Is the internet still useful nowadays?

[Mæstro]

And of course they take 20-30 seconds to load and reload before you are so graciously allowed through.

Because the internet needs most of all a dial-up simulator.

The internet is going to die because it has become an utterly stupid and pointless waste of time.

For me, the internet is a library and art gallery which I can access at home, wrapped in my blankets. Oxonian sites are the most prominent to have gated themselves like this, but there are other mirrors and print editions which are easier accessed (even online!) Where do you find your time being wasted?

[Moonchild]

The internet is going to die because it has become an utterly stupid and pointless waste of time.

I don't think so. The Internet, while a lot of people seem to easily forget this, is a lot more than a handful of websites, or the world-wide web, for that matter.
Is it a pointless waste of time that I can send a digital message over the internet to my elderly mother who is thousands of km away? I'd say no. My alternative would be to write a postal letter that can take weeks to arrive.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to track and verify things I send and receive in shipping with track&trace? No.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to make a payment in the store with my debit card? Also, no.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to order goods and services I would have a hard time doing otherwise? ...
I could go on.
And that's just a few high-level things off the top of my head. We are a lot more interconnected through the internet than you maybe realise. I've seen this develop first-hand, so I'm very aware of how the fabric was woven over time.

[Drugwash]

Honestly, I believe this topic of the Internet being useful or not nowadays would deserve its own thread somewhere in the off-topic section or whatever. There are [partly] valid opinions on both sides, and it would be interesting to see how it develops, how people actually see what the Internet has become since its early days.

Personally I'm more and more frustrated with these unwanted delays introduced by bot checks (read somewhere some time ago how ironic it is that a bot asks me to prove I am human), as well as the search results that about 99% of times return precisely the opposite of what I had asked for, and other things more or less subtle that some people may not realize until they're put on the table and dissected.

Sometime in the early 2000s while activating with the Miranda IM community someone developed a plug-in that would directly connect two computers over the Internet without the need of a third-party server. We could send to each-other texts and files in real time without the fear that someone else could snoop on us. Privacy 100%. Nowadays the Internet is mostly built over the concept of services. Server and clients. No direct connections between clients. Privacy is a nice albeit hollow word. Same goes for freedom of speech.

My opinion is that the Internet will shift towards IoT for its most part, leaving humans as mostly observers with little interaction with each-other.

My alternative would be to write a postal letter that can take weeks to arrive.

Yes, but she would cherish that letter like nothing else, because it would carry the handwriting that she probably taught you when you were a child, maybe the scent of you as well. It would sit together with all your other letters in a carboard box tucked in a safe place, and from time to time she'd pull one or another out and reread it in nostalgy. Where do electronic messages go? Most likely to the recycle bin. There would be no memory of them. So much of the past is being erased just because of the volatility of the Internet-based interactions.

Ancient people wrote their [hi]story in stone, and we are able to read it nowadays. What will be leave for generations to come: magnetic hard-drives that a solar storm could erase in the blink of an eye, and whose data degrades over time even when stored without interaction...? SSDs whose life span is a macabre joke...? Do we even care what we leave behind after we're gone...?

Food for thought.

[Moonchild]

Good point, I split it off into its own thing.

the search results that about 99% of times return precisely the opposite of what I had asked for,

Yeah I'm absolutely frustrated about "AI summaries" as search results. If I wanted some high level overview then I wouldn't be using a search engine to begin with. AI chat is only really useful in that respect if you know absolutely nothing about a topic yet and need a primer. Beyond that? Rubbish!

Yes, but she would cherish that letter like nothing else, because it would carry the handwriting that she probably taught you when you were a child, maybe the scent of you as well.

This is why we also exchange written letters and post cards. It's a lot more personal. But in terms of just wanting to get a message across, the Internet isn't "an utterly stupid and pointless waste of time".

[Drugwash]

AI chat is only really useful in that respect if you know absolutely nothing about a topic yet and need a primer. Beyond that? Rubbish!

Agreed! Totally basic things it does get right but beyond that it's all a mess. Actually I try as much as possible not to interact with AI, but unfortunately even regular search results are so useless that I'd rather call a friend or something, and ask for a brief response. If only I had any friends left...

This is why we also exchange written letters and post cards. It's a lot more personal.

Indeed. I'm so glad you do that. It's real life, and it can't be beaten.

