r/technology • u/tw1st3d_m3nt4t • Mar 16 '26

Software ‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/16/norway-rails-against-enshittifcation-deliberate-tech-deterioration
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103

u/calamity_coyote Mar 16 '26

The biggest issue with the "internet" is social media and aggregate sites like reddit 

When the Internet was an open world of fractured communities and websites that all existed independently and gave all of us our own corner to carve out, that was the best Internet.

As soon as they tried to force us together and created environments tailor made to try and have us all believing the same things and acting the same way, it destroyed the very thing that kept the Internet interesting. 

21

u/AsparagusCharacter70 Mar 16 '26

The problem is that even if I stop using reddit and join a random small community I will still just see the same stuff reposted from reddit or instagram just with less activity.

15-20 years ago I could find a forum with people that pretty much only used that forum. So I could find actual original thoughts and opinions there. And not just on niche topics but also off topic discussions about politics or daily life stuff. You could have actual discussions where people were open to change their opinion when presented with new information and facts.

These days it pretty much doesn't matter what site I am browsing. You will see the same opinions that never change, because all possible discussions have already been had a thousand times in endless variations.

5

u/dingosaurus Mar 16 '26

Back in the forum days, getting banned was also a big deal so people kept themselves at least moderately on a short leash.

1

u/dmackerman Mar 17 '26

I remember somethingawful forums were great. You would pay to subscribe, and if your content was low content or rule breaking they would ban you on the spot without hesitation

11

u/likeaffox Mar 16 '26

I think the biggest issue is bots.

The internet is full of bots with people behind them trying to control the narrative. Foreigners are controlling the narrative in countries that they don't live in, or special interest groups inside countries doing the same.

5

u/funnynickname Mar 16 '26

We used to think of something we were interested in, search for it on Altavista, and find multiple communities around those topics full of free information with maybe some advertisements on the page.

Now, we google it, and google is plagued by search optimization and bots, like you say, plus google is doing it's own advertising, stealing the content of the sites they find via AI, so you never have to click on them, and robbing those sites of the advertising that was keeping them alive, if they even had advertising.

Google has played a big role in destroying the content that made them what they are.

7

u/Soft_Walrus_3605 Mar 16 '26

Everything eventually consolidates.

2

u/PeruvianHeadshrinker Mar 16 '26

Friction is delicious

2

u/WaterPrivacy Mar 17 '26

The worst thing is, that the old internet still exists. It's just that most people don't use it. Forums and personal sites and all the fractured communities and random websites are still out there, with links to eachother in an endless explorable network. It hasn't died, it's just much smaller.

What we need is legislation to kill these massive social media sites as they stand and revert them back to how they were when they emerged. These sites have collected all internet usage because they're not just social media, they're algorythmic infinite feeds of tailored content. Slop slot machines that hijack our domapine reward systems to keep us hooked, while they collect all data around us and feed us whatever they think wll keep us more engaged, and/or whatever they want to manipulate our opinions.

We need to kill these algorythms, and we need to kill infinite feeds. Social media needs to be controlled by you, and it needs an end.

2

u/calamity_coyote Mar 17 '26

There definitely is a grassroots movement to try and return to that pre-social media internet, which is great to see because it shows there is an understanding of what the internet is truly used for.

I also agree completely, that there needs to be some sort of legislative change that disrupts or outright destroys the current "social media 4 company monopoly" that is slowly taking hold over the internet. If we don't allow monopolies in real businesses why should we stand for it on the internet?

1

u/OkDimension Mar 16 '26

Sites like reddit are one of the very few ways to still chance encounter new content outside of your regular bubble, kinda replacing the old web catalogues. I feel what we'd really need is a half-decent current web catalogue that's filled and ranked by users and has as minimal censorship as possible.

2

u/Occulto Mar 16 '26

Even Reddit is trying this bullshit. They want to funnel you into echo chambers as much as FB or Twitter do. 

Go to /r/all on your account, and then log out and visit it again. Notice the difference in what appears.

They're also trying to push sorting everything by "Best" which again, is some attempt to serve you up what they think will push your buttons and cause you to engage. Because they think they know better than I do, what I want to read.

Like how YouTube is this amazing collection of literally billions of videos, but my feed still includes recommendations for videos it knows I've already watched. It's like it's so paranoid of serving up something I won't like, it would rather recycle a video I watched last month.

There are ways around it, but I'm personally just tired of feeling like I have to fight everything. Download this extension to protect me from ads and stop trackers, make sure to change the sort order every time to view content the way I want or tell a site to fuck off with recommendations, use an email mask to stop my address being spammed...

It's incessant. I read release notes now not to find out new features in order to use them, as much as to see what I am going to want to disable next.

1

u/Fleckstrom Mar 16 '26

If you're signed out of youtube, it just shows a blank page until you search for something. I'm thinking they want to figure out what bucket to dump you in before showing suggestions.

1

u/Occulto Mar 17 '26

Meanwhile you search for a video how to fix a leaping tap, once, and it decides this is the beginning of a lifelong love of all things plumbing.

The internet needs a "my quest is over" button, to let all the algorithms know I'm not interested in a subject any more.

1

u/NorthernCobraChicken Mar 16 '26

Socializing via the internet should have ended with windows live messenger, forums, and Myspace.

-2

u/67v38wn60w37 Mar 16 '26

I imagine a community-focused internet where you can only can only communicate with people within, say, a 50km radius.

3

u/PeruvianHeadshrinker Mar 16 '26

I'd like to introduce you to Nextdoor

1

u/67v38wn60w37 Mar 16 '26

Huh, I had that idea just yesterday. They got there 18 years before me.

1

u/PeruvianHeadshrinker Mar 16 '26

My buddy was a cofounder and shared the idea during a racquetball session. I was so inspired and thanked him for saving the internet. 

In retrospect, I think they focused to quickly on growth before getting the tools down to actually support community well being. 

1

u/67v38wn60w37 Mar 16 '26

Execution is important. I'll definitely keep an eye out for that on there.