The internet, as we know it, is dying.
And maybe it's not a bad thing.
Seems like maybe mostly it is a bad thing, though. We'll have to see.
Do you have an immediate emotional reaction?
I, my immediate emotional reaction is, hey, I'm here for you.
You're fine with this? No, I'm not. You're fine with the internet, as we know it, just...
I want you to walk me through what you're talking about. What it feels like is if the internet was someone
that I've known my entire life, a close friend, and then all of a sudden the friend decided
they actually want to go become a monk in the Himalayas
and they leave and I can never see them again. And the only way you can see them
is to give them your Google account at the front door. Yeah.
And if I sign a business deal with them.
It's kind of the opposite of that, actually, rather than going and being a monk.
If you let the monks scrape your dead skin off your back
and use it to clone you, then you can see your friend.
Yeah, it's a stat holiday in the office, where this is going up on Monday, August 5th,
and we were trying to think of something to talk about, and I thought that it would be good to talk about this change
in the internet that's happening. We've been kind of monitoring some of these stories
that have been about the internet being segmented
into these discreet chunks that all have to now pay each other
for access to each other. But we are kind of like the same generation.
We both grew up with web 2.0, right? Like you were on Facebook.
Yep. You were on Instagram.
Technically, I still am. Technically, I still am too, but I don't use these platforms anymore
just for many reasons. But the reason this question is interesting to me
is because the internet used to be open. It was like the open web.
Everybody's freely linking everywhere. You go to a website, it's a cool website.
Maybe there's a forum to discuss what's going on there,
but there's no closed off platforms.
Then we get into this era where the internet is basically
made up of discreet kingdoms. There's the Facebook kingdom.
There's the Twitter kingdom. There's the Reddit kingdom.
And people are kind of congregating with communities
that are like them.
But there's still lots of discourse and crosstalk among them.
Now we're heading into this era where if you want
to search Reddit, there's only one search engine
that you can use to do that, which is Google,
because Reddit and Twitter and some other platforms
that I can't think of right now closed off access to their API.
Friendster is a huge one. Dig it.
Didn't they die? Dig? You're the man now, dog. Dig it.
You mean dig.com? I couldn't care less.
The reason this has all come up recently for us on Techlink
is because of these stories about perplexity.
And what do you know about perplexity, Jacob?
It's the measure of how confused one person is.
Don't define the word. Perplexity, AI. Perplexity is was, I mean, depending on how you just,
sorry, no, it was an AI startup that was focusing on searching the web using AI and then getting summaries
on things that you search, which just kind of does sound like being AI.
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.
The difference is that Microsoft added AI search
functionality to Bing. Perplexity, from the ground up, it doesn't give you
like a list of search results. It just summarizes stuff for you
and then links you to stuff. So if you go to Bing and you say,
what is perplexity AI?
Bing still, like it has this blurb at the top that has been part of search engines
long before a chat GPT came out. But then under that, it's just a regular search engine.
They have this list of links. But what perplexity did,
I think you can go to perplexity right now. Perplexity.ai.
And we say, what is perplexity?
I mean, that's right there, but will that just be like, yeah.
So perplexity.ai doesn't give you a list of links.
It gives you, as we're looking at right here, it now lists the sources right up at the top.
I believe that's a relatively recent addition after they were criticized for plagiarism,
which we're going to get into. Now they list the sources up top,
but then they just have this AI summarized answer.
So that's the difference. You can get that kind of search result by using Copilot,
Microsoft's AI, but perplexity is trying to change
the search engine from a list of links to an AI-generated summary of what's out there,
which is another way the internet has largely changed.
I think that a lot of companies are trying to turn the internet from a library where you go in,
you find the sources, you collect a list of books or links
that you can go through yourself, and then you form your own opinion.
Now it's like a sommelier. Yeah, they're trying to turn the library into a librarian
who knows everything in the books already, so you don't go and check the book out yourself,
you just talk to the librarian and they know everything, and they'll give you the gist,
except that the librarian is a liar, and occasionally-
It has like 17 personalities. Occasionally they just make something up for fun,
17 personalities. They get bored of their job, so they just make shit up.
