to the earlier internet

> Don't romanticize the internet. The modern internet has torn society apart at the seams. It's made the world less tolerable and made civic discourse impossible.

Pretty much the same thing the printing press did. Breakthrough communication technologies force underlying societal problems to the surface. It will end up being a good thing long term as long as we survive it.

The problem is AI and the internet's leakage into everything else. Marketing copy, prose in public spaces, even books... I really hope that society as a whole accepts that human-written text is more valuable than AI-written.

I have had this thought quite a bit, that the silver lining of the slop-ification of the internet could lead people to spend less time online, which in my mind would be a positive development.

But unfortunately I just don't think that will happen. For some people it might, but I think the mass of people will accept the slop as it's given to them. Nothing in the history of communication technologies makes me think otherwise.

Perhaps I'm too cynical.

>be less on the internet

you might as well expect people to drink less water.

be careful for what you wish for. if you take away our drug/escape/safety. The people will switch from #revolting to 1800-1900s revolting.