But in terms of just wanting to get a message across, the Internet isn't "an utterly stupid and pointless waste of time".

True, and I'm sure andyprough didn't intend to throw just everything into one single pot. There stll are good things about the Internet, depending on each person's range of utilities, knowledge etc. But I also do understand the point of view expressed by him when an urgent search comes up with 100% garbage, or an apparently extremely easy task proves to be way too difficult because of those "security tools" or whatever that ultimately eat up our - sometimes very limited - time, be it spare time or even our plain time on Earth.

[jobbautista9]

I think it's still possible to have the "personal touch" with the internet as communication medium. Videotelephony is perhaps the best real-time example. My grandma in the US regularly video calls my family every week via Viber (for some reason she refuses to use Facebook Messenger and I doubt she knows or cares about the privacy controversies around Facebook but hey I'm not going to complain if it means not using any FB product ). I still remember my relatives keeping in touch with their parents overseas via Skype...

Hell I doubt that plenty of my hobbies and interests would be a thing if the internet didn't exist. Whether that'd be a past, current, or future interest. It may be hard to discover new, genuinely interesting stuff right now but I doubt I will run out of stuff I haven't discovered for myself yet, even if you exclude everything made in 2020 onwards.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

The internet is going to die because it has become an utterly stupid and pointless waste of time.

Please define what you mean by "the internet", and what should replace it.

For me (just slightly older than the pope in charge and sir Tim Berners-Lee ) "Internet" (in my native language it is used as a proper noun, capitalized and without article ... otherwise one can use "la rete = the net") is "just" the infrastructure using TCP-IP protocol connecting nodes around the world. It is not the first "net" (we had Bitnet and SPAN/Decnet in the academic world at least since 1987). The early net(s) allowed at least to do things like e-mail exchange (do you remember postage letters, or submitting hardcopy manuscripts to journals ?); remote login (originally telnet before ssh), though originally not so often used; remote file transfer and retrieval (originally ftp, also gopher; do you remember magnetic tapes sent by post ?). All things which I do use regularly (and I would deeply regret their disappearance). There was also mail exploders and Usenet news. Then (1993 for us) http came and in a few months each institute got its own web server.

The availability of web access to public administration sites, banks, and e-commerce sites came later, and also that is something which is now necessary for virtually all citizens (not just in the academic world). Do you remember the time you got the electricity bill by post ? when you had to pay a bill in person queing at the counter ? etc. etc. One might criticize the implementation, not the need.

There may be more (the so called "socials", music, video etc.) which does not concern me.

Off-topic:
In fact, if you allow me a dream, in the old times each apartment had a land phone line (we call it "fixed" in my native language), and a phone number of 10-14 digits was sufficient to cope with them. If each apartment would have got one static IP number and one DNS entry as a public service, everybody would have been able to have an individual connection and run one's own server.

[andyprough]

The internet is going to die because it has become an utterly stupid and pointless waste of time.

I don't think so. The Internet, while a lot of people seem to easily forget this, is a lot more than a handful of websites, or the world-wide web, for that matter.
Is it a pointless waste of time that I can send a digital message over the internet to my elderly mother who is thousands of km away? I'd say no. My alternative would be to write a postal letter that can take weeks to arrive.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to track and verify things I send and receive in shipping with track&trace? No.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to make a payment in the store with my debit card? Also, no.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to order goods and services I would have a hard time doing otherwise? ...
I could go on.
And that's just a few high-level things off the top of my head. We are a lot more interconnected through the internet than you maybe realise. I've seen this develop first-hand, so I'm very aware of how the fabric was woven over time.

But what about the "handful of websites", which is the issue I'm really talking about? I'm not talking about "the internet as a useful piece of public infrastructure for moving data around for various financial and logistical purposes". I'm talking about the fact that the general user experience with using websites for information and research purposes has turned into absolute garbage. And that's just talking about the Cloudflar-ification of the web, not even discussing the fact that almost no one gets paid for writing anymore, and so your search results are going to be filled with AI hallucinatory slop. You almost have to use AI in order to dig past all the AI slop to find some data of value. There was a brief hope in the late 1990s that the web would usher in a grand new era of human enlightenment. I think by any metric we've failed to realize that promise pretty badly.

