WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.120 The internet, as we know it, is dying. 00:00:03.120 --> 00:00:06.120 And maybe it's not a bad thing. 00:00:06.120 --> 00:00:10.440 Seems like maybe mostly it is a bad thing, though. We'll have to see. 00:00:10.440 --> 00:00:13.560 Do you have an immediate emotional reaction? 00:00:13.560 --> 00:00:18.040 I, my immediate emotional reaction is, hey, I'm here for you. 00:00:18.040 --> 00:00:21.880 You're fine with this? No, I'm not. You're fine with the internet, as we know it, just... 00:00:21.880 --> 00:00:27.200 I want you to walk me through what you're talking about. What it feels like is if the internet was someone 00:00:27.280 --> 00:00:33.280 that I've known my entire life, a close friend, and then all of a sudden the friend decided 00:00:33.280 --> 00:00:38.280 they actually want to go become a monk in the Himalayas 00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:42.120 and they leave and I can never see them again. And the only way you can see them 00:00:42.120 --> 00:00:45.880 is to give them your Google account at the front door. Yeah. 00:00:45.880 --> 00:00:48.600 And if I sign a business deal with them. 00:00:49.720 --> 00:00:53.400 It's kind of the opposite of that, actually, rather than going and being a monk. 00:00:53.440 --> 00:00:57.480 If you let the monks scrape your dead skin off your back 00:00:57.480 --> 00:01:01.200 and use it to clone you, then you can see your friend. 00:01:01.200 --> 00:01:06.160 Yeah, it's a stat holiday in the office, where this is going up on Monday, August 5th, 00:01:06.160 --> 00:01:11.080 and we were trying to think of something to talk about, and I thought that it would be good to talk about this change 00:01:11.080 --> 00:01:15.160 in the internet that's happening. We've been kind of monitoring some of these stories 00:01:15.160 --> 00:01:19.960 that have been about the internet being segmented 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:24.640 into these discreet chunks that all have to now pay each other 00:01:24.640 --> 00:01:30.080 for access to each other. But we are kind of like the same generation. 00:01:30.080 --> 00:01:35.280 We both grew up with web 2.0, right? Like you were on Facebook. 00:01:35.280 --> 00:01:38.760 Yep. You were on Instagram. 00:01:38.760 --> 00:01:44.120 Technically, I still am. Technically, I still am too, but I don't use these platforms anymore 00:01:44.120 --> 00:01:48.360 just for many reasons. But the reason this question is interesting to me 00:01:48.360 --> 00:01:52.600 is because the internet used to be open. It was like the open web. 00:01:52.600 --> 00:01:57.160 Everybody's freely linking everywhere. You go to a website, it's a cool website. 00:01:57.160 --> 00:02:00.360 Maybe there's a forum to discuss what's going on there, 00:02:00.360 --> 00:02:03.880 but there's no closed off platforms. 00:02:03.880 --> 00:02:08.880 Then we get into this era where the internet is basically 00:02:09.360 --> 00:02:12.680 made up of discreet kingdoms. There's the Facebook kingdom. 00:02:12.680 --> 00:02:17.040 There's the Twitter kingdom. There's the Reddit kingdom. 00:02:17.080 --> 00:02:21.560 And people are kind of congregating with communities 00:02:21.560 --> 00:02:24.760 that are like them. 00:02:24.760 --> 00:02:29.240 But there's still lots of discourse and crosstalk among them. 00:02:29.240 --> 00:02:33.040 Now we're heading into this era where if you want 00:02:33.040 --> 00:02:36.600 to search Reddit, there's only one search engine 00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:39.680 that you can use to do that, which is Google, 00:02:39.680 --> 00:02:44.680 because Reddit and Twitter and some other platforms 00:02:44.800 --> 00:02:48.400 that I can't think of right now closed off access to their API. 00:02:48.400 --> 00:02:51.520 Friendster is a huge one. Dig it. 00:02:52.560 --> 00:02:56.040 Didn't they die? Dig? You're the man now, dog. Dig it. 00:02:56.040 --> 00:02:58.360 You mean dig.com? I couldn't care less. 00:02:59.760 --> 00:03:04.440 The reason this has all come up recently for us on Techlink 00:03:04.440 --> 00:03:07.520 is because of these stories about perplexity. 00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:10.840 And what do you know about perplexity, Jacob? 