Comment by JohnMakin
1 year ago
> Which I forgive because it’s the hazmat suit for the internet I’ve always dreamed of.
You dreamed of this? Why not dream of a web where you don’t have to brave a veritable ocean of crap to get what you want? It may surprise you to learn such a web existed in the not too distant past.
Your dream wins in a competition of dream quality. But it’s not realistic.
Of course it is - like I said, this existed not really that long ago. Why do you think it's unrealistic? What's different now? Hint: this erosion started long before generative AI.
I don’t think I could say anything that hasn’t already been written about the causes of this problem. But, I’m glad we have some tools that make things more pleasant while we work it out. Also existence of said tools could provide an incentive to go back to that world. If a website is awful, people will browse it with bots and reader modes, a good incentive for people to make their websites not suck.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at your apparently sincere belief that spending a trillion dollars to build a fleet of data centers that collectively use more power than Switzerland is a better solution to the enshittification of the web than... not doing that.