Death by AI

I love his writing, and this wonderful story illustrates how tired I am of anything AI. I wish there was a way to just block it all, similar to how PiHole blocks ads. I miss the pre-AI (and pre-"social"-network, and pre-advertising-company-owned) internet so much.

HN is a social network

Playboy circa 1980 is pornography, and yet it's not the same pornography as pornhub circa 2020

Fair point, although "pre-social-media" would also be pre-HN. But I get what you mean

That "old" Internet is still here, alive and kicking, just evolved. It's easier to follow people's blogs and websites thanks to ubiquitous RSS (even YouTube continues to support it). It tends to be more accessible, because we collectively got better at design than what we've witnessed in the GeoCities-era.

Discovery is comparatively harder - search has been dominated by noise. Word of mouth still works however, and is better than before - there are more people actively engaged in curating catalogues, like "awesome X" or <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.

Most of it is also at little risk of being "eaten", because the infrastructure on which it is built is still a lot like the "old" Internet - very few single points of failure[1]. Even Kagi's "Small Web" is a Github repository (and being such, you can easily mirror it).

[1]: Two such PoFs are DNS, and cloudflarization (no thanks to the aggressive bots). Unfortunately, CloudFlare also requires you to host your DNS there, so switching away is double-tricky.

I have nothing against networks that are actually social. I hate the ones that are only social in name, but are actually just a way to serve ads to people, and are filled with low quality (often AI generated) content. That's why I put quotation marks around social. Maybe I should have said "so-called-social-networks", but I thought it was commonly understood.

You could make a browser extension to filter your content through AI and rewrite it to something else you find more palatable. Ironically, with AI you could probably complete it in an hour.

I think pre-HN would be like newsgroups... or, gasp, even dial-up bulliten boards.

I want to disagree: HN is social media, but it is not a social network.

For it to be a social network there should be a way for me to indicate that I want to hear either more or less of you specifically, and yet HN is specifically designed to be more about ideas than about people.

Excellent point. I've never made the distinction really, but you're right. There's no relationship building here, just sharing and commenting.