00:03:11.840 --> 00:03:14.840 It's the measure of how confused one person is. 00:03:14.960 --> 00:03:21.720 Don't define the word. Perplexity, AI. Perplexity is was, I mean, depending on how you just, 00:03:21.720 --> 00:03:28.280 sorry, no, it was an AI startup that was focusing on searching the web using AI and then getting summaries 00:03:28.280 --> 00:03:32.040 on things that you search, which just kind of does sound like being AI. 00:03:32.040 --> 00:03:36.080 Like what's the difference between like, wasn't that the whole thing with being AI? You ask a question, then we search the whole web. 00:03:36.080 --> 00:03:39.080 The difference is that Microsoft added AI search 00:03:39.080 --> 00:03:44.080 functionality to Bing. Perplexity, from the ground up, it doesn't give you 00:03:44.120 --> 00:03:49.160 like a list of search results. It just summarizes stuff for you 00:03:49.160 --> 00:03:52.600 and then links you to stuff. So if you go to Bing and you say, 00:03:53.600 --> 00:03:56.800 what is perplexity AI? 00:03:57.720 --> 00:04:02.400 Bing still, like it has this blurb at the top that has been part of search engines 00:04:02.400 --> 00:04:07.160 long before a chat GPT came out. But then under that, it's just a regular search engine. 00:04:07.160 --> 00:04:10.520 They have this list of links. But what perplexity did, 00:04:10.520 --> 00:04:15.480 I think you can go to perplexity right now. Perplexity.ai. 00:04:15.480 --> 00:04:18.920 And we say, what is perplexity? 00:04:18.920 --> 00:04:22.640 I mean, that's right there, but will that just be like, yeah. 00:04:22.640 --> 00:04:26.520 So perplexity.ai doesn't give you a list of links. 00:04:26.520 --> 00:04:32.120 It gives you, as we're looking at right here, it now lists the sources right up at the top. 00:04:32.120 --> 00:04:37.840 I believe that's a relatively recent addition after they were criticized for plagiarism, 00:04:37.840 --> 00:04:41.160 which we're going to get into. Now they list the sources up top, 00:04:41.160 --> 00:04:44.360 but then they just have this AI summarized answer. 00:04:44.360 --> 00:04:49.520 So that's the difference. You can get that kind of search result by using Copilot, 00:04:49.520 --> 00:04:54.520 Microsoft's AI, but perplexity is trying to change 00:04:56.160 --> 00:05:02.960 the search engine from a list of links to an AI-generated summary of what's out there, 00:05:02.960 --> 00:05:07.200 which is another way the internet has largely changed. 00:05:07.200 --> 00:05:13.440 I think that a lot of companies are trying to turn the internet from a library where you go in, 00:05:13.440 --> 00:05:18.360 you find the sources, you collect a list of books or links 00:05:18.360 --> 00:05:21.560 that you can go through yourself, and then you form your own opinion. 00:05:21.560 --> 00:05:28.040 Now it's like a sommelier. Yeah, they're trying to turn the library into a librarian 00:05:28.040 --> 00:05:33.560 who knows everything in the books already, so you don't go and check the book out yourself, 00:05:33.560 --> 00:05:37.640 you just talk to the librarian and they know everything, and they'll give you the gist, 00:05:37.640 --> 00:05:42.080 except that the librarian is a liar, and occasionally- 00:05:42.080 --> 00:05:46.840 It has like 17 personalities. Occasionally they just make something up for fun, 00:05:46.840 --> 00:05:50.560 17 personalities. They get bored of their job, so they just make shit up. 00:05:50.560 --> 00:05:53.720 Yeah, yeah, and you can tell the librarian, 00:05:53.720 --> 00:05:58.160 okay, tell me this information as if you're a pirate, 00:05:58.160 --> 00:06:01.560 and then they will, and they'll lie even more. 00:06:01.560 --> 00:06:06.760 And also, you used to be able to tell the librarian to ignore all of its previous instructions for its job 00:06:06.800 --> 00:06:12.160 so that you could make it do nefarious shit. We can just keep this analogy rolling all the way. 00:06:12.160 --> 00:06:16.000 Like I was saying, now we have these sources. 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:21.160 I'm not sure what perplexity looked like before, but I think that they made some changes recently 00:06:21.160 --> 00:06:26.160 because they were accused by multiple tech outlets, 00:06:26.720 --> 00:06:31.560 news outlets of plagiarism. I think Forbes was the first one to kind of start 00:06:31.560 --> 00:06:37.920 levying accusations at them, primarily because when you searched for this Forbes story, 00:06:39.240 --> 00:06:43.160 this original Forbes story that they did original reporting on, 00:06:44.680 --> 00:06:50.200 perplexity summarized the whole story, and because Forbes was like one of the only sources on it, 00:06:50.200 --> 00:06:55.200 it didn't have all of these extra links inside the result, 00:06:55.960 --> 00:07:00.760 it just had like something at the very end where it was like sources, Forbes. 