Alive internet theory
alivetheory.net167 points by manbitesdog a day ago
167 points by manbitesdog a day ago
Somehow, reading the comments made something CLICK for me about how passive and reactive we have all become in this culture.
1. The issue is real. Not sure it is articulated but I related to live vs dead internet.
2. The comments (only 10 as of now) are mostly critiques. (no javascript, call to action, style, theory is wrong)
The CLICK: "Critiques kill". You want a live internet? Don't critique. If you want a no javascript version make one. If you have a better solution do it. If you have insight into the problem share it.
The "follower" internet has somehow instilled the notion that making a comment is the same as "doing something". It is not.
Someone has done something here. If you want to comment, try to develop the thought, not critique. Help build something.
> The CLICK: "Critiques kill". You want a live internet? Don't critique. If you want a no javascript version make one. If you have a better solution do it. If you have insight into the problem share it.
Yes, and no. I think a problem is critique in the form of action. There are movements such as the indie web (e.g. Neocities, Nekoweb, Agoraroad) that long for the old web in their nostalgia and form a counter-movement to the current state of the web. The websites and communities that emerge from this are more or less an imitation of the websites of the late 90s and early 2000s. My problem with this is that the indie web primarily defines itself by simply being the opposite of the web 2.0. It exists primarily as a counterculture, in which “counter” is more important part than "culture". This movement is cynical in that a better future for the internet and the web no longer seems possible, and the only way out is to escape into a nostalgically romanticized past. For me, this is more of a confirmation of the Dead Internet Theory than of the Alive Internet Theory.
some of this is simply that it is a counter-culture, because it's in the minority (by a significant margin).
that doesn't mean it's defined by that decision, or even that it made that decision in the first place - the majority have decided it for them. and you're letting the majority define it for you, whether it's even remotely accurate or not.
indie web generally wants personal control and ownership. that isn't cynicism or "pre web-2.0" or counter-culture-as-self-identity, it's personal control and ownership. almost everyone wants that. the fact that the majority have given it up doesn't make them cynical, if anything it makes the mega-corps denying those things cynical.
And yet, what you are calling "the past" exists now in the present. It may be that some of those sites resemble "the past" simply because they value certain things, and those values just happen to have been prevalent then, and aren't now. Maybe to you those values look like the past because that's the last time we saw them. Or in other words, maybe they resemble the past coincidentally rather than intentionally. And maybe those values ARE the way forward. The future isn't always different from the past; in fact it seems history is usually cyclical. And it's not monolithic.
Think of a great jazz saxophonist in 2025. Practicing sax every day for years. Is he living in the past because jazz isn't popular like it once was? To some degree, sure, because his inspiration and source material is probably 60- and 80-year-old recordings. But is he cynical for appreciating craft, improvisation and organic individual expression over convenient digital production? And how should he advance his values? By trying to convert Taylor Swift into a jazz saxophonist? That's never going to happen. And it's not cynical to think so, it's just obvious. (Edit: To some degree it might even be wrong, because she would have to deny her inherent Taylorness.) No, the way he can advance those values is by living them himself. Which is the epitome of non-cynical, really. If there are enough of him out there, it'll be a movement, but popularity isn't necessary for it to be part of the present and future, especially his own present and future.
Touches on the broader problem - that the less thought and care put into a comment, the more likely it is to be posted on the internet. Not sure what can be done about statistics.
I completely agree. This is cool and fun and interesting, and dares to be unique. That’s what the Internet should be. It’s legitimately dangerous how reliant so many people are on computers and the Internet for entertainment, information, and their livelihoods almost entirely as passive consumers or users.
We need to bring back something like the MySpace era, I think.
I think it’s underrated how much devices, tools, and a handful of companies contribute to the current stage. Everybody wants to monetize consumers’ inability to do things on their own, developers’ potential to make money with their product and get locked in ($$$), and funnel people into things. But at the same time, that’s pretty much the only way anybody has been able to consistently get paid and keep up with technology by making software. It’s just very hard to get unstuck when your primary computer is a phone that is basically impossible to use as anything but a pacifier for the mind, and every platform wants to keep you from discovering anything outside of it.
