Web is obsolete. Going forward AI is the first and maybe last step to getting information about a topic. No need to sift through ads, forum drama, clickbait blog posts, comments etc… just straight compiled information into your brain as quickly as possible. Yea sometimes it’s wrong, but sometimes things you find on the wild web are wrong anyway, just deal with it.
I find that when people pine for the old web, what they’re really asking for is some way to connect to other people and see things that people have written or made just for fun in a genuine way, without it being performative, derivative or for other motivations.
In theory social media should have been this, but people’s constant need to accumulate validation or tendency to produce meme-like content adversely affects the quality of their output, giving it a machined style feel that rarely feels genuine or true to their human nature. Instead of seeing people’s true personalities, you see their “masks”.
Thus the issue is not rooted in a technical problem but rather a cultural one: people no longer naively share things that don’t fuel their ego in the most perfect way.
Until that same AI starts shilling ads and certain viewpoints peddled by their owners in the output... This will happen 100% (ads, the other bit has already happened). The economics of all of these models doesn't work as is. There will be a major squeeze down the line.
Some of us have dipped our toes in local LLMs. To be sure, the ones I can run on my hardware always pale when compared to the online ones. But perhaps in time the ones you can run locally will be good enough.
Or perhaps an Apple or Kagi will host an LLM with no built-in monetization skewing its answers.
I find that when people pine for the old web, what they’re really asking for is some way to connect to other people and see things that people have written or made just for fun in a genuine way, without it being performative, derivative or for other motivations.
In theory social media should have been this, but people’s constant need to accumulate validation or tendency to produce meme-like content adversely affects the quality of their output, giving it a machined style feel that rarely feels genuine or true to their human nature. Instead of seeing people’s true personalities, you see their “masks”.
Thus the issue is not rooted in a technical problem but rather a cultural one: people no longer naively share things that don’t fuel their ego in the most perfect way.