Yeah, yeah, and you can tell the librarian,
okay, tell me this information as if you're a pirate,
and then they will, and they'll lie even more.
And also, you used to be able to tell the librarian to ignore all of its previous instructions for its job
so that you could make it do nefarious shit. We can just keep this analogy rolling all the way.
Like I was saying, now we have these sources.
I'm not sure what perplexity looked like before, but I think that they made some changes recently
because they were accused by multiple tech outlets,
news outlets of plagiarism. I think Forbes was the first one to kind of start
levying accusations at them, primarily because when you searched for this Forbes story,
this original Forbes story that they did original reporting on,
perplexity summarized the whole story, and because Forbes was like one of the only sources on it,
it didn't have all of these extra links inside the result,
it just had like something at the very end where it was like sources, Forbes.
Yeah, you know what? They definitely have changed it, and the sources are up at the top now
because of that criticism. And then CondÃ© Nast, which owns Wired.
And it's also my rap name. CondÃ© Nast, nasty.
They also, no, they sent a cease and desist letter.
They didn't sue them, but I think that this is like a very light form of pushback.
We've had some, there was a lawsuit
from the New York Times against OpenAI for like training on their information and on their data.
And now you have some other news outlets trying to fight back against this like new paradigm
of AI companies just
Scraping. Steam rolling over the internet with their scrapers, just scraping whatever the hell they want.
And to be fair, that's the way it always worked
with scrapers, like web scrapers did not arrive
with AI companies, but these scrapers have become more of a problem.
There's more eyes on them. And people are thinking a lot more
now that the AI models have already been trained on all the content on the internet.
People are like, wait a second, maybe the people who make the content should be compensated for that.
Though the people that conglomerate the content,
not as other people that make it, Reddit's not giving really any money to Reddit.
Yeah, I mean, I'm talking about news outlets, but yes, Reddit is, that's interesting
because as a Reddit user, you're thinking that maybe you should be compensated.
And I think they had some sort of compensation. I forget what happened with that.
It's very small. It's very small. Yeah.
But regardless, now these AI companies are being forced to, well, forced, I don't know,
to make publisher deals. So they're making deals with certain aggregators
or creators of the news content.
And so that's first started with OpenAI when they launched SearchGPT, right?
So they launched it after Perplexi had all these issues with the publisher plagiarisms.
Yes. The plagiarism accusations. Yep, season desists.
And then, so SearchGPT gets launched.
They're like, hey, we have deals with publishers. Yeah.
And then a week after that, Perplexi's like, oh, we also have deals with publishers?
Yeah, we're doing that too. Yeah, it's kind of funny. I mean, OpenAI started making these deals
with publishers last year, I believe. I think it was one with the Atlantic.
They definitely one with the Atlantic. And no, I think the New York Times,
they don't have a deal, obviously, because the lawsuit is still ongoing with that.
But they have made a deal with a number of other large news corporations.
And yeah, you're right. When they announced SearchGPT, it was basically like,
oh, OpenAI's doing Perplexity, except they have the deals with publishers.
And they also now have a deal with Reddit. Yes.
So you can use Google to access Reddit content?
Or SearchGPT.
Now, here's my question. Tying back into the whole thesis about internet dying,
becoming more closed off, when AI chatbots sort of took off like,
oh, there's censorship and stuff like that,
is this not sort of accentuating that?
Because I'm assuming because they wanna,
avoid plagiarism accusations, Perplexity is probably going to either only use
or only promote publishers that they have
these ad revenue sharing deals with, which means that the answers that you get
when you search with Perplexity, and I would imagine SearchGPT,
would only use those publishers. So you're only getting information from a smaller pool
of potential information from the web if you were to look around yourself, perhaps.
That is what I am confused about. OpenAI has launched SearchGPT in like,
they call it a prototype. So it's not widely available to the public right now.