I’m hopeful that better tools, AI, open source, and normalizing rewarding helpful people and things on the Internet will bring us back to what it could have been. Why is there literally nowhere to go anymore that doesn’t feel abandoned or like marketing slop? Maybe we’ll have to login with real names to access what comes after that, but maybe it won’t be so bad if we get to decide for ourselves how/what we do with it.
Problem: the Internet is dangerous now. What you put in "your space" might get you fired, deported, etc. (Even if you think you're only posting safe things, consider the person who finds your space might not be sensible.) And not just people - everything you ever post can be assumed to be saved by countless "AI" systems by well-resourced groups, for future bad people to search through. See the imprisonment of Larry Bushart[1] over a Charlie Kirk meme. In most scenarios that's an okay thing to do, except when there are bad people in charge who are data-mining social platforms.
Posting anything is a risk. What benefit do you get from it - does it outweigh the risk? In the past, both the actual risk and the perceived risk were lower.
This concept explains the move from openly public forums and blogs to more private group chats - including Discord which is somewhat less public than the world wide web (and also feels less public because it's not random-access from a user perspective, although data slurpers will have no trouble).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/31/tennessee-ma...
That’s definitely one major and related factor, but I do think it’s separate from the problem that all most people can do on the Internet is consume or post on someone else’s website. Participating in the Internet doesn’t have to be just writing down your opinions on somewhere that shows up on Google Search.
There’s this technical-nontechnical dichotomy that I think really holds back the potential for rich/diverse Internet applications, because the interest and specialized knowledge necessary for eg a “24/7 remote plumbing video chat” service or “open source education-adjacent gaming” is primarily held by nontechnical people. Not that technical people couldn’t do these things, but the people who would want to make them “their thing” probably aren’t professional software developers.
Anyway, I think we’re culturally ready to learn how to forgive people who make forgivable mistakes and grow from them, even though there might still be some “cancel culture”. It’s just better for everybody because it disempowers the people that would abuse it, and everybody makes mistakes or changes their mind over time anyway.
> Problem: the Internet is dangerous now. What you put in "your space" might get you fired, deported, etc.
> Posting anything is a risk. What benefit do you get from it - does it outweigh the risk? In the past, both the actual risk and the perceived risk were lower.
Yes, because people post openly their hot takes to the whole world. Their internet personality is completely tied to their real-world personality. One of the best things of the internet was the anonymity you had. But at one point people started to think it was a good idea to throw this away.
Every new generation reinvents itself to fix what it sees wrong with the ones before it. But they can’t undo what already happened. The Internet is too deeply embedded in our lives now and too useful for that to change. And if bad actors insist on polluting the commons/letting AI run loose on it the only way to get any kind of accountability is for there to be identity mechanisms whenever you’re interacting with people beyond those you already know.
But regardless, it’s like a party that started out as a group of friends, then an entire subculture, then an entire personality type, then everybody else kinda watching through the windows, and now all those people are here but too shy to participate. I remember the end of the anonymity era, and looking back, it really did enable people to just be cruel and nasty in a way that scared away 90% of personality types.
Now a different kind of personality just sees the whole thing as a dump, strip mine, or a mark and the rest of us grew up. And I see an entire generation who truly internalized the cynicism of anonymous Reddit commenters who probably knew just as much about the world as they did, who are real people looking for any kind of authenticity or help they can find, and settling for that.
So, I think people are almost ready to start being truly sincere, forgiving, and graceful to each other on the Internet as long as they can expect to receive it back in kind. Partially because we have no choice, but it would be good anyway.
I’m glad you experienced the CLICK, I did too when GPT-3 released. The comment section was full of snarky, cynical, dismissive remarks with hundreds of likes. It smelled like Reddit but it was HN.
Cynicism is a dangerous instinct that captures many people. It’s easy, it’s rewarding, and it offers the psychological safety of unity. But it’s missing a key component. Hope.
I have no problem with critiques if they are accurate, insightful, and helpful. But cynics don’t think this way. Cynics seek to find the minimum viable argument to destroy anything that threatens change.
