this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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There once was a dream of the semantic web, also known as web2. The semantic web could have enabled easy to ingest information of webpages, removing soo much of the computation required to get the information. Thus preventing much of the AI crawling cpu overhead.
What we got as web2 instead was social media. Destroying facts and making people depressed at a newer before seen rate.
Web3 was about enabling us to securely transfer value between people digitally and without middlemen.
What crypto gave us was fraud, expensive jpgs and scams. The term web is now even so eroded that it has lost much of its meaning. The information age gave way for the misinformation age, where everything is fake.
Much drama.
I agree about semantic web, but the issue is with all of the Internet. Both its monopoly as the medium of communication, and its architecture.
And if we go semantic for webpages, allowing the clients to construct representation, then we can go further, to separate data from medium, making messages and identities exist in a global space, as they (sort of, need a better solution) do in Usenet.
About the Internet itself being the problem - that's because it's hierarchical, despite appearances, and nobody understands it well. Especially since new systems of this kind are not being built often, to say the least, so the majority of people using the Internet doesn't even think about it as a system. It takes it for given that this is the only paradigm for the global network. And that it's application-neutral, which may not be true.
20 years ago, when I was a kid, people would think and imagine all kinds of things about the Internet and about the future and about ways all this can break, and these were normal people, not tech types, and one would think with time we wouldn't become more certain, as it becomes bigger and bigger.
OK, I'm just having an overvalued idea that the Internet is poisoned. Bad sleep, nasty weather, too much sweets eaten. Maybe that movement of packets on the IP protocol can somehow give someone free computation, with enough machines under their control, by using counters in the network stack as registers, or maybe something else.
Sound like it went the same way everything else went. The less money is involved the more trustworthy it is.
It's ironic that the middlemen showed up anyway and busted all the security of those transfers
You want some bipcoin to buy weed drugs on the slip road? Don't bother figuring out how to set up that wallet shit, come to our nifty token exchange where you can buy and sell all kinds of bipcoins
oh btw every government on the planet showed up and dug through our insecure records. hope you weren't actually buying shroom drugs on the slip rod
also we got hacked, you lost all your bipcoins sorry
At least, that's my recollection of events. I was getting my illegal narcotics the old fashioned way.
aaaaaaaaand - it's gone!
A whole swath of trained toads using a special made tube network?
getting into a car with a stranger who said he was 15 minutes away two hours ago
Nah, they clearly meant in liquid form.
Liquid narcotics, you say?
Capitalism is grand, innit. Wait, not grand, I meant to say cancer
I feel like half of the blame capitalism gets is valid, but the other half is just society. I don't care what kind of system you're under, you're going to have to deal with other people.
Oh, and if you try the system where you don't have to deal with people, that just means other people end up handling you.
In this case it is purely fault of the money incentive though. Noone would spend so much effort and computation power on AI if they didn't think it could make them money.
The funniest part is though that it's only theoretical anyway, everyone is only losing on it and they're most likely never gonna make it back.
I don't think it ever was that, I think folding ideas has the best explanation of what it was meant to be, it was meant to be a way to grab power, away from those who already have it
https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
Mr. Internet, tear down these walls! (for all these walled gardens)
Return the internet to the wild. Let it run feral like dinosaurs on an island.
Let the grannies and idiots stick themselves in the reservations and asylums run by billionaires.
Let's all make Neocities pages about our hobbies and dirtiest, innermost thoughts. With gifs all over.
I'm down with that. Web 1.5? Let's do it. I'll get my Geocities page up and then we can rev up that hit counter.
Preach!