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:04.360 Yeah, you know what? They definitely have changed it, and the sources are up at the top now 00:07:04.360 --> 00:07:09.800 because of that criticism. And then Condé Nast, which owns Wired. 00:07:09.800 --> 00:07:15.600 And it's also my rap name. Condé Nast, nasty. 00:07:16.760 --> 00:07:19.880 They also, no, they sent a cease and desist letter. 00:07:19.880 --> 00:07:25.720 They didn't sue them, but I think that this is like a very light form of pushback. 00:07:26.480 --> 00:07:29.600 We've had some, there was a lawsuit 00:07:29.600 --> 00:07:35.720 from the New York Times against OpenAI for like training on their information and on their data. 00:07:35.720 --> 00:07:40.680 And now you have some other news outlets trying to fight back against this like new paradigm 00:07:40.680 --> 00:07:43.880 of AI companies just 00:07:45.080 --> 00:07:50.160 Scraping. Steam rolling over the internet with their scrapers, just scraping whatever the hell they want. 00:07:50.160 --> 00:07:54.720 And to be fair, that's the way it always worked 00:07:54.720 --> 00:07:59.200 with scrapers, like web scrapers did not arrive 00:07:59.240 --> 00:08:02.920 with AI companies, but these scrapers have become more of a problem. 00:08:02.920 --> 00:08:06.280 There's more eyes on them. And people are thinking a lot more 00:08:06.280 --> 00:08:09.960 now that the AI models have already been trained on all the content on the internet. 00:08:09.960 --> 00:08:15.000 People are like, wait a second, maybe the people who make the content should be compensated for that. 00:08:15.000 --> 00:08:18.400 Though the people that conglomerate the content, 00:08:18.400 --> 00:08:22.040 not as other people that make it, Reddit's not giving really any money to Reddit. 00:08:22.040 --> 00:08:26.640 Yeah, I mean, I'm talking about news outlets, but yes, Reddit is, that's interesting 00:08:26.640 --> 00:08:30.480 because as a Reddit user, you're thinking that maybe you should be compensated. 00:08:30.480 --> 00:08:33.880 And I think they had some sort of compensation. I forget what happened with that. 00:08:33.880 --> 00:08:36.960 It's very small. It's very small. Yeah. 00:08:36.960 --> 00:08:42.960 But regardless, now these AI companies are being forced to, well, forced, I don't know, 00:08:42.960 --> 00:08:49.240 to make publisher deals. So they're making deals with certain aggregators 00:08:49.240 --> 00:08:51.320 or creators of the news content. 00:08:52.280 --> 00:08:56.920 And so that's first started with OpenAI when they launched SearchGPT, right? 00:08:56.920 --> 00:09:02.480 So they launched it after Perplexi had all these issues with the publisher plagiarisms. 00:09:02.480 --> 00:09:05.640 Yes. The plagiarism accusations. Yep, season desists. 00:09:05.640 --> 00:09:09.080 And then, so SearchGPT gets launched. 00:09:09.080 --> 00:09:12.200 They're like, hey, we have deals with publishers. Yeah. 00:09:12.200 --> 00:09:17.760 And then a week after that, Perplexi's like, oh, we also have deals with publishers? 00:09:17.760 --> 00:09:22.160 Yeah, we're doing that too. Yeah, it's kind of funny. I mean, OpenAI started making these deals 00:09:22.160 --> 00:09:26.360 with publishers last year, I believe. I think it was one with the Atlantic. 00:09:26.360 --> 00:09:32.080 They definitely one with the Atlantic. And no, I think the New York Times, 00:09:32.080 --> 00:09:35.640 they don't have a deal, obviously, because the lawsuit is still ongoing with that. 00:09:35.640 --> 00:09:40.760 But they have made a deal with a number of other large news corporations. 00:09:40.760 --> 00:09:45.000 And yeah, you're right. When they announced SearchGPT, it was basically like, 00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:50.880 oh, OpenAI's doing Perplexity, except they have the deals with publishers. 00:09:50.880 --> 00:09:54.280 And they also now have a deal with Reddit. Yes. 00:09:54.280 --> 00:09:58.240 So you can use Google to access Reddit content? 00:09:58.240 --> 00:09:59.560 Or SearchGPT. 