AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?
76 comments
·July 20, 2025sharpfuryz
rambambram
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.
nchmy
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.
https://infrequently.org/links/
But I definitely need to put in the effort to discover other eclectic blogs. I really miss reading long, authentic things on diverse topics
nirui
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.
j45
That's something the few can do, but not the many.
As open source improves at user onboarding, and user experience, there might be a chance.
627467
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?
marginalia_nu
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.
larodi
Delete all social media immediately. It’s the equivalent of Neo unplugging himself, taking these tubes out of his throat.
barbs
Well said. There's a good search engine for that, maybe you've heard of it?
https://marginalia-search.com/
;)
marginalia_nu
Well as it happens...
thoroughburro
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.
lmpdev
The thing that stops me pursing this idea though is how do you verify contributors to this new internet aren’t platforms/businesses?
Where do you draw the line?
Who gets to draw the line?
sircastor
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.
DaSHacka
Isn't this just a standard pgp web of trust?
null
moron4hire
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.
salawat
Anything that requires the end user to internalize PKI is dead on arrival.
A) The interface won't get intuitive enough.
B) The asshats will still find a way in.
C) Ain't nobody ever met someone in the real world and gone "Yo dawg, what's your public key?"
Encryption is just a machine that turns already hard problems into key management problems.
asplake
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?
xyzzy123
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 :/
null
belter
> The web as we knew it — open, chaotic, full of real voices already gone. Free
Commented on a site whose top pages are curated manually....
tropicalfruit
> one that puts users, privacy, and real expression first
users aint that special.
krapp
It already exists, it's called the Gemini protocol: https://geminiprotocol.net/
null
jmclnx
I moved my site to Gemini, finished middle last year.
Clients:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)#Software
Some links to find content:
gemini://sdf.org
gemini://gem.sdf.org
gemini://gemi.dev/xkcd/
gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
gemini://skyjake.fi/~Cosmos/view.gmi
gemini://calcuode.com/gmisub-aggregate.gmi
gemini://tinylogs.gmi.bacardi55.io/
gemini://sl1200.dystopic.world/juntaletras.gmi
gemini://tilde.team/~khuxkm/leo/
gemini://raek.se/orbits/space-elevator/
gemini://fediring.net/
thoroughburro
Do you have readers, or is it just for you?
nonvibecoding
This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it.
Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
thom
I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same and it was still better than today, so I’m not convinced this is a fundamental symptom of our current problems. To me it’s more that the internet has lost any sort of physical, spatial, kinetic quality. There’s no time or place, no nooks and crannies to disappear into with friends. Just an unyielding cacophony. I agree it’s all undifferentiated but it’s not the aesthetics that are the problem for me.
nonvibecoding
Yeah, maybe you’re right. Could be nostalgia playing tricks on me. I just remember how exciting it felt to join a new forum, or discover something like eMule, Sababa DC, or random p2p tools.
Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.
null
thom
It's possible that various Discord servers, or obscure streamer chatrooms still feel like this, and we're just old. But it definitely feels like the default has become very top-down and public instead of bottom-up and intimate.
pjc50
"Context collapse"? The phenomenon that, no matter where you go and what the nominal topic of discussion is, it always comes back to US politics.
lmpdev
My memory of this was Facebook overtaking MySpace
I remember being 13-years-old and completely baffled people preferred the platform where I had no say over the HTML on my page.
I didn’t understand how people could prefer a boilerplate with profile picture and name over an actual artefact made by the person.
nonvibecoding
I loved Myspace. You could talk directly to bands members (At least the unknown punk bands I was following back then)
Once they lost all the pre-2016 content, I think that was it. Hard to make a comeback after something like this
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-l...
aspenmayer
It's a long shot, but you might find some resources here:
alganet
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but I think we need less collaboration, less competition, and less team dynamics in general. Anything that does cross-pollination should be opaque.
More individuals cultivating personal points of view drastically different from homogenized masses.
That extends way beyond the web though.
kristianc
A huge chunk of online content (especially what ranked on Google )was already SEO churned sludge, and I'm not I buy the argument that elite publishers and creators like the New York Times, The Economist, and The Atlantic have ever really depended on Google. When the Economist sells itself to advertisers it doesn’t talk about its web traffic numbers, it talks about the fact that it's read by CEOs.
