I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.

Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."

Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.

She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.

To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.

I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"

No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/

Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.

I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.

I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.

It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.

None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).

That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.

Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.

My two kids absolutely do not trust open social media (thankfully). My 16 year old has a IMessage group with his friends as well as a discord and that’s it. My 13 year old just uses iMessage with his friend group. My wife and I have taught them the risks of social media but never to the degree of their current distrust. They seem to have picked it ip on their own and want no part of X, insta, TikTok or anything else. They just want to talk to the friends they know.

> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended

I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.

They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.

People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.

It's the people with money, houses, and kids that departed the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the joys of the simple local lifestyle.

The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).

I'd say it was much shorter than 30 years. Facebook opened to the public in 2006, and I was surprised to learn Myspace (the first "normie" space on the Web) isn't much older. And before that your digital persona was separate from your offline persona, unless you were one of the grognards with a faculty .edu address.

What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.

Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.

That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.

The brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of which don't concern me at all.

> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.

Not true. People post their entire lives (OK not entire, but the positive parts) on social media every day for the public to see.

I’ve known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult when the Web happened.

If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves.

Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit.

Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.

> Most of my friends have money, houses

Yeah, these are genuinely the only people worth advertising to anymore in a practical sense, if you are selling something non-essential.

Because of the K shaped economy a lot of people in the US are spending whatever they make on bare essentials like rent, food and paying off debt like student loans and consumer debt.

Advertise to those masses all you want, on whatever platforms you want, cant get water from a stone.

> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.

maaaaybe 2% of the people…

From my own experience as one grows over their 30's, or probably much older, to get to what you mentioned "money, houses, kids, friends", these ads pretty much don't target u very effectively any ways because one's priorities are shifted and you care more about other things than what the attention economy is all about. IOW these ads all about the people who have attention to spare.

You just reminded me that a few years ago I was doing some product research and one of the questions I'd ask people was what technical communities they turned to regularly. To keep up with news, if they had a question to ask they needed an answer to (this was pre-LLM hype days). HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and various Slack communities dominated the results for people I spoke to in the USA. I was shocked by how much private WhatsApp groups dominated amongst the respondents from Africa (Nigeria representing the overwhelming majority of people who I spoke to).

At the time it felt to me they were missing out on so many other useful resources. Maybe I was wrong. It's interesting to see things trending in a similar direction now.

> It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend.

Even if they do have disposable income to spend, the lack of working ads means that they're getting their vendors in a different way.

Some speculation follows: If advertisements as the main driver of sales went away, wouldn't that help smaller players gain a foothold against incumbents? Because, while incumbents can use their war chest to push all newcomers to page 2 of the results. If the awareness is coming from somewhere else, being on page 2 of the results doesn't matter anymore, because no one is even seeing page 1 of the results anyway!

> WhatsApp

This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.

To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.

Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.

I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I express the same. It was once cool to have social media and presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my personal website.

Meta appears to believe this, and so is pushing chatbot integration into private chats on Messenger and WhatsApp; presumably that will be the vector by which they push product advertisements.

> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.

That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with reality.

> my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions

I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think people are done putting content that matters to them on public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes, influencers or ads.

I regularly do improv every week, which is essentially improvised live theater. So some time is spent not watching youtube or some sort of electronic intermediaries.

Which is actually pretty odd, because improvisational comedy as we know it today is younger than the film industry.

> If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.

Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?

100% this. I used to be a "digital native". I guess I have migrated away from my native lands and now I am a boring old local again.

> In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels

The Return of Content Curation. Peer-to-peer: research, retrieval, review.

100% this. I remember when I took advantage of being online and not really competing in SEO, it was simply a matter of being real. At the time, I didn’t realize it was just arbitrage: I was naturally in a space with fewer participants and most organizations didn’t even know the rules yet.

Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build business the way it’s always been done in history: walking the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive distraction.

I think you're correct to a degree. Instututions like social media and google ads were given a very generous chance, we gave them our money and attention, they gave us scams (especially facebook) and enshittification.

The loss of faith in institutions takes quite a long time to occur but I think it will be quite a bit of effort to reverse.

This is 100% what I see too.

> If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.

Shh! One must never question the ponzi scheme.