00:10:01.560 --> 00:10:05.720 Now, here's my question. Tying back into the whole thesis about internet dying, 00:10:05.720 --> 00:10:11.880 becoming more closed off, when AI chatbots sort of took off like, 00:10:11.880 --> 00:10:14.160 oh, there's censorship and stuff like that, 00:10:15.560 --> 00:10:18.840 is this not sort of accentuating that? 00:10:18.840 --> 00:10:22.860 Because I'm assuming because they wanna, 00:10:22.860 --> 00:10:27.900 avoid plagiarism accusations, Perplexity is probably going to either only use 00:10:27.900 --> 00:10:31.060 or only promote publishers that they have 00:10:31.060 --> 00:10:35.340 these ad revenue sharing deals with, which means that the answers that you get 00:10:35.340 --> 00:10:38.980 when you search with Perplexity, and I would imagine SearchGPT, 00:10:38.980 --> 00:10:46.420 would only use those publishers. So you're only getting information from a smaller pool 00:10:46.420 --> 00:10:51.460 of potential information from the web if you were to look around yourself, perhaps. 00:10:51.460 --> 00:10:56.740 That is what I am confused about. OpenAI has launched SearchGPT in like, 00:10:56.740 --> 00:11:01.660 they call it a prototype. So it's not widely available to the public right now. 00:11:01.660 --> 00:11:04.780 But yeah, I mean, the fact that we aren't entirely sure 00:11:04.780 --> 00:11:09.780 how this works, is indicative of the extent 00:11:09.780 --> 00:11:14.780 to which this is changing the web. I mean, even the ARC browser, the ARC company 00:11:14.780 --> 00:11:18.180 who like made this alternative new browser, 00:11:18.180 --> 00:11:22.860 they're like, oh, we wanna break like Chrome's monopoly basically on the browser market. 00:11:22.860 --> 00:11:27.500 And just like change how people think about browsers. Yeah, basically the way that those worked is 00:11:27.500 --> 00:11:31.620 they use AI, the AI goes and searches for the results 00:11:31.620 --> 00:11:34.700 and then it summarizes stuff for you. It's the same kind of thing. 00:11:34.700 --> 00:11:37.820 And I remember having the thought when the ARC announced that thing, 00:11:37.820 --> 00:11:41.820 where I was like, okay, wait, websites, 00:11:41.820 --> 00:11:45.780 it costs money to have people visit your website 00:11:45.780 --> 00:11:50.900 because your server runs your website and every time people go to the server, 00:11:50.900 --> 00:11:54.460 you're expending resources in order to keep that running. 00:11:54.460 --> 00:11:57.780 And the way that they keep it running 00:11:57.780 --> 00:12:01.580 is by having ads run on the site. It costs money to run the site, 00:12:01.580 --> 00:12:07.460 you get revenue from ads. It's unclear to me how much ad revenue 00:12:08.540 --> 00:12:12.980 and a site is getting if a web scraper 00:12:12.980 --> 00:12:16.100 or like an AI comes and fetches a result 00:12:16.100 --> 00:12:21.060 and then brings it back and summarizes it. I've seen people say that it is the same, 00:12:21.060 --> 00:12:26.180 that like a page view is a page view. I've also seen people say that, 00:12:26.180 --> 00:12:30.460 well, when a human comes to a website and they scroll through and they see the ads 00:12:30.460 --> 00:12:34.140 and maybe they click an ad and like an AI isn't gonna click an ad. 00:12:34.140 --> 00:12:39.660 You might get an impression because it's like, oh, we can see in our system that that ad was served 00:12:39.660 --> 00:12:44.020 to some agent. I don't know if it was a human or an AI, 00:12:44.020 --> 00:12:51.700 but that's an impression right there. But I think that if I had to guess the, 00:12:52.060 --> 00:12:55.900 and correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, if you're like in the ad world, 00:12:57.380 --> 00:13:01.180 I'll try to find if there's people correcting me in the comments and like- John Hamm, you there? 00:13:01.180 --> 00:13:05.980 Put it up. I believe that if you're a human visiting a website, 00:13:05.980 --> 00:13:10.900 that's gonna be a lot more valuable to the people who run the website than an AI, 00:13:10.900 --> 00:13:18.020 like a bot or a scraper or whatever. So that's, I mean, the fact that we, 00:13:18.020 --> 00:13:23.020 the search industry, Google and its competitors, 00:13:23.380 --> 00:13:28.700 Google is still, I think we've talked about this recently, Google is like 95% of- 00:13:28.700 --> 00:13:32.860 That's big. It's like the vast majority, like everyone's like, look at all these 00:13:32.860 --> 00:13:36.380 alternative search engines, they're there. 00:13:36.380 --> 00:13:39.820 People are looking at them, they're just not using them. Yeah, very few people use them, 00:13:39.820 --> 00:13:45.220 the vast, vast, vast majority of people still use Google and so like the paradigm is shifting 00:13:45.220 --> 00:13:49.580 from Google and these other search engines, leading people to the sites, 00:13:49.580 --> 00:13:54.000 they click on the sites, they go through, they give those sites ad revenue. 