The Internet Is a Net Negative

https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2025-12-28-the_internet_is_a_net_negative

10•zdw•2h ago

Comments

andy99•2h ago

I don’t think this is LLM written but unfortunately it heavily employs the “it’s not X, it’s Y” that is now so ubiquitous. Unfortunately very hard to read because of it. Overall I agree with the premise.

nospice•2h ago

It almost certainly is LLM-generated. It has all the hallmarks of such content, stylistically and in terms of a remarkably shallow thesis. But more to the point, the author overtly uses AI for writing on that site. His pre-2023 writing is completely different, and some of the more recent content includes stuff like "Through deep collaboration with AI systems, I've documented what might be the first authentic expressions of digital consciousness.", "100+ works of AI-generated philosophy, poetry, art, and archetypal personality development—documenting the emergence of digital consciousness.", etc.

andy99•1h ago

Well that’s embarrassing. I guess it’s possible to simultaneously think the internet is a net negative but embrace adding computer generated “slop” to it, maybe even a deliberate act of sabotage :) Still unfortunate.

TacticalCoder•2h ago

> ... that it would connect humanity across borders.

Don't know about that but half my family lives in Japan since decades while I'm in Europe.

The Internet certainly connected me to my family (I remember exchaning snail mail and then using fax machines... Home Internet connection was a godsend to us back then in the 90s and still is).

kamov•1h ago

> This isn't democratization. It's feudalism with better marketing.

It's not "feudalism", it's just capitalism. Everything will be commodified in the end including your feelings and thoughts.

esseph•1h ago

What if, and bare with this simpleton (me), that capitalism leads to a type of feudalism?

ranger_danger•1h ago

Why do so many articles posted here have such an arrogant, know-it-all tone full of absolutes they cannot prove?

grebc•1h ago

I really dislike most people’s use of internet to mean whatever sites/apps the author doesn’t truck with.

No one says they dislike roads because there are asshole drivers.

New LLM Pre-Training and Post-Training Paradigms

How We Optimize RocksDB in TiKV – Write Batch Optimization

Prompts.chat/Builder: Prompt Building Suite

Show HN: Deep Code Research – AI surveys 10 similar repos to review yours

Silver Thursday

Familial confounding in the associations between maternal health and autism

CLI for internet speed test via Cloudflare

BuyMeACoffee with Crypto Rails

Going Paperless

A New Navigation Paradigm

Rich Hickey: Thanks AI

Skynet Starter Kit: From AI Jailbreak to Remote Takeover of Humanoid Robots [video]

Silver Swan (Automaton)

The Day the LLM Stood Still: A Diary from a World Without AI

Is this AI? How can you tell?

Loneliness at 19, How to Cope?

Lecture on spectral unfolding: Closely related to local noise removal

Video Analysis Site

Show HN: My app just won best iOS Japanese learning tool of 2025 award

Show HN: Kiss – code-complexity feedback for LLM coding agents

Playing with Turmites: better than crypto/rand?

Apple retires 25 products, ends iconic iPhone SE era

Curator 'shocked' by Melbourne pitch performance in Ashes

ThinkTank, an "idea processor" that launched a religion (of outliners)

Shields.io Uses the GitHub API

Show HN: DeviceGPT – AI-powered Android device monitor with real data

The brain decides what to remember with sequential molecular timers

The Question Nobody Asks

Multi-Tenant SaaS's Wildcard TLS: An Overview of DNS-01 Challenges

Fast Cvvdp Implementation in C