But yeah, I mean, the fact that we aren't entirely sure
how this works, is indicative of the extent
to which this is changing the web. I mean, even the ARC browser, the ARC company
who like made this alternative new browser,
they're like, oh, we wanna break like Chrome's monopoly basically on the browser market.
And just like change how people think about browsers. Yeah, basically the way that those worked is
they use AI, the AI goes and searches for the results
and then it summarizes stuff for you. It's the same kind of thing.
And I remember having the thought when the ARC announced that thing,
where I was like, okay, wait, websites,
it costs money to have people visit your website
because your server runs your website and every time people go to the server,
you're expending resources in order to keep that running.
And the way that they keep it running
is by having ads run on the site. It costs money to run the site,
you get revenue from ads. It's unclear to me how much ad revenue
and a site is getting if a web scraper
or like an AI comes and fetches a result
and then brings it back and summarizes it. I've seen people say that it is the same,
that like a page view is a page view. I've also seen people say that,
well, when a human comes to a website and they scroll through and they see the ads
and maybe they click an ad and like an AI isn't gonna click an ad.
You might get an impression because it's like, oh, we can see in our system that that ad was served
to some agent. I don't know if it was a human or an AI,
but that's an impression right there. But I think that if I had to guess the,
and correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, if you're like in the ad world,
I'll try to find if there's people correcting me in the comments and like- John Hamm, you there?
Put it up. I believe that if you're a human visiting a website,
that's gonna be a lot more valuable to the people who run the website than an AI,
like a bot or a scraper or whatever. So that's, I mean, the fact that we,
the search industry, Google and its competitors,
Google is still, I think we've talked about this recently, Google is like 95% of-
That's big. It's like the vast majority, like everyone's like, look at all these
alternative search engines, they're there.
People are looking at them, they're just not using them. Yeah, very few people use them,
the vast, vast, vast majority of people still use Google and so like the paradigm is shifting
from Google and these other search engines, leading people to the sites,
they click on the sites, they go through, they give those sites ad revenue.
It's changing from that to like the Google or search GPT or whatever is doing all the summarizing
for you and it's, hopefully they have these deals worked out with some of the big publishers
because otherwise no one is gonna get nearly as much revenue as they used to.
The fact that these AI scrapers and the bots
are like costing websites money is indicated by the fact
that like some people are calling out the bots
for being annoying. Like the iFixit CEO just said recently,
he called out specifically Anthropic because the Anthropic scraper was hitting,
he said they were hitting our servers a million times in 24 hours
and even the AI company's own chat bot disapproves according to PC Gamer, which I hate when people do that.
I love PC Gamer, but I can't stand when people are like, I asked this chat bot what it thought about this.
It's like, it's not alive, it doesn't,
it can't have opinions. And then also the Reddit CEO told the Verge
in an interview, talking about his Google deal,
he basically said, hey, we made this deal with Google,
we made this deal with open AI. Steve Hoffman. Yeah.
Hey, Microsoft, Anthropic, Proplexity, if you want Reddit, like pay up.
And I don't know, like there's a part of me that wants people to be paid for the content that they make.
On the other hand. F*** you, Spess.
On the other hand, when it comes to Reddit charging
for the use of their API, when Reddit was,
Reddit is such a great example of the phenomenon that I'm talking about here.
I never used Reddit that much when I was a kid.
I don't know about you, but to me it was,
when I discovered Reddit, fairly late in the game,
I was like, what the, this is amazing. That the front page of the internet is just like,
literally anything on the internet can be posted here.
It was like user, it's a user built site.
It was like a home for every forum ever. Yeah.
And now Reddit, the company is like, that's our data.
And like, if you want access to our data, then you have to pay us.
And it's just weird. I don't know, it just feels weird.
But maybe that's because I was a native of this
like web 2.0 and I need to get a lot. I mean, with web 3.0, it was like a crypto thing.
We're not even talking about that anymore. That's a deprecated term.
You said web 2.0. I did. I didn't like it.
I'm sorry. I love you. Did you use Reddit when you were younger?
How active on the internet? I started using it probably when I was like,
maybe late teens or early 20s.
That was really when I started sort of using it. I remember like, I really started using it
like when I started university. Like I heard about it before then.