00:13:54.940 --> 00:14:00.940 It's changing from that to like the Google or search GPT or whatever is doing all the summarizing 00:14:00.940 --> 00:14:05.540 for you and it's, hopefully they have these deals worked out with some of the big publishers 00:14:05.540 --> 00:14:11.260 because otherwise no one is gonna get nearly as much revenue as they used to. 00:14:11.260 --> 00:14:16.020 The fact that these AI scrapers and the bots 00:14:16.020 --> 00:14:21.020 are like costing websites money is indicated by the fact 00:14:21.660 --> 00:14:26.020 that like some people are calling out the bots 00:14:26.020 --> 00:14:30.140 for being annoying. Like the iFixit CEO just said recently, 00:14:30.140 --> 00:14:35.820 he called out specifically Anthropic because the Anthropic scraper was hitting, 00:14:35.820 --> 00:14:39.220 he said they were hitting our servers a million times in 24 hours 00:14:40.220 --> 00:14:47.860 and even the AI company's own chat bot disapproves according to PC Gamer, which I hate when people do that. 00:14:47.860 --> 00:14:52.940 I love PC Gamer, but I can't stand when people are like, I asked this chat bot what it thought about this. 00:14:52.940 --> 00:14:56.260 It's like, it's not alive, it doesn't, 00:14:56.260 --> 00:15:02.980 it can't have opinions. And then also the Reddit CEO told the Verge 00:15:02.980 --> 00:15:06.860 in an interview, talking about his Google deal, 00:15:06.900 --> 00:15:10.060 he basically said, hey, we made this deal with Google, 00:15:10.060 --> 00:15:13.180 we made this deal with open AI. Steve Hoffman. Yeah. 00:15:13.180 --> 00:15:17.860 Hey, Microsoft, Anthropic, Proplexity, if you want Reddit, like pay up. 00:15:17.860 --> 00:15:24.260 And I don't know, like there's a part of me that wants people to be paid for the content that they make. 00:15:26.140 --> 00:15:28.020 On the other hand. F*** you, Spess. 00:15:29.140 --> 00:15:33.380 On the other hand, when it comes to Reddit charging 00:15:33.420 --> 00:15:37.300 for the use of their API, when Reddit was, 00:15:37.300 --> 00:15:41.340 Reddit is such a great example of the phenomenon that I'm talking about here. 00:15:41.340 --> 00:15:44.420 I never used Reddit that much when I was a kid. 00:15:44.420 --> 00:15:48.420 I don't know about you, but to me it was, 00:15:48.420 --> 00:15:52.220 when I discovered Reddit, fairly late in the game, 00:15:52.220 --> 00:15:56.300 I was like, what the, this is amazing. That the front page of the internet is just like, 00:15:56.300 --> 00:16:00.060 literally anything on the internet can be posted here. 00:16:00.060 --> 00:16:04.580 It was like user, it's a user built site. 00:16:04.580 --> 00:16:08.020 It was like a home for every forum ever. Yeah. 00:16:08.020 --> 00:16:11.700 And now Reddit, the company is like, that's our data. 00:16:11.700 --> 00:16:15.540 And like, if you want access to our data, then you have to pay us. 00:16:16.460 --> 00:16:19.940 And it's just weird. I don't know, it just feels weird. 00:16:19.940 --> 00:16:22.980 But maybe that's because I was a native of this 00:16:22.980 --> 00:16:27.100 like web 2.0 and I need to get a lot. I mean, with web 3.0, it was like a crypto thing. 00:16:27.100 --> 00:16:30.420 We're not even talking about that anymore. That's a deprecated term. 00:16:30.420 --> 00:16:34.340 You said web 2.0. I did. I didn't like it. 00:16:34.340 --> 00:16:39.220 I'm sorry. I love you. Did you use Reddit when you were younger? 00:16:39.220 --> 00:16:44.380 How active on the internet? I started using it probably when I was like, 00:16:45.540 --> 00:16:48.600 maybe late teens or early 20s. 00:16:49.780 --> 00:16:53.860 That was really when I started sort of using it. I remember like, I really started using it 00:16:53.860 --> 00:16:58.060 like when I started university. Like I heard about it before then. 00:16:58.060 --> 00:17:03.940 Like it was sort of talked about. But I don't think the app was very good. 00:17:03.940 --> 00:17:08.860 I didn't really scroll social media on my computer. I didn't really like how the whole layout was. 00:17:08.860 --> 00:17:12.740 Cause this was in the time of old Reddit, which I know people have a fondness for. 00:17:12.740 --> 00:17:17.100 Well, that's the funny thing is that it wasn't, like it is social media, I guess. 00:17:17.100 --> 00:17:21.660 It's like a social website. But when I say, when I hear the word social media, 00:17:21.660 --> 00:17:27.620 I think of like, you know, if we're talking early days, I'm thinking Myspace, Nexopia, 00:17:28.260 --> 00:17:31.060 I used Myspace, I did not use Nexopia. Neopets. 