Can we repair the internet?

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Three new books on the internet, AI, platforms, and its affects. Should be an informative fall read and a great company to Enshittification by Cory Doctorow that just came out.

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Books include:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-age-of-extraction-how-tech-platforms-conquered-the-economy-and-threaten-our-future-prosperity-tim-wu/ee81a4888237ee0d

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-save-the-internet-the-threat-to-global-connection-in-the-age-of-ai-and-political-conflict-nick-clegg/7888820

https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-is-for-everyone-the-unfinished-story-of-the-world-wide-web-tim-berners-lee/24b4aed4e37b6987

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My hot take is that I frankly I want to kick out the normies and gatekeep the internet to the nerds like in the good ol days, but it is too late for that and the internet is too lucrative for the nerdy-types alone to enjoy themselves selfishly.

Also I recognize that the old internet forum was incredibly toxic place to be in.

I seem to recall that there were a lot more cooler random sites to visit compared to than the few forum and youtube that I visit these days.

I kind of miss the old prose internet back then where you read and learn rather than the video and chat dominated present day internet. You had the space for nuance back then but a lot of content was also dry and a bit dragging to read.

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When money was out of the internet is when the internet was truly rich. Ironic indeed.

Paraphrasing Ed Zitron - I will never forgive what social media did to the internet.

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I was a proponent of it.

F*ck… I was one of the few first few people with here with GMail and Facebook… :sob: :rofl:

And here I thought I was the cool guy with the new tech. I brought the dystopia with me first.

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We all make mistakes. Nothing that big big still.. :sweat_smile:

We all were young and stupid once. I was an idiot. But we grow.

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Also, Google was kind of the “good guys” in the beginning. “Don’t be evil” and all.

Then enshittification happened.

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Fair point. The removal of dont be evil was a canary dying in the coal mine.

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I know everybody shits on “real name policies” but we need a service that can issue a token to people who can prove they are real people.

if we can keep it as simple as, show you are a person and we issue you one code strip. We don’t keep records on who was assigned a code strip. But we stand by every code strip that was minted.

Let services ask for a code strip. Whether through a tor browser or a direct residential ip, the code strip proves a real person made the account. Bad behavior and a service can ban the code strip. Can’t get a new code strip for another two years.

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Why?

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What you’re suggesting won’t work. There are already human verification’s that exist. They’re called CAPTCHA’s. I don’t understand why you prefer it your way.

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Captchas get defeated by bots no? Or is the bot problem already resolved?

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It would depend on the quality of the CAPTCHA and the website’s implementation. The tech works as far as I know.

For example, Proton’s human verification is what I like best. And there are newer ones that ask you to solve a small puzzle. But the old Google ones are horrendous. Even pirating sites have better CAPTCHA’s than the majority of the internet (if you want to post a comment or something on the platform).

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It is interesting you consider for it to keep working :roll_eyes: when AI progress.

:roll_eyes: oh nice… be banned for 2 years [sarcastic]. We can almost imagine this happening, because the government almost already programmed this service:

I am guessing this system will be used for human verification. Now the people need to ensure the government is transparent, and guarantees privacy (somehow?), and let apply this system for itself or others only on valid causes (not for banning for 2 years for example) (or court system should decide if there is a valid reason in some cases)