Was just reading through an old forum from like 2008 and it hit me how fundamentally different the web used to feel. back then the whole magic of being online was absolute anonymity. you could be anyone, and nobody questioned if you were actually a real person sitting behind a keyboard.
now? it honestly feels like walking through a crowded city where 90% of the people are just mannequins on automated tracks. the dead internet theory isn't even a conspiracy theory anymore, it's just our exhausting daily reality. between the relentless engagement farming, the corporate botnets, and the automated comment sections, it’s getting to the point where I genuinely doubt if half the interactions I have online are with actual carbon-based lifeforms. it's incredibly isolating tbh. you just feel completely drained trying to sift through the noise.
it’s wild to think about how society is going to adapt to this, because software clearly can't catch software anymore. the only actual way out of this mess seems to be anchoring our digital presence to our physical biology. I was reading about the push for this recently, like the Reddit CEO talking about using Face ID just to verify human presence, or exploring dedicated hardware like that Orb to securely verify human uniqueness. it’s honestly fascinating that we actually need physical, biometric anchors now just to prove we physically exist before joining a discussion.
but it also brings up such a crazy dilemma. we are basically trading the wild west of the early internet for a gated community where you have to prove your humanity at the door just to escape the spam farms. i completely get why it has to happen – hardware verification is basically the only reliable tool we have left to save any sense of genuine human connection online and keep platforms usable.
it's just a massive paradigm shift. what happens to the concept of the digital alter-ego? idk, maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic today. does anyone else feel a little weird witnessing the total collapse of the anonymous internet, even if it's necessary to save it?
I think we're the last generation that will remember an internet where you didn't have to prove you had a pulse
byu/Leedeegan1 inFuturology
36 Comments
I’d like to think that people will fight back and refuse to go along with the lack of privacy, but our privacy is already so destroyed I assume folks will just keep going on with it.
The push toward biometric verification just feels like a focus on mining and selling data. Social media (et al) can’t profit from selling the data associated with bots, so it needs some way to differentiate between us meat-people and AI.
Seems less like a gated community and more like a zoo where we’re an exhibit.
Nah, this has been a long time coming and needs to happen. Sucks for good people who feel they have to hide what they say or do online because of whatever reasons but bad actors have done way too much damage to all corners of the Earth.
If we are lucky, this can lead to online voting and move the needle even further towards actual Democracy.
The last generation that nobody knows where you went, what you spent, and what on, what your opinions are, who you are related to. Its frightening.
what’s funny is I think future generations are going to unplug more & choose unplugged lifestyles
In the future there may be a bifurcated internet. A wild west full of bots and spam, and a tightly controlled online surveillance state where everyone has been verified and is tracked/spied-on. But the problem is that the latter will have bots and spam too, its just that not just anyone will be able to create that content, only a cabal of elites who will control the verified through propoganda. The verified wont know the difference because they will assume that everyone they encounter is verified. But of course, governments and the corporate overlords of these online spaces will be able to bypass verification to spread AIslop/propaganda.
I see it going the other way people will build on things like i2p and make an unregulated network then the cycle will likely repeat when companies try to get on it and take it over.
Human nature imo
I more like to look back fondly when AI and bot farm technology wasn’t as good and we could mostly assume people we interacted with were real and genuine. Now, it’s either a literal AI bot or some dude from Kazakhstan pretending to be some hyper political local
More like the mid-late 90’s. It was all wonderful anarchy. Communities felt close-knit. It wasn’t all under these mega-corp umbrellas like Facebook, Instagram and yes, Reddit. It wasn’t all these multi-billion dollar megacorps right out of Cyberpunk 2077 tracking your every move.
Honestly I can’t wait for the proof-of-humanity era. Let’s just hope someone figures out a way for me to prove it without ad companies knowing who I am.
The fun thing about the internet is that it’s fundamentally the same technology as it ever was. There’s nothing stopping you from spinning up your own little corner of the internet on 10 year old hardware in a closet just like we used to do in the 90s.
Just because three tech companies are big, corporate, and lame, does not mean the internet is dead. It just means you need to explore more.
The internet is on its way to becoming not worth the trouble. Time to pass time like in the good old days, getting drunk in some bar.
lol I wish some of the hateful shit my family post on Facebook was from bots. But unfortunately, it’s from real people. They’re just wildly ignorant.