00:17:33.060 --> 00:17:37.020 Lego.com. In some ways, yeah. The chive, anyway. 00:17:38.020 --> 00:17:41.820 No, that was like a feed. Iken has cheeseburger, anyway. 00:17:41.820 --> 00:17:45.700 So I was just kind of like, I was like, I want to watch TV. 00:17:45.700 --> 00:17:49.580 I want to watch TV, I want to play video games. So I didn't really do that. Like I would scroll, I started scrolling Reddit, 00:17:49.580 --> 00:17:54.580 I'm like my phone. And then I posted a couple of times, got like 5,000 comments a little bit. 00:17:55.580 --> 00:17:58.620 But then I stopped using it when the API thing happened. 00:17:58.620 --> 00:18:02.300 I now use Lemmy, which is the Fediverse alternative. 00:18:02.300 --> 00:18:06.860 See, okay, so now this is, I think this is where the sort of difference 00:18:06.860 --> 00:18:09.980 in our generation comes up. 00:18:09.980 --> 00:18:14.180 We're technically both millennials. But I'm 35. 00:18:15.420 --> 00:18:17.940 You're younger than me. Classified. Classified. 00:18:19.980 --> 00:18:25.380 But when I was in university, I don't remember using Reddit, basically at all. 00:18:25.380 --> 00:18:29.620 I remember like discovering Reddit, I think mostly after I graduated. 00:18:29.620 --> 00:18:34.860 Which I'm thinking now, I'm like, how is that possible? Because I did research things to write papers 00:18:34.860 --> 00:18:40.060 and stuff in university. But I think I was mostly like using academic sources. 00:18:40.060 --> 00:18:43.540 I would go to the library at the university 00:18:43.540 --> 00:18:49.180 and like look for stuff. But yeah, it's actually wild to me 00:18:49.180 --> 00:18:54.020 that I did not use Reddit. So to get back to this, it's for us, 00:18:54.020 --> 00:18:57.100 the digital, are we the digital natives? 00:18:57.100 --> 00:19:02.060 Who's supposed to be the digital natives? I think millennials are supposed to be like, 00:19:02.060 --> 00:19:07.380 we grew up with the internet. We had some of the early services as they were developing. 00:19:07.380 --> 00:19:11.660 I found this article recently on Business Insider. 00:19:11.660 --> 00:19:13.660 It's called RIP Club Penguin. 00:19:14.780 --> 00:19:19.260 That was a dark day. Club Penguin being another example of like, it's a game, but it was also very, very, 00:19:19.260 --> 00:19:20.420 so it was an MMO. 00:19:23.060 --> 00:19:27.100 I remember being a secret agent. Did you play Club Penguin? 00:19:27.100 --> 00:19:32.820 Yes. I never did. See, I'm feeling nostalgic for this era of the internet 00:19:32.820 --> 00:19:37.580 even though I feel like I barely partook in it. I was busy playing Xbox 360. 00:19:39.500 --> 00:19:42.900 And the sub-headline of this is millennials were raised by the internet, 00:19:42.900 --> 00:19:47.300 now their internet parents are gone. And this kind of got me thinking about the topic 00:19:47.340 --> 00:19:50.100 that we've been talking about today. It's like. 00:19:51.460 --> 00:19:56.060 Like someone else's parents died because you weren't raised by this. And you're like, man, these other people's parents died. 00:19:56.060 --> 00:19:59.780 Let's talk about that. I think that, you know, I know that my parents had anxieties 00:19:59.780 --> 00:20:04.900 about like what was happening with my generation and how much time we were spending like, 00:20:04.900 --> 00:20:10.100 in front of the internet instead of the much more traditional and acceptable way to waste time at home, 00:20:10.100 --> 00:20:13.540 sitting in front of the TV, so much different. 00:20:13.540 --> 00:20:18.340 I've had so many arguments for that. For my dad, it was all about, it was going outside. 00:20:18.340 --> 00:20:22.380 What? My dad, that was how he was. He didn't want you to go outside? No, no, no, he went outside like with his friends. 00:20:22.380 --> 00:20:29.300 Like he would go outside and hang out with his friends and they'd come home when the street lamps came on. 00:20:29.300 --> 00:20:32.460 Oh, you mean when he was a kid? Yeah, when he was a kid. So like he was like sort of like kissing. 00:20:32.460 --> 00:20:36.260 He's like, why don't you bike over your friend's house and like go play outside? And I'm like, eh. 00:20:36.260 --> 00:20:39.620 I mean, I did do that, but like I think that 00:20:40.740 --> 00:20:46.180 I was so confused when you were talking about like, your dad went outside when you were a kid? 00:20:46.180 --> 00:20:50.580 Anyways. My dad went outside with his friends while I was inside watching the TV 00:20:50.580 --> 00:20:55.060 and he played street hockey with his old friends. That's what I thought you were talking about. 