Like it was sort of talked about. But I don't think the app was very good.
I didn't really scroll social media on my computer. I didn't really like how the whole layout was.
Cause this was in the time of old Reddit, which I know people have a fondness for.
Well, that's the funny thing is that it wasn't, like it is social media, I guess.
It's like a social website. But when I say, when I hear the word social media,
I think of like, you know, if we're talking early days, I'm thinking Myspace, Nexopia,
I used Myspace, I did not use Nexopia. Neopets.
Lego.com. In some ways, yeah. The chive, anyway.
No, that was like a feed. Iken has cheeseburger, anyway.
So I was just kind of like, I was like, I want to watch TV.
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,
I'm like my phone. And then I posted a couple of times, got like 5,000 comments a little bit.
But then I stopped using it when the API thing happened.
I now use Lemmy, which is the Fediverse alternative.
See, okay, so now this is, I think this is where the sort of difference
in our generation comes up.
We're technically both millennials. But I'm 35.
You're younger than me. Classified. Classified.
But when I was in university, I don't remember using Reddit, basically at all.
I remember like discovering Reddit, I think mostly after I graduated.
Which I'm thinking now, I'm like, how is that possible? Because I did research things to write papers
and stuff in university. But I think I was mostly like using academic sources.
I would go to the library at the university
and like look for stuff. But yeah, it's actually wild to me
that I did not use Reddit. So to get back to this, it's for us,
the digital, are we the digital natives?
Who's supposed to be the digital natives? I think millennials are supposed to be like,
we grew up with the internet. We had some of the early services as they were developing.
I found this article recently on Business Insider.
It's called RIP Club Penguin.
That was a dark day. Club Penguin being another example of like, it's a game, but it was also very, very,
so it was an MMO.
I remember being a secret agent. Did you play Club Penguin?
Yes. I never did. See, I'm feeling nostalgic for this era of the internet
even though I feel like I barely partook in it. I was busy playing Xbox 360.
And the sub-headline of this is millennials were raised by the internet,
now their internet parents are gone. And this kind of got me thinking about the topic
that we've been talking about today. It's like.
Like someone else's parents died because you weren't raised by this. And you're like, man, these other people's parents died.
Let's talk about that. I think that, you know, I know that my parents had anxieties
about like what was happening with my generation and how much time we were spending like,
in front of the internet instead of the much more traditional and acceptable way to waste time at home,
sitting in front of the TV, so much different.
I've had so many arguments for that. For my dad, it was all about, it was going outside.
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.
Like he would go outside and hang out with his friends and they'd come home when the street lamps came on.
Oh, you mean when he was a kid? Yeah, when he was a kid. So like he was like sort of like kissing.
He's like, why don't you bike over your friend's house and like go play outside? And I'm like, eh.
I mean, I did do that, but like I think that
I was so confused when you were talking about like, your dad went outside when you were a kid?
Anyways. My dad went outside with his friends while I was inside watching the TV
and he played street hockey with his old friends. That's what I thought you were talking about.
No beers, just Capri sons. My dad was in like the stranger things type group
as a 40 year old.
Riding around his bike solving mysteries while I was on Wikipedia, like a loser.
When his friends got sucked into the upside down, he was so upset.
But yeah, I mean, I'm kind of like, I lament this.
I mean, like what is there on the internet
that is like ye olden times where, you know,
you go on, you make a free account, it's everything goes.
The Fetaverse, I think would be the closest.
You've mentioned the Fetaverse before and I kind of understand it to be sort of a like Reddit
slash Twitter slash interconnected group of websites
where you can like cross post and stuff. Is that more or less?
So there are a bunch of, it's a collection of social media alternatives.
There are like alternatives for like every major social media platform you can think of
or even like YouTube and stuff like that. And they all can communicate with each other
using a common protocol. It's the internet for vegans.
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.
No, no, no, it's more free form because like there's servers and they're publicly hosted
and it's more like, it's not all controlled by one entity.