Ah yeah, in my younger days I remember making websites from free services like angelfire or geocities for things like sharing armored core builds, forums for role playing games, and random other stuff. Then I would go out searching and would find all sorts of really interesting and niche sites other people made. Sometimes I feel like I’m just reminiscing about the past.
I wish I could make the Internet 2.0 where we could go back to that, and people who just the current AI slop and ad fest could stick with the current Internet, but that’s not feasible. I guess there’s always the dark web which still feels like the wild west, but that has a bunch of it’s own separate issues.
I make music and feel like i need to prove i actually made it every time i release something… Being able to hide behind an alter-ego now just makes people jump to conclusions that you’re 100% clanker.
Early wild west internet was pretty crazy, and probably why it felt so fun! The chaos that comes from being a perfectly flawed human.
It felt like the internet was at its best in the 90’s, before it was commercialised, before bots, and before the people with extreme views joined.
It was just regular people, with normal view points, exchanging information and helping each other. The nearest thing to social media was forums (like Reddit) and chat rooms. And video was a thing of the future due to the slow speed of dialup connections.
Consider considering the Internet just came out I don’t know within my lifetime. What the hell are you talking about?
I used to have so many screen names and handles. Every few weeks made a new one. This is not practical when you connect finances to these portals. The more we make cyberspace like the real world, the banality will sneak in with it.
You can have aliases IRL but you either have to be so poor the Government doesn’t care, or so wealthy you can pay a service to manage that shit for you (CPA). Average people live average lives.
I’ve been a dog on the internet the whole time. But, I do have a pulse.
And to think we thought the “Are you human” pop ups, puzzles and counting how many pictures included motorcycles and cross walk lines, weren’t a pain in the ass then.
Authentication systems can’t distinguish ‘legitimate agent acting on your behalf’ from ‘bot with bad intent’ — they both end up in the same bucket. Until there’s a real delegation model (user grants specific permissions to a specific automated actor), biometrics and CAPTCHAs are just friction that hits legitimate use harder than sophisticated bad actors.
nonymous-by-default was load-bearing for the old internet, and nothing we are rolling out to replace it is neutral. Proof-of-humanity systems always come with a ledger, and whoever runs the ledger decides what a valid human is allowed to say. I am not romanticizing the old anonymous spaces, they were always mixed, but I am watching where the verification layer lives. If it sits inside the same platforms we wanted to escape, we have not solved anything, we have just moved the censorship one layer upstream.
This DOES NOT have to happen and I guarantee you that corporations and governments pushing it will be using it to invade your privacy.
There might be a way to do this that doesn’t violate privacy, but governments and corporations are not interested. I would rather have a bot infested internet. If you don’t like the fact that it’s bot infested, maybe log off. It’s not healthy to spend so much time on social media anyway.
I remember an Internet where the purpose was to never let anyone know who you were.
I mean…depending on your age, you’re also the first generation to be raised with the internet, so it didn’t take very long to find ourselves here.
I’m old enough to have had the privilege to have been raised wild and feral. The only electronics I could carry with me were my Walkman or my old Gameboy. I’m sad not everyone gets to have that experience socially.
True and frightening. But people have to stop with this defeatist attitude of “they know everything already, just take it all”. Online surveillance HAS come a long way already, we all know that, but beware the horrors once they truly close the loop (Im talking CBDCs, no internet access without ID, digital wallets that contain your whole life, phasing out VPNs/TOR etc.). Never stop resisting, it can ALWAYS get worse.
I genuinely think that AI bots are going to make the internet way way better.
That is, they are going to destroy entirely anonymous discourse, right now we see these weird political things, like in Canada where one oil rich province has weirdos talking about joining the US. This rhetoric is driven by really well funded bot accounts.
This is going to soon reach a frenzy where every issue will appear to have millions of supporters who have the rhetorical skill of a high school debate club champion (more than most people).
This will jump the shark and become noise.
When people show me some video of a puppy landing a 787. I ignore it, but I also ignore real puppy videos. They are all now just obviously a waste of time, and really always were.
I love how people are reporting on TikTok videos where one real person puts out a video where they talk about crapping their pants in a TSA lineup, and then suddenly 200 other videos by seemingly real people tell the same story, word for word; their face right up to the camera just like the original.