You're likely to see content creators pull their work behind access-controlled spaces (which might actually work out better than the current bargain of it being free but unreadable, recipes buried by long winding stories, etc). You might see the weird web emerge again as search engines are able to discover it under a pile of SEO sludge.
sofixa
The Economist and FT no, but a lot of the other more mainstream (read by a wider audience) media like Guardian, NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro, etc. depend a lot on Google traffic. There were numerous legal disputes over this dependence, how Google circumvented it for users (the quick answers that made it so a lot of queries were resolved without even needing to visit the source website), and profit sharing.
medion
No. All great things come to an end - artistic movements, cultural, nations, etc etc - the end of the internet is now.
mmcconnell1618
I just read Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis which has an interesting perspective that "cloud capitalism" is replacing traditional capitalism and competition. A few players are assembling their own fiefdoms inside dominant web/mobile platforms. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal...
The internet doesn't have a clear, simple, micro-payment system that would allow people to reward value, so instead we have an attention based system where the number of likes and followers grants social status and financial opportunity.
jrexilius
When cryptocurrency first started getting attention (2010,2011-ish?) I was so excited that a potential micropayments system would come out of it and solve this problem. Sadly it did not go that way..
anilgulecha
Making it federated (so it's a true network of people's sites) is what can theoretically save things. But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work .. the centralized services are slated to win.
Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
IanCal
I feel like the barrier for self hosting could be so much lower. The resources required to host a static site are tiny and even a dynamic one with comments accessed by all the people I actually know could easily run on a cheap router.
jen729w
I think self-hosting is a distraction. You can make your own site using Astro and deploy it for free to Netlify and still get 99% of what we're talking about here.
If that was less scary maybe more people would do it!
zer00eyz
> But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work
The place where the web is still great is where you have to be invested to be a real participant. Everyone can yell about politics in a text box on twiter/FB/reddit/HN or post photos to IG/Dataing site Or videos to twitch/YouTube.
If you can host something, even for a small number of people your one of the rare few. If your "into" something where there is a focused community then your back into one of those 1% pools where people vibe and participate.
To make an analogy of it: The web is now a tourist town. Everyone is interested in making money off the visitors with the flashy lights and signs luring them into the over priced tourist traps. The locals, the natives, the REAL .01% know where the cheap places with great food and local flavor are.
SalariedSlave
The "web" is already just business infrastructure. It already was, much prior to AI. I would challenge the assumption that there is anything worth saving.
amelius
Maybe start a new movement, similar to the Amish. And have a completely separated version of the internet.
tobyhinloopen
The web was already dead.
> We care about your privacy. Can we please put a camera in your toilet seat for a personalized experience? > > [ ACCEPT ]
Browsing the web is a nightmare these days, I rarely visit "new" websites
> Subscribe to our spam for a 10% off coupon > > [ ] [SEND]
It is just a pain to visit any website these days... anyone involved creating these modern monstrosities should just fire themselves and go on a hike or something.
> We rely on invasive, tracking ads! Please enable your adblocker so we can get 0.00001 USD, please. > > [IVE DISABLED MY FIREWALL AND ANTI-VIRUS] [PAY 999 USD A MONTH FOR AN AD-FREE EXPERIENCE]
_nalply
AI is one sharp tool cutting slices from the old internet. But perpetrators have used different tools from the start: SEO spam, algorithmic feeds, embrace/extend/extinguish, building moats, the attention economy, and many others. AI is just the next newfangled sharp tool.
In other words, I don't think that AI is killing the web.
It's being profit-oriented and running amok in an unleashed way. It's prisoner's dilemma. You know, if you don't do it then someone else will do it and you lose. Enshittification is one consequence. The internet experienced it from the beginning. But only about fifteen years ago companies learnt how to squeeze the last drop out and, like in the tragedy of the commons, everybody is worse off.
And what's the most catastrophic? People are confused. They look at the tools but not at some famous people behind these rampages. Of course as leaders they just optimize the hell out of the internet with the target that their companies thrive. But in doing so they cause heavy damage.
The web as we knew it — open, chaotic, full of real voices already gone. Free speech isn't what it was 15 years ago; it's filtered, throttled, and buried under bots and algorithmic noise. But AI isn’t the root of the problem — it’s just another layer. The real issue is that the current internet model no longer serves people; it serves platforms. Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one—one that puts users, privacy, and real expression first.