Cyberspace Theory

[ysabetwordsmith]

The internet peaked in 2008

The year is 2008. You don't know it yet, but the internet will never again be as accessible, searchable, interoperable, or durable as it is right now. Profit motive, the tragedy of the commons, and malicious self interest are beginning to conspire to erode all of the best parts of the online world, and it will only get worse from here. Here are some of the highlights of your regular online experience that the people being born today won't even realize were taken from them:


Aaaaand now I'm homesick again.

Comments

[zesty_pinto]

I heard a veeeeeeery similar remark but about private PC customization in the age of AI. Yay.

(it's the latest Gamers Nexus doc)

[thatjustwontbreak]

Heartbreaking but good to remember.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm watching the internet crumble away right in front of me. More and more websites are turning to "security" measures that break and just keep people out. I've lost a lot of sites that I used to rely on regularly. And the search engines just keep getting worse.

Re: Yes ...

[tornir]

Websites, especially interesting/valuable ones, are being effectively DDoS'd by swarms of bots looking to scrape their content for the slop engines.

It seems these slopnets are either foreign organisations, or deliberately obfuscated third-party entities, so the companies running the LLMs can legally claim they don't scrape copyrighted material; they just buy anonymised "public domain" data sets that actually aren't, from entities that then disappear, or are jurisdictionally untouchable.

The websites are constantly having to tighten their security measures, 'cos the bots are constantly refining their access pattern signatures to more closely match humans, because their aim is to scrape the sites, not break them.
However, the sheer volume either overloads the shared servers small websites run on, or their bandwidth limit is exceeded and their hosting provider shuts them down 'til the next billing cycle.

I'm a member of a small forum. In the past, it was common to have <10 members online, and <100 guests (which included declared search engine indexing bots).
Recently, before the site effectively stopped responding for a few hours, we had 5K+ "guests".
After it came back, logs showed it hit 8.6K.