Like people can make servers and then people can join those servers
and then still access to the other servers and then there's this cross communication
between other platforms. You know, every time you've brought up Lemmy,
I'm like, okay, whatever, man, I'm using Reddit. But I think given everything
that we've been talking about here, I feel like it might be kind of time to consider it,
which is kind of funny for me to say because even as I say that, I'm like, I don't wanna do that.
I really just want the internet to be fixed and maybe that's stupid. Maybe it won't happen.
Cause it is scary looking ahead at what we're,
I have a child, what I'm sending my child into.
Like what is the internet gonna look like when he's a teenager, you know?
It's like, I... See, Riley, what you're describing is you're like,
my issue is all of these different places are closing off themselves
and there's all this information and stuff on the internet
that's becoming centralized and like gated. Yeah, yeah.
Decentralization is what the Fetaverse is.
And that's awesome. I think that like... It's free and open source.
Download Lemmy. It's a chicken and the egg problem, right?
Because the Fetaverse sounds really great
and it sounds like everyone should use it.
But if I go to use that and no one's there,
then it's like I'm cutting myself off from culture
and I think that this is a whole another debate
baked into this. It's like, should I be lamenting the ways
that the internet is changing or should I be just kind of like accepting the changes
that come with societal transformation?
I think that you don't have to pick one of those. I think I can say that an internet
in which everything exists in these little bubbles
owned by corporations that have to pay each other to access it, leading to a worse experience
overall for users, I can say that that's bad.
Well, also kind of admitting that,
all right, we got to find a way to live and advocate for change in this culture.
I just don't know if like I said this when Elon bought Twitter and Twitter started changing,
Twitter is objectively worse than it was. You mean X?
Yeah, you know what I mean. It's objectively worse than it was
except for community notes, community notes are great, other platforms should adopt the same thing.
But the algorithmic changes and the moderation changes
on X are just unquestionably worse. It's just, anyways, I will get into that.
But I said this when that first happened,
that like I don't think Twitter is ever gonna go away. I think it'll, I don't think anything will really
take the place of Twitter. I will say that it's been encouraging
to see threads do well. I think threads is doing okay. I thought they were gonna die immediately.
But that's another meta platform. I don't want them to have it.
Have you considered Mastodon, which is a Fediverse alternative?
I feel like everything that I'm saying, I tell you that I'm not interested in the Fediverse
and then everything that I'm saying is like, I should just check out the Fediverse.
It is fun constantly bringing up. When you keep describing the same problem.
You know the thing is like this one site that I used to like, it's closed off
and this controversial technocrat runs it.
And I don't know if I wanna support him and it makes me feel uncomfortable.
If only there was a way that I could have like a free or like another open source alternative
that was decentralized, that wasn't controlled by like someone like Mark Zuckerberg.
The Fediverse sounds like something in Star Citizen and that weirds me out.
Like the... Like it's a universe specifically for federal agents.
Maybe my brain is adding a R to it
and now it sounds like the Frediverse. So it's a universe of just threads.
It's such a universe made by Fred and that makes me think of Star Citizen
because the company that makes Starships in Star Citizen is called Robert Space Industries
named after Chris Roberts, the creator. Did you follow my path of my thought?
That didn't relate to Fred at all cause I was just thinking of Fred from Scooby-Doo
and then Fred from Old School YouTube. I would get on Fred from Scooby-Doo's social platform
if that was him, but it's not, so I won't. So where is the internet going?
I don't know. I hope that we're not going into this
like straight up dystopian situation where like there's no open internet at all anymore.
You know, it's basically just TV channels that you have to pay to access and that's the internet.
I hope not, but I hope it looks like
that might be where we're going. I'm not sure. That neutrality just got, it might be,
it looked like it was coming back now that it looks like they're not bringing it back
because of the Chevron thing. That's a whole other thing. Regardless, guys, we don't have time anymore.
Thanks for watching this TalkLinked. It's Monday.
We'll see you on Wednesday for more tech news. Love y'all, be good to each other.
That's nice. I love you too. I used to say that.
Say it back. I used to say, I love you.
Thank you.