[Gemmaugr]

I don't think so. The Internet, while a lot of people seem to easily forget this, is a lot more than a handful of websites, or the world-wide web, for that matter.
Is it a pointless waste of time that I can send a digital message over the internet to my elderly mother who is thousands of km away? I'd say no. My alternative would be to write a postal letter that can take weeks to arrive.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to track and verify things I send and receive in shipping with track&trace? No.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to make a payment in the store with my debit card? Also, no.
Is it a pointless waste of time to be able to order goods and services I would have a hard time doing otherwise? ...
I could go on.
And that's just a few high-level things off the top of my head. We are a lot more interconnected through the internet than you maybe realise. I've seen this develop first-hand, so I'm very aware of how the fabric was woven over time.

While true that the internet is much more than we think (especially Internet of Things), that doesn't mean we should get rid of all the fallback procedures and established ways of doing things. For example;

You used to be able to send messages through non-internet cellphones, and even call them on landlines too. Now internet 4G and 5G are the only ways.
You didn't, and still don't, need to track packages. They arrive or they don't either way. Knowing where it was last doesn't mean it'll arrive with any higher chance. If it was/is lost during transit, it's still the delivery services fault.
You can still make purchases in stores with cash. Well, most stores.. many stores, I mean. Until CBDC like e-krona or Digital Euro becomes the only way.
You could order by mail in yesteryears, Mail-Order it was called. It is easier and more doable nowadays though, that's true.
Many such examples of backup means were available to both youth and elderly, and is now being phased out completely for complex and difficult to understand ones (Bank-ID/Swish/webapps on a smartphone with internet connection).

There was a brief hope in the late 1990s that the web would usher in a grand new era of human enlightenment. I think by any metric we've failed to realize that promise pretty badly.

I remember that Golden age period. It was all happy positive views about decentralization, freedom (of speech, association, [virtual] movement, privacy, etc) and instead of turned into restriction of each (vague blasphemy, tarring brush, region locks, data gathering/telemetry, etc), and become the greatest surveillance centralization IoT.

[Mæstro]

Other people have spoken about the blessings of email and IM, which exist beyond the web (fully for me, now that I have forsaken Discord). I could not have made any of my current friendships except online, for friends who share my esoteric interests are hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. It has also been well documented that the internet levels the playing field for autistic socialising. Processing delays and an inability to cope with body language and intonation mean little where replies are delayed and through text.

But what about the "handful of websites", which is the issue I'm really talking about? …the general user experience with using websites for information and research purposes has turned into absolute garbage. And that's just talking about the Cloudflar-ification of the web, not even discussing the fact that almost no one gets paid for writing anymore, and so your search results are going to be filled with AI hallucinatory slop. You almost have to use AI in order to dig past all the AI slop to find some data of value.

How do you research on the web?
For me, if we are dealing with an academic topic, it often begins with any of the several reference websites, including Encyclopædia Britannica, the Free Dictionary (itself hosting many subject dictionaries and encyclopaedias), seeking out books on the subject through the Internet Archive, combing through Wikipedia citations as if it were a web portal. Specific subjects have got their own subject dictionaries: Routledge, Stanford and the IEP for philosophy, the EMS and Wolfram for mathematics, Spektrum (in German) for biology and geology. If we are dealing with anime, the VNDB, fan wikis and kindred sites are easy to consult. Over the years, I have built up various places to look into different subjects. Search engine miscarriages like the blight of Indian school revisions are relatively rare for me, and I know the kinds of topics which tend to provoke this rash, helping me avoid them. Online research is far easier than visiting several libraries or waiting for days to receive a book, needing to evaluate it only after it arrives and needing to take notes if I am to refer to the contents later.

[Moonchild]

While true that the internet is much more than we think (especially Internet of Things), that doesn't mean we should get rid of all the fallback procedures and established ways of doing things. For example

That is not, at all, what I said. Me pushing back at a rather exclusionary PoV doesn't mean I exclude the opposite.
But, I'm not in a mind right now to play the "game of extremes" of discussion, so I'll leave it at that. I just ask that you don't read things into my posts that aren't there.

[UCyborg]

Agreed! Totally basic things it does get right but beyond that it's all a mess. Actually I try as much as possible not to interact with AI, but unfortunately even regular search results are so useless that I'd rather call a friend or something, and ask for a brief response. If only I had any friends left...