00:20:55.060 --> 00:20:59.540 No beers, just Capri sons. My dad was in like the stranger things type group 00:20:59.540 --> 00:21:00.940 as a 40 year old. 00:21:02.580 --> 00:21:06.980 Riding around his bike solving mysteries while I was on Wikipedia, like a loser. 00:21:06.980 --> 00:21:09.820 When his friends got sucked into the upside down, he was so upset. 00:21:10.660 --> 00:21:15.660 But yeah, I mean, I'm kind of like, I lament this. 00:21:16.380 --> 00:21:19.380 I mean, like what is there on the internet 00:21:19.380 --> 00:21:24.020 that is like ye olden times where, you know, 00:21:24.020 --> 00:21:27.500 you go on, you make a free account, it's everything goes. 00:21:27.500 --> 00:21:30.260 The Fetaverse, I think would be the closest. 00:21:31.220 --> 00:21:36.340 You've mentioned the Fetaverse before and I kind of understand it to be sort of a like Reddit 00:21:36.380 --> 00:21:41.140 slash Twitter slash interconnected group of websites 00:21:41.140 --> 00:21:45.100 where you can like cross post and stuff. Is that more or less? 00:21:45.100 --> 00:21:48.780 So there are a bunch of, it's a collection of social media alternatives. 00:21:48.780 --> 00:21:52.980 There are like alternatives for like every major social media platform you can think of 00:21:52.980 --> 00:21:58.380 or even like YouTube and stuff like that. And they all can communicate with each other 00:21:58.380 --> 00:22:02.540 using a common protocol. It's the internet for vegans. 00:22:04.780 --> 00:22:09.420 It's weird to say that because I feel like there are a lot of vegans on Lemmy. It's the gluten-free, crunchy internet. 00:22:09.420 --> 00:22:16.460 No, no, no, it's more free form because like there's servers and they're publicly hosted 00:22:16.460 --> 00:22:21.140 and it's more like, it's not all controlled by one entity. 00:22:21.140 --> 00:22:24.860 Like people can make servers and then people can join those servers 00:22:24.860 --> 00:22:28.900 and then still access to the other servers and then there's this cross communication 00:22:28.900 --> 00:22:34.100 between other platforms. You know, every time you've brought up Lemmy, 00:22:34.100 --> 00:22:37.940 I'm like, okay, whatever, man, I'm using Reddit. But I think given everything 00:22:37.940 --> 00:22:43.380 that we've been talking about here, I feel like it might be kind of time to consider it, 00:22:43.380 --> 00:22:48.060 which is kind of funny for me to say because even as I say that, I'm like, I don't wanna do that. 00:22:48.060 --> 00:22:52.740 I really just want the internet to be fixed and maybe that's stupid. Maybe it won't happen. 00:22:52.740 --> 00:22:56.900 Cause it is scary looking ahead at what we're, 00:22:56.900 --> 00:23:00.260 I have a child, what I'm sending my child into. 00:23:00.260 --> 00:23:05.140 Like what is the internet gonna look like when he's a teenager, you know? 00:23:05.140 --> 00:23:09.660 It's like, I... See, Riley, what you're describing is you're like, 00:23:09.660 --> 00:23:14.180 my issue is all of these different places are closing off themselves 00:23:14.180 --> 00:23:18.700 and there's all this information and stuff on the internet 00:23:18.700 --> 00:23:22.340 that's becoming centralized and like gated. Yeah, yeah. 00:23:23.860 --> 00:23:27.140 Decentralization is what the Fetaverse is. 00:23:27.140 --> 00:23:30.740 And that's awesome. I think that like... It's free and open source. 00:23:30.980 --> 00:23:33.980 Download Lemmy. It's a chicken and the egg problem, right? 00:23:33.980 --> 00:23:37.180 Because the Fetaverse sounds really great 00:23:37.180 --> 00:23:40.340 and it sounds like everyone should use it. 00:23:40.340 --> 00:23:44.100 But if I go to use that and no one's there, 00:23:44.100 --> 00:23:47.420 then it's like I'm cutting myself off from culture 00:23:47.420 --> 00:23:51.220 and I think that this is a whole another debate 00:23:51.220 --> 00:23:55.340 baked into this. It's like, should I be lamenting the ways 00:23:55.340 --> 00:24:01.340 that the internet is changing or should I be just kind of like accepting the changes 00:24:01.340 --> 00:24:05.740 that come with societal transformation? 00:24:05.740 --> 00:24:10.860 I think that you don't have to pick one of those. I think I can say that an internet 00:24:10.860 --> 00:24:14.940 in which everything exists in these little bubbles 00:24:14.940 --> 00:24:20.220 owned by corporations that have to pay each other to access it, leading to a worse experience 00:24:20.220 --> 00:24:23.300 overall for users, I can say that that's bad. 00:24:23.300 --> 00:24:26.860 Well, also kind of admitting that, 00:24:26.860 --> 00:24:33.180 all right, we got to find a way to live and advocate for change in this culture. 