Comment on Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web
BertramDitore@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Just because he invented the WWW doesn’t mean he’s always right. In fact, he’s already wrong about this. The internet as a whole has gotten noticeably worse over the last few years.
Has it? If someone offered me access to the Internet from 20 years ago instead of access to today’s one, I would certainly refuse.
No GitHub? With all open source software in existence presented in a standardized way? No StackOverflow? With giantic knowledge base presented ad-free? No Fediverse? No vod streaming? No interactive weather apps? Guys, c’mon.
We are in a social media app created exclusively to avoid the nowadays internet. That’s how is going on.
I’m not in an app
They never said it deteriorated so much that we’re back to square one. Would you still refuse if you were instead offered the internet of 6 years ago? I don’t think I would.
To me it definitely has gotten much worse, though everyone’s internet experience is radically different. 20 years is too far back, definitely not. But 5 or 10 years? Absolutely.
I don’t have accounts on and completely ignore all social media other than this, and have all my ads blocked everywhere. I don’t use streaming services, so no exposure to ads there either. That all makes my web experience (and I’m sure most other Lemmy folks) arguably way cleaner and content-focused than the vast majority of people who just use the mainstream internet as it is.
And yet it’s pretty difficult to find out basic things, and I think that’s a very recent development. It has always been nontrivial to figure out what’s true and what’s not and sometimes you had to dig a bit. SEO did a great job of poisoning things before LLMs. But now? I feel like 99% of what I find is unconvincing and just bad, and the sheer volume of rehashed bullshit makes it super hard to find something useful, let alone something real and truthful.
this web? the web i use all day? every day? is destroyed by AI already
damn
No, he’s correct. AI won’t destroy the web. It would actually be better if it did though, because it’s just going to make the web worse. Like all other developments under capitalism.
Doing anything on the web has gotten less convenient, more expensive, more ad-ridden and requires more logins and relinquishing of your data. This will continue, and AI will only let it happen faster.
They even talk about it in the interview. The web having to be rebuilt from the ground up with open protocols that encourage privacy and shareability would be a huge improvement.
Not destroyed yet though, and very simple to fix
cadekat@pawb.social 3 days ago
I think a large part of that is enshittification and not necessarily because of AI (though AI certainly doesn’t help…)
www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ is a decent read.