I was recently positively surprised by the AI (ChatGPT) guiding me towards patching the smartphone app that wanted Chrome or similar browser to successfully complete the login, to not require it. Though few months ago, the AI on DuckDuckGo, when searching for SQL statement to reset sequence in Oracle Database to specific value, it gave incomplete statement missing one word.

Same here with friends. Though humans betray, backstab, gaslight, disappoint...

[Drugwash]

[...] the AI on DuckDuckGo [...] gave incomplete statement [...]

Actually DuckAI is the only AI I have ever interacted with, for the simple reason that it does not require an account. Almost anything and everything requires an account nowadays, and I've already had way too many accounts in my [virtual] life since the mid '90s. However, DuckAI sucks big time. And DuckDuckGo itself rarely provides any useful results lately. Mostly barfs Indian garbage (someone mentioned this somewhere above), almost identical pages/domains repeating the very same useless much-too-basic information far away from what was requested. I'm willing to accept the idea that it may use geodetection to spit out different results based on the request origin, so it's possible people here living in other countries may not experience the same flood of garbage results. Still, this may well be [part of] the waste of time andyprough was talking about, because it sure as hell did waste a lot of my time so far, and my patience is running thin.

Though humans betray, backstab, gaslight, disappoint...

Granted humans do have their flaws, nobody's perfect, but at least they have the ability to understand when you're in a hurry, when you want something specific, when you're dissapointed or happy and so on. And most of all, they can say either "cannot be done" or "I don't know" easily at any time - something the damned AIs are programmed not to do, ever. That is why the AIs waste your time with half-assed results, plain garbage, hallucinations. And this is aggravating as hell.

[UCyborg]

Well, I only use AI sparingly. Usually for quick questions if I get stuck modifying some code. Regarding that smartphone app, that was so far the only longer discussion I had. I didn't need an account, ChatGPT site does occasionally nag about it.

This is just anecdotal, but, there is a phenomenon I noticed, in some cases, people that were traumatized in some way or are at least down, they seem to be more enthusiastic about AI.

Regarding DuckDuckGo in general, it also happens to me that it just doesn't find some things, and it isn't a rare occurrence.

[Mæstro]

[...] the AI on DuckDuckGo [...] gave incomplete statement [...]

Actually DuckAI is the only AI I have ever interacted with, for the simple reason that it does not require an account. Almost anything and everything requires an account nowadays, and I've already had way too many accounts in my [virtual] life since the mid '90s. However, DuckAI sucks big time.

For these reasons, DuckAI was the only one I was willing to experiment with until 2024, when I came to reject the technology as a wasteful, fraudulent bundle of hollow promises.

I'm willing to accept the idea that it may use geodetection to spit out different results based on the request origin, so it's possible people here living in other countries may not experience the same flood of garbage results.

It happens to me whether I use European, American, Asiatic or Australasian VPN servers. I have never observed any to fare better or worse, but many queries, in general, will tend to give ‘local’ results, which is useful when I want European and not US results. (Qwant used to be splendid in favouring European sources, even in English, but Qwant Lite has been gone for years, and Qwant’s modern failure in Linux in Pale Moon is well documented.)

I notice that I tend to get Indian word salad most often when attempting to find online sources discussing technical terminology which was more popular in the twentieth century, ie before the web dominated, than today in the West. Two examples I can draw from a hat are Archaeozoic instead of Archaean for the metamorphosed geological formations antedating the Proterozoic, and thallophyte for the lower plants (viz algae, fungi and bacteria), for which you are more likely to get a tired song about evolution and DNA if you dare these days to prefer to treat them in the traditional manner.

And most of all, they can say either "cannot be done" or "I don't know" easily at any time - something the damned AIs are programmed not to do, ever.:

Sycophancy is what everyone attributes to LLM, but I could never witness it myself. Good luck trying to get it to agree with you when virtually the only online attestations of your preferred position are those same worthless Indian sites!

[andyprough]

This is an interesting article, showing just some of what websites are up against: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/20/ ... isruption/

The US government has moved to disrupt a cluster of IoT botnets behind some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded, including traffic bursts topping 30 terabits per second.

In a coordinated operation with authorities in Germany and Canada, the Department of Justice said it disrupted the command-and-control infrastructure behind four botnets – Aisuru, KimWolf, JackSkid, and Mossad – that together compromised more than three million internet-connected devices worldwide.