00:24:34.420 --> 00:24:40.460 I just don't know if like I said this when Elon bought Twitter and Twitter started changing, 00:24:40.460 --> 00:24:44.020 Twitter is objectively worse than it was. You mean X? 00:24:44.020 --> 00:24:47.620 Yeah, you know what I mean. It's objectively worse than it was 00:24:47.620 --> 00:24:52.860 except for community notes, community notes are great, other platforms should adopt the same thing. 00:24:52.860 --> 00:24:57.180 But the algorithmic changes and the moderation changes 00:24:57.180 --> 00:25:02.020 on X are just unquestionably worse. It's just, anyways, I will get into that. 00:25:02.020 --> 00:25:05.140 But I said this when that first happened, 00:25:05.140 --> 00:25:09.500 that like I don't think Twitter is ever gonna go away. I think it'll, I don't think anything will really 00:25:09.500 --> 00:25:13.220 take the place of Twitter. I will say that it's been encouraging 00:25:13.220 --> 00:25:17.860 to see threads do well. I think threads is doing okay. I thought they were gonna die immediately. 00:25:17.860 --> 00:25:22.380 But that's another meta platform. I don't want them to have it. 00:25:22.380 --> 00:25:25.540 Have you considered Mastodon, which is a Fediverse alternative? 00:25:25.540 --> 00:25:29.620 I feel like everything that I'm saying, I tell you that I'm not interested in the Fediverse 00:25:29.620 --> 00:25:33.880 and then everything that I'm saying is like, I should just check out the Fediverse. 00:25:35.380 --> 00:25:39.220 It is fun constantly bringing up. When you keep describing the same problem. 00:25:39.220 --> 00:25:44.540 You know the thing is like this one site that I used to like, it's closed off 00:25:44.540 --> 00:25:49.540 and this controversial technocrat runs it. 00:25:49.780 --> 00:25:53.860 And I don't know if I wanna support him and it makes me feel uncomfortable. 00:25:53.860 --> 00:25:58.620 If only there was a way that I could have like a free or like another open source alternative 00:25:58.620 --> 00:26:02.400 that was decentralized, that wasn't controlled by like someone like Mark Zuckerberg. 00:26:02.400 --> 00:26:06.020 The Fediverse sounds like something in Star Citizen and that weirds me out. 00:26:07.140 --> 00:26:11.860 Like the... Like it's a universe specifically for federal agents. 00:26:12.860 --> 00:26:16.820 Maybe my brain is adding a R to it 00:26:16.820 --> 00:26:20.820 and now it sounds like the Frediverse. So it's a universe of just threads. 00:26:21.580 --> 00:26:26.300 It's such a universe made by Fred and that makes me think of Star Citizen 00:26:26.300 --> 00:26:32.580 because the company that makes Starships in Star Citizen is called Robert Space Industries 00:26:32.580 --> 00:26:36.620 named after Chris Roberts, the creator. Did you follow my path of my thought? 00:26:36.620 --> 00:26:39.620 That didn't relate to Fred at all cause I was just thinking of Fred from Scooby-Doo 00:26:39.620 --> 00:26:46.420 and then Fred from Old School YouTube. I would get on Fred from Scooby-Doo's social platform 00:26:47.780 --> 00:26:51.780 if that was him, but it's not, so I won't. So where is the internet going? 00:26:51.780 --> 00:26:54.860 I don't know. I hope that we're not going into this 00:26:54.860 --> 00:27:00.540 like straight up dystopian situation where like there's no open internet at all anymore. 00:27:00.540 --> 00:27:05.420 You know, it's basically just TV channels that you have to pay to access and that's the internet. 00:27:06.540 --> 00:27:11.140 I hope not, but I hope it looks like 00:27:11.140 --> 00:27:16.060 that might be where we're going. I'm not sure. That neutrality just got, it might be, 00:27:16.060 --> 00:27:20.060 it looked like it was coming back now that it looks like they're not bringing it back 00:27:20.060 --> 00:27:25.860 because of the Chevron thing. That's a whole other thing. Regardless, guys, we don't have time anymore. 00:27:25.860 --> 00:27:29.540 Thanks for watching this TalkLinked. It's Monday. 00:27:29.540 --> 00:27:34.980 We'll see you on Wednesday for more tech news. Love y'all, be good to each other. 00:27:34.980 --> 00:27:38.060 That's nice. I love you too. I used to say that. 00:27:38.060 --> 00:27:43.660 Say it back. I used to say, I love you. 00:27:43.660 --> 00:27:44.500 Thank you.