Just ignore the platforms. Use RSS on a body of self-curated websites/bookmarks. Click to read the articles and essays on their own domains (show the creators some love by doing that), and click around over there on that other domain.
I built my own system for that, but I know for sure this is possible with off-the-shelf (open source) software.
It takes some time to get used to this. No saturated video thumbnails, no infinite scrolling, no notifications. It's slower and feels more boring in the beginning. But it becomes a blessing very soon, when you go back to LinkedIn's feeds or Youtube's algo grid after a month and it feels like a punch in the stomach.
I used to be a heavy user of RSS, back in the Google Reader days. I loved it for following a wide array of different blogs. I'm not really sure why I stopped with rss - I switched to viable alternatives to Google reader when it died.
Recently I've been keen to get back into this way of using the web, because I have evidently been sucked into scrolling on the platforms until the algorithms give me something I want to see.
The other day, one of my favourite web dev blogs (and one of the only blogs I actually seek out) created this fantastic compendium of Web Performance resources and blog links, along with an associated rss opml file. Surely this is the push I needed to get back to the glory of the web.
I think OPML is underrated and the combination of RSS (Really Social Sites) and OPML (Other People's Meaningful Links) could give the open web a resurrection as the social media of choice for curious people.
Right now, I'm working on integrating more and more OPML functionality into my RSS software. I envision a quick way of exploring and discovering new links/feeds from sites/feeds that I already follow.
I am an RSS user but it is pretty frusterating these days being one. All of the I guess "first tier" sort of sites you'd really want an RSS feed for don't have one any more or offer a truncated one that forces you onto the platform (yes I roll my own morss, doesn't always get the content). You are left with sort of second tier news websites that pollute their feed with reposted AP content you might even see on several same feeds you follow.
And the biggest issue is that no one is starting a new site and implementing RSS. Seems like for a lot of RSS feeds I follow, the only reason they still exist is because the webmaster has not yet culled the service for whatever reason; like some of these links are found on vestigial web pages that look like 2007 internet whereas the rest of the site is modern.
And it makes sense why RSS is dying. It is a huge free bone tossed to the community. You don't see free bones tossed out anymore without a string attached to pull you back into some profit making angle. Everyone wants you on their site so they can serve you ads. They don't want you using a feed reader and getting that content without having to see an ad.
On one hand I think it's a shame and I do miss feeds on certain (big) websites, but on the other it makes me appreciate the small web or indie web or just open web more.
Feels like rehab after two decades of 'social media'. But the open web is the ultimate form of social media itself, if you'd ask me. I plea for a name change of RSS to Really Social Sites. I already started calling it like that in my own software.
A ton of good discussion of things has left Reddit/Facebook/Twitter for all the obvious reasons and gone to Discord because of discoverability is low, so is discovery by trolls and AI scraper bots and plagiarists.
Which is great - if you have the invite and like the Discord UI.
It really sucks if you'd prefer to follow RSS or longer-form in general.
Ignoring is not how it works. Internet is a basically huge social circle, if not enough people got on broad, a site can die out really quickly. I've observed quite few examples of small community closed down because no one was there anymore, some websites that I loved as a child no longer exists because of this reason too, gone with it is all the content they once hosted.
Here's the problem:
1. Software/Infrastructure have a cost: If you want to self-host, there's a consistent dread of maintaining things. It wears you down, slowly maybe, but eventually.
2. The problem of discovery: Back to the past, people used to sharing links and resource manually, often on a forum ("forum life", i call it). But now days people are more rely on platform recommendations (starts from "Just Google it"). If your content/link is not recommended, then you can't reach far. Also, people now days really hates registration (and memorizing/recording account/password), and they will not even try to use "strange" websites.
3. Government regulation: The government pushing laws upon laws that could restrict self-hosting content, by either making self-hosting difficult, or forcing websites to self-censor (which most personal sites just don't have enough admin to do).
4. Some people who has the capability and know-hows on solving the problem are "solving" it the wrong way. Instead of creating systems that modern users would love to use, they tries "being back the old way" so do speak, but not giving any consideration on why people abandoned "the old way" in the first place. The software they created maybe even quite hostile to regular non-tech-savoy people, but hey at least they themselves thinking it's cool.
There are few projects gets it right, like Mastodon, and maybe Blue Sky etc. But, then these project still don't earn a lot of money and political capital, meaning it still can't escape the point 1 above and maybe point 3 as well.
Over all, I think it's less that the platforms exploiting the Internet, it's mainly that most people just "moved on" to what could make their life easier. Internet is a tool after all.
P.S. If someone wants to solve the social media over-monopolization problem, I'd recommend that you make sure you're "user forced", user, user, user, regular old man/woman John/Marry Doe user. That's how you create social circle/network effect and that's how you grow and sustain.
I worry that AI/bot presents as a desincentive for proper RSS distribution. Authors may not don't want to provide easy access to their content by bots. Maybe paywalling? Maybe proof of work solves this?
You're using the wrong tools to browse the web if it seems that is the case.
The weird, creative, bordering on unhinged part of the web is still very much around and alive. It's just that you need to depart from the major social media sites and search engines if you want to find it again.