The botnets largely spread across the usual soft underbelly of the internet, including routers, IP cameras, and digital video recorders that are often shipped with weak credentials and rarely patched.

According to the DOJ, the botnets were responsible for hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks, some of which targeted US Department of Defense systems and other high-value targets. Their scale, however, is what sets them apart. Officials said the networks were capable of generating traffic volumes exceeding 30 Tbps, with one attack peaking at roughly 31.4 Tbps.

[Night Wing]

The internet is very useful for me. The internet taught me there was more than one operating system than just Windows. The internet taught me about the world of Linux and all of the distros using linux. Not to mention all of the different linux desktop environments. This is the main reason why I use and enjoy different linux distros today. Like someone else said, the internet has affected some of my hobbies, specifically longboard surfing, saltwater fishing and archery.

Ditto for vehicles. I am thinking about purchasing a new pickup truck since my 2001 Chevy Silverado is slowly deteriorating. But the big deal is engines. I really do not want to purchase a small Toyota Tacoma , 4 cylinder 2.4 liter gasoline engine which comes installed with a turbo charger.

Turbo engines with a 4 cylinder 2.4 liter engine have a tendency to get oil dilution where there is so much pressure in the pistons the gasoline leaks over the rings and gets into the engine where the engine is and mixes with the gasoline where the inside of the engine looks like a sludgy mess after 90,000 miles. This leads to a very expensive new engine replacement. The 4 cylinder Toyota Tacoma went to this engine and I wish Toyota had stayed with a naturally aspirated engine.

This is why I am leaning towards a "plain jane" 2026 Nissan Frontier King Cab (not a Crew Cab) 4x2, six foot bed, 6 cylinder, 3.8 liter, 310 horsepower naturally aspirated engine. No turbo. If I pull the trigger on this truck, at my age, it will be my last truck and it will still be going strong after I am long gone from this Earth. I looked at a lot of YouTube videos and these three videos below really helped me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leXfrTdDJv8

The next video showed me how to bypass the auto/start feature which I simply HATE with a pink purple passion. Especially at stop signs or stop lights where the engine turns itself off and then the engine turns on back on when the gas pedal is pressed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZd9_r_GF5o

And the expensive bypass way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV5DCAmdz3c

BTW, I like the "cheap" zip tie way.

I find the internet very useful, very interesting and very "valuable" for my needs, likes and wants.

[jobbautista9]

In a related note...

do-you-really-need-the-internet.jpg

[Mæstro]

Now I can finally know whether the Reddit logo’s Korean mother approves of what I am doing!

[andyprough]

One of my internet buddies on another tech forum wrote a fantastic piece on why today's internet sucks catastrophically and degrades every aspect of our lives, I'm going to quote them here:

Everybody expects everyone else to have a smartphone. I go to the doctor, the receptionist is sitting there doing nothing, yet she wants me to check myself in with a smartphone. Landline phone service no longer exists in my area despite the electricity going out literally multiple times every winter. I'm stuck with buggy VOIP that won't disconnect the phone line after I hang up.

Every internet-based company has a long privacy policy about how they'll use or sell customer data. There's always some new tracking technology; you block cookies, but now some websites use supercookies or pixels. On some websites, you can't read a block of text without enabling javascript or disabling your vpn. Infinite Cloudflare loops, authentic online content replaced with "influencer" posts/videos: the Internet is not really the place to be anymore.

Public services keep choosing to integrate Google services or introduce new web technology yet keep getting hacked. Every other organization, even the public library, is using random third-party services that want private info. I was notified that my health insurance company was hacked, then I couldn't access the class action settlement money without giving some unknown third-party service my personal information.

And so many people complaining about the power mainstream social media has, yet nearly everyone is on it. Apparently governments would rather keep fining Facebook than tell their citizens to stop using it.

I sometimes fantasize about moving to a developing country. I wouldn't mind going back to paying in cash, going to businesses in person, standing in line to speak to an employee instead of having to unblock Google services to submit an online application, if I can get the application to even load on Abrowser [Note - Abrowser is a Firefox fork for 100% free software enthusiasts]. I once filled out a job application that was trying to load Google Maps. Some modern web development just makes no sense.