The Dying Internet

The Internet is an amazing feat of innovation and collaboration. We have connected the world through miles of cables This infrastructure still needs constant maintenance! and countless electromagnetic signals. We created a global platform where anyone with access can speak and be heard Vint Cerf's 2002 RFC 3271: The Internet is for Everyone outlines the internet protocols at their best.. The Internet is powered by the people who use it, and as Uncle Ben said, "with great power comes great responsibility." The potential of the internet is at risk, so here is what we can do about that.

Incentives and Deceptions

You came to this site for a reason. Every time you head online, you have a goal. It could be to buy something, do some research, or just pass the time, but you always have had an objective. Every site you have been on has a goal. It is trying to sell you something, teach you, entertain you, or just keep you engaged so you end up viewing more ads This is why short form video content is so popular! It keeps a user watching and it is easy to work in ads between every few short clips. . More often than not, your reasons are not fully congruent with the site's goals.

This isn't (necessarily) evil, it's economics. Running a website isn't free, owning a url costs monthly fees I pay Squarespace $1 a month for MrMarchant.com! If my name wasn't so unique, it would cost me even more! on top of all of the effort that went into constructing and maintaining the site. It is fair to expect that the team that put their time and efforts into the site receive compensation. With online stores it is clear how this happens, but what about all of the "free" sites?

Probably ad views and collecting (and selling) your data. Every time you see an ad online, the platform that sent it your way earns a fraction of a cent for their efforts Maybe like $0.001 but there are a ton of variables at play like how targeted the ad is and if anyone actually clicks through. . That's why social media sites want to keep you scrolling and streaming videos want to autoplay. It is also why ad blockers are an ethical gray area - those ads are how you are supporting the creators who made the work you are trying to see! If a site isn't directly delivering ads, it could also be supporting advertisers by selling your email address and other PII Personally Identifiable Information (since you let them do that in the Terms of Service you are obligated to agree to). This is all reasonable - we go to a site for goods and services so we should expect to offer some sort of compensation in return. Unfortunately, some sites go too far and break this social contract with their users.

These sites use deceptive patterns to manipulate users. They take advantage of principles of design Here's a game to explore some of these patterns! that should be used to benefit a site and instead try to get users to act against their best interests. Best case is that these cause minor inconvenience but at their worst a deceptive site could lead to significant financial harm Or emotional damage.. There are some laws in place to combat these actions, but the line between advertisement and deception is just as blurry online as it is off.

Rot and Drift

Deceptive patterns are hard to prevent due to the actual nature of the internet. The internet is a collection of agreed-upon protocols that manage the transfer of data between devices Blown to Bits is a fantastic resource to learn more about how the technical details impact society.. It's a postal service for computers! These rules make sure the transfer of information is precise and reliable, but they also have no bearing on what that information actually is.

When you use an internet browser to navigate to the website, you use a URL like www.MrMarchant.com to find the content you want to see. It's like sending a letter to a specific address to request a letter back. Links on websites work the same way Khan Academy has an intro to the technical details if you are curious! - they are just the text of the address that you want your computer to navigate to when clicked. So what happens when someone moves and changes address?

The Supreme Court found out the hard way! Websites are not dynamic by default, they are a static set of code that tells your device how to present the content you see You can open up the Dev Tools in your browser to see the code!. If there is an address linked in the site that is no longer valid, the developer of the site has to make a point of changing the link or else it will lead to the wrong place. This is link rot, and it is getting worse every single year. Running a website is not free, so older websites might go down. Or sites might change their address without redirecting anyone trying to access their old URL. Link rot is bad but at least it makes itself known. A more uncomfortable issue is content drift. The address is still valid, but the residents have changed.

If you are publishing research with websites in your citations, what can you do to make sure rot and drift don't hurt your credibility? You can archive! If you were quoting a physical book, you might take a picture of it as proof. With a website, you could save your own screenshots of the page. But there are also resources online that can help archive your sources for you The Internet Archive saves records of lots of websites! . The preservation of information online is something that can only happen with deliberate effort The Vanishing Culture report details what we could lose without these efforts., but if everyone online puts in the work it will preserve the historical quality of the information online.

Veracity

This all has assumed that the online sources are worth using, but believe it or not, not everything you can read online is true! Traditional data verification strategies Data Journalism has a lengthy set of handbooks on data journalism and verification that provide great strategies on how to approach this problem. are still needed when doing online research, and the advent of widespread generative AI has added to the pile of questionable information that must be filtered through. Sparing the details If you want an AI term to show off, model collapse is the feedback loop of bad AI-generated content training other generative AI models leading to absolute nonsense., it is easier than ever to use code to generate entire websites of AI output. AI programming does not acknowledge truth, AI code does not process facts, AI works using frequency. It outputs popular answers CGP Grey's video gives a great overview of how this happens., not correct ones.

The best strategy to deal with this is to do the tedious thing: seek out primary sources. When using human-made sites this is straightforward: most sites still cite their sources! For example on Wikipedia you can directly go to the source of any information via the citations and references at the bottom of any article! With how AI slop has invaded search engines, it can be a bit more difficult to find those initial sites to work off of. Using a search engine's built in tools and filters can be a huge help with this - for example, isolating a search for only .pdf would make it more probable to have an actual research paper show up! Using tools like Google Scholar or having your site support access to an academic library can also make this much more doable.

Overcoming the Algorithm

Another place invaded by AI generated content is social media feeds. Most platforms use code to decide what you see on your homepage. It will deliver content that will get the most engagement from you, even if it isn't quality. With social media becoming a primary method to get news for a lot of folks, this can be disastrous. One way to avoid this would be to develop your own news stream! This can be as simple as subscribing to trusted sources via email or making a point to have your feeds deliver your posts chronologically Time-based feeds make sense as a way to avoid outside influence, but it can also limit engagement (which isn't a bad thing)..

Another way to curate new online content is through RSS. RSS is a protocol that lets websites broadcast their updates so you can see them all in one place. By curating your own RSS feed, you can have control over what information is delivered to you without concern about an outside source changing the formula for what you see. The only hurdle is that you need to find an aggregator to use, but there are plenty of cheap or free options to try out!

More Resources to Explore

Cory Doctorow's analysis and predictions on how technology shapes society never fail to impress me. His piece Social Quitting puts the importance and pain of social network sunk costs into perspective. He has also coined one of the most accurate terms for what has been happening to society.

Another form of decay on the internet is caused by a terrible feedback loop between bots and SEO. Lots of late-stage capitalism ideas here.