I’ve tried Marginalia about… probably 10 times, at this point? Every time I want niche search results. I haven’t found an interesting site through it, yet.
I love the concept and want it to work! I pay for Kagi; I value search.
The explore mode[1] is probably the tool you're looking for if you're just looking for something interesting / demonstration that the weird web still exists.
The problem of the pre-platform Web is the difficulty of discovery; your interesting content will have but a few readers.
The lure of platforms, like Twitter, or, well, HN, is that your content can potentially be seen by "everyone". Going viral is fun but not that important; being seen by the right people you never knew, or never had a hope to grab attention of, is much move valuable. This leads to much stronger cross-pollination.
(Spam is a problem here, but spam is also a problem in similar biological systems; blooming plants release tons of pollen, and then tons of seeds, most of them fruitless.)
Discoverability wasn't much of a problem for Google's first half decade. We had great content spread all over from millions of sources easily discovered with a simple search engine. Then Google IPO'd and Facebook showed up and everything went to shit. And that ignores other great discovery tools from directories all the way back to web rings. The web from 1995-2005 really was pretty good for content and discovery both. Today it's a few mega corporations with walled gardens who control all of the discovery and are loathe to let users engage with the web outside of their walls.
This is an incomplete thought, but a friend of mine has this idea around reputation built through a sort-of key signing. You get a key, your friend gets a key, you sign each other's keys. The key can serve as an indicator of trust, or validity that an individual's contributions are meaningful (or something). And if your friend suddenly turns into a corporate shill, you could revoke that trust. And if the people haven't established their own trust with that person, their trust goes when yours does. Transitive trust.
It obviously has some flaws, and could be gamed in the right circumstances, but I think it's an interesting idea.
Sounds like following people on a social media platform and only reading posts from in your network. Which is exactly how most people I know use Bluesky.
It works better than Twitter's algorithmic feed but it's still not foolproof because not everyone has the same idea of what sort of content they are willing to trust/ track.
A plug-in. Trusted users thumbs up/down sites and ratings are recorded in a database. The plug-in visually differentiates shite links (according to database) so others can avoid clicking on them (or they can hide them altogether).
Why that line in particular? It seems not to be about the quality of the content. Part of the issue is that businesses were advised to produce useful content, but the motivation for doing so is disappearing. A net negative, surely?
Even if you could do it perfectly (distinguish "authentic people" from slop merchants) the same old actors will do the same old things as long as the incentives are there. They will just wear "real people" like skin suits. Almost worse :/
It will never happen as long as Google is able to gatekeep the Internet with its search and browser. Even if you could find enough power users to break out and create something that hits critical mass, user-powered indexes don’t scale. Whomever swoops in to fix the problem immediately becomes the new Google.
Spams of groups of threes (open, chaotic, full of real voices - filtered, throttled, and buried - users, privacy, real expression)
It's not just X - it's Y type of sentence structure
Vapid marketing style writing that has no real substance (Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one)
Of course, there are emdashes too, they may not betray LLM alone as they exist in literature and a minority like to use them in internet comments but when they are present along with other signs of slop they are still a strong tell, particularly when they are numerous.
Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel.
Typically LLMs don't put spaces between em dashes and the words that surround them—which is the correct orthography, I should point out. Humans often put spaces around them when they shouldn't, like in the example you quoted. I don't know if it's AI or not, but if you ask an AI to use a sentence with an em dash in it, it won't include spaces.
How can "correct" have any meaning in style-preference territory? Chicago doesn't put spaces around dashes. AP does. Oxford follows Chicago, and the rest of the UK uses spaced en dashes instead. For typewriting -- and, by extension, typing -- this well-established convention appears (attested in Garner's Usage, if you're wondering). Chicago always spaces ellipses . . . and AP doesn't, no matter how ugly it looks next to a period. ... Who's correct?
I've seen some variation in such formatting/style from LLMs, so that can't be totally reliable. Doesn't need to be, though. LLMs tend to subject dashes to a distinct flavor of abuse:
- In all the places they don't belong; nearly all can be replaced with a comma, a period, or nothing at all, with no loss to style or tone
- In few of the places they might belong, and conspicuously absent whenever there's a parenthetical phrase to offset
Hi, ntstr! I am the author of the parent post, and it is not LLM Slop (you can use gpt detectors like zerogpt.com to check text); in fact, only the "call to action" (the last sentence) part was written by LLM, just because I thought that something was missing.
> Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning that everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel.
No satire, no trolling from me. Even if an evil robot wrote this comment, what's wrong with responding to it?
I didn’t notice because I unconsciously skim over slop-looking comments without evaluating whether it’s human-written or not, and only read the more interesting comments.
Gemini is a first step in the right direction but it doesn't really have an immune system protecting it to what happened to the web.
Meaning what happen when Gemini get so successful that idiots and bots start flowing into it.
My guess is Gemini would be a good starting point to experiment with bold ideas:
- We need some form of web of trust system. As most of the time we are not interested to be exposed or interact with agents more than 1 or 2 hops away of what we trust.
- Sorry but we will need to form of "nano" payment system in place. If a bot want to consume resources on my server, maybe fine but they will have to at least pay for it.
We already pay today for every websites using proof-of-work challenges, and I would rather give that money to the person hosting.