Again, the real video was a waste of time, now they all are.
This is going to so dilute what little value social media had that it will be like drinking p*ss because it is the same colour as apple juice.
I am coming to find that some people are either very persistent with their single minded need to shoot my arguments down, that they are AI bots. This usually happens when I take the opposite side to an issue you can be sure has highly paid lobbyists. Not watering advice for my Aloe Vera (p*ss filtered through more p*ss).
Right now, I feel like a weirdo because I don’t sit in a doctor’s waiting room doomscrolling like potentially 100% of the other people including the receptionists.
But, I am now seeing people reading books in places where phones dominated even just months ago.
My present quest is to find an android flip phone which can do those features which modern life has foisted upon us. Boarding passes, banking apps, tap to pay, and, yes, I do want a damn good camera.
What I don’t need is much screen at all, just enough to do the above. I’m happy if I do need something like a map, that I squint.
I also keep my phone on DnD 99% of the time with only a few critical people in my life on the bypass list.
I basically don’t text, ever check my voice mail, I don’t use any slacks, discords, etc, I check my email every week, and I am the VP of R&D at a tech company.
I use reddit when I have sent my computer or some hardware off into a multi minute test. Like right now. I’m pretty sure reddit will be polluted by AI bots before the middle of 2027.
or trust/believe everything you read online…
We are officially in an era of post truth…:
* Search engines are limited and serve ads
* AI is controlled and monitored
* News media now doesnt allow wayback bachine so they can print retractions or change articles liek 1984 and we wont know any better.
* Most people get their news from social media..
* Multipolar world and we once again have aggressive propaganda
Its been fun folks. But right to privacy is gone, free speech is gone. If you make a following or call for action you can be deplatformed or shadow banned.
Free web is now being called ‘dark web’ and is associated with criminal activity.. Ergo the corporate web is the policed overseen source of truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth so sayith the ministry of truth. Digital IDs are coming fast, so your online identity will be your real identity.
Dude, a nepo-anchor baby is grifting the globe on a betting platform.
But the small town plug buying disposable weed pens is getting strung up by FLOCK cams.
>!make it make sense!<
I doubt it. The push for ID verification and biometrics is entirely a result of of the current economic system, and that’s very much on its last legs.
Plus, if anything happens to current internet infrastructure, more modern backbones, or even compliant meshes, are going to be so heavily decentralized and transient that there’d basically be dozens or hundreds of different internets all over, even overlapping. At that point it’d be easier to regulate and restrict access to computerized hardware than to try and regulate the internet at that point.
We might see some sort of Computerized Hardware lisence become standard, like a drivers lisence. And after hardware is restricted, what consumers can get their hands on will much more expensive, and as a result prone to modification.
Basically, I think we’re headed towards a future that’s basically Mad Max but with computers instead of cars.
where is this happening? i see pros (to our future world, if not now) and cons but what social media is going to have the critical mass to force this? seems to me the trend has been in the other direction. i know who people are on facebook. my feed anywhere else is mostly bands i like and cool internet art.
I think this is a misconception. The early internet was regulated. As in only certain people could afford it and those people were obviously making good money which entails certain traits. Now everyone can afford it so something is needed to keep quality and safety higher.
I think you are missing an important point: more and more, humans will start to PREFER non-human connection. It’s easier, always available, sycophantic, forever pleasing, never leaves you and infinitely “safe”/“nonthreatening”. We may be the last generation that prefers human connection because we have grown up with friction—the current generation has another option—the appealing frictionless world of AI.
Yeah I feel this a lot. It’s weird because the old internet had tons of garbage too, but it *felt* human. Even the trolls were clearly some guy being annoying, not a system optimized to keep you scrolling.
I’m not totally convinced full identity verification is the clean fix though. It might solve bots, but it also kind of kills that low stakes exploration that made early internet culture interesting. A lot of people figured themselves out in anonymous spaces.
Feels like we’re heading toward a split. One side is verified, high-trust spaces, the other is messy and anonymous but harder to trust. Not sure either fully replaces what we had.
Mourning the days of the World Wide Web – it was like the wild Wild West
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Do… Do you have to now?
I don’t have medical tech ensuring all my online activities are biomarked.