What old boards/forums do you remember wasting time on? : r/oldinternet
I think it's all going to come back. I see a future of local/regional community networks of message boards and human created content. They won't be walled off from the wider internet, but I imagine there will be some vetting process to get access to them. The rest of the net will still be there, but it'll be borderline useless-even more than it is now.
The internet will be fully agentic and work like a "black box". You'll try to find something and the search engine will do all of the searching for you. You'll receive results that are rewritten and summarized by the AI instead of the source materials. Not that it matters: AI slop will bury human content in time. Your shopping will likewise be redirected to "preferred" retailers, and what reliable news reportage will be long gone by then.
Physical media will continue to grow in popularity. Reading is going to make a comeback. Books, 'zines, even old fashioned pamphlets and broadsheets will gain new life.Quirkiness, imperfections, and indicators of hyperlocal knowledge will become things people look for.
Online, reputations will matter more than charisma. Intelligence, demonstrable knowledge, and a recognizable, trustworthy perspective will be a big part of this. It will be very likely that people like this disseminate their work through hybridized platforms: paid snail mail publications safe from AI consumption and deplatforming for the important stuff, and very careful use of the internet for the rest.
All of the influencers, the low effort dumb-dumb podcasters, the streaming agitators, and culture war "independent journalists" are going away. Most of them will be replaced with AI so good that most people will have a hard time identifying it. The ones who manage to hang around will be so hopelessly and obviously ethically/financially compromised that only the dullest among us will still consume their products.
Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and discussion will be sick to death of ultra-processed, short-form, clipped and captured content from bottomfeeders who dance to the tunes played by their oligarch masters.
Sometime over the next decade there will be a counter-reaction to the celebrated ignorance and monetized cruelty of this age. The "I'm not reading this" and "Just ask an AI" crowd will not be a part of it. They'll be thought of as troublesome throwbacks by their neighbors and useful idiots by the Epstein class behind the mainstream information ecology.
This moment reminds me of the counter-culture revolt of the late Reagan/Bush era. A lot of cool stuff started happening just outside of the mainstream. It will again. Hang on: a new Internet is coming and a better, smarter age is just around the corner.
What old boards/forums do you remember wasting time on? : r/oldinternet
https://www.reddit.com/r/oldinternet/comments/1v2ua2u/what_old_boardsforums_do_you_remember_wasting/
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The internet will be fully agentic and work like a "black box". You'll try to find something and the search engine will do all of the searching for you. You'll receive results that are rewritten and summarized by the AI instead of the source materials. Not that it matters: AI slop will bury human content in time. Your shopping will likewise be redirected to "preferred" retailers, and what reliable news reportage will be long gone by then.
Physical media will continue to grow in popularity. Reading is going to make a comeback. Books, 'zines, even old fashioned pamphlets and broadsheets will gain new life.Quirkiness, imperfections, and indicators of hyperlocal knowledge will become things people look for.
Online, reputations will matter more than charisma. Intelligence, demonstrable knowledge, and a recognizable, trustworthy perspective will be a big part of this. It will be very likely that people like this disseminate their work through hybridized platforms: paid snail mail publications safe from AI consumption and deplatforming for the important stuff, and very careful use of the internet for the rest.
All of the influencers, the low effort dumb-dumb podcasters, the streaming agitators, and culture war "independent journalists" are going away. Most of them will be replaced with AI so good that most people will have a hard time identifying it. The ones who manage to hang around will be so hopelessly and obviously ethically/financially compromised that only the dullest among us will still consume their products.
Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and discussion will be sick to death of ultra-processed, short-form, clipped and captured content from bottomfeeders who dance to the tunes played by their oligarch masters.
Sometime over the next decade there will be a counter-reaction to the celebrated ignorance and monetized cruelty of this age. The "I'm not reading this" and "Just ask an AI" crowd will not be a part of it. They'll be thought of as troublesome throwbacks by their neighbors and useful idiots by the Epstein class behind the mainstream information ecology.
This moment reminds me of the counter-culture revolt of the late Reagan/Bush era. A lot of cool stuff started happening just outside of the mainstream. It will again. Hang on: a new Internet is coming and a better, smarter age is just around the corner.
What old boards/forums do you remember wasting time on? : r/oldinternet
https://www.reddit.com/r/oldinternet/comments/1v2ua2u/what_old_boardsforums_do_you_remember_wasting/