Stay awake my friend. Remain hopeful. We are hackers. We believe in the liberating potential of technology. We refuse to succumb to the lazy ignorant masses. We build.
“Only optimists build complex systems.”
> We refuse to succumb to the lazy ignorant masses.
Says the person who just made a lazy generalisation and lumping in a whole raft of nuanced positions into one, conveniently labelled, oppositional lump.
One interesting thing from the arts is that new works are often part of an ongoing generational argument. Two examples which come to mind are Notes from Underground and the hilarious Duchamp urinal.
I think this form of critique - active, costly, valuable in itself, and barely even a critique at all - is really nice.
Allow me to criticise your criticism...
> The CLICK: "Critiques kill". You want a live internet? Don't critique.
I don't see the connection. Critiques are also content.
The issue is not related to the type of content, but to what is producing it. Dead Internet is the (proven) idea that most content on the internet is produced and consumed by machines, not humans.
Yes.
Critiques, discourse, discussion..these are all things that make the internet "real".
Does your comment need an AI disclaimer? The tone reeks of it.
Absolutely not AI unless they manually edited it, in which case it isn't AI in a meaningful way. Need to tune your AIdar.
I dunno, the combination of the "CLICK", the bullet points and tone of sweeping boosterism is a tell.
> The "follower" internet has somehow instilled the notion that making a comment is the same as "doing something". It is not.
Nice, that completely defines how I felt about Twitter when I decided to delete my account.
In the early days the barrier to comment was higher and there were no obvious points to score from doing so. If a blog had a post you had opinions on, you could write a response on your own blog, or email the author. These days we have sites (like this) where commenting is almost 0 effort, and people can rack up fake internet points for doing it.
The best thing I've seen in recent years in on bearblog, where people will most their email address, so if someone has something to say in reply to a post, they can simply email the author. It's not a public pissing match for who can have the hottest take.
There are a couple things that often resurface in my mind on this topic.
The first is from Teddy Roosevelt's Citizenship in a Republic speech.
> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
The second is Ego's review in Ratatouille.
> In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.
In modern times with comment sections, influencers, talking heads, and a seemingly endless supply of opinions from those who risk nothing while judging those actually putting something out into the world, we seem to place far too much value in the critics, while dismissing the risk and efforts of those who actually create.
While some criticism is valuable or even necessary, it feels like we've gone overboard as a culture and the balance of creator vs critic is completely backwards. We have millions of people refreshing screens all day long just waiting to call the next new thing crap.
I think that the bot/agent problem is so huge that humans need a separate space where they can discuss in peace. No idea how to achieve that, or whether the gemini and gopher radicalists where right all along. But the effect of botnets for hire, and now LLM proxies for hire is the result of surveillance capitalism, where too greedy and immoral players in the game have a strategical advantage against the ones respecting their ethical boundaries.
However, coming back to the original problem: MCP is killing the human parts of the internet. The "loud crowd" isn't radicalized humans anymore, it's bots for the most part.
Maybe we need an artificially slower version of the internet, where people are forced to write thoughtful letters (or whatever the quintessence of letters used to be) without the possibility to engage in fast-lived influencer-like content? Dunno, to be honest, at this point this is very hard to tell.
I did. I've been running my website(s) from home for 20+ years now. I am the change. And I participate in many non-corporate communities on IRC.
This site still looks dead to me because of the JS requiring captcha I cannot bypass. I therefore feel the critiques are relevant.
There are two webs. There's the HTTP/1.1+HTTPS HTML websites made of files by people that have no specific time of use required. Then there's constant wave of JUST POSTED NOW on the HTTPS-only HTTP/3 corporate web that only uses HTTP to deliver javascript applications. By choosing to use the later this site is contributing to my perception of dead corporate-only internet and not helping.
> You want a live internet? Don't critique. If you want a no javascript version make one. If you have a better solution do it. If you have insight into the problem share it.
Go back to internet in 1999... There weren't a lot of text boxes to type into that got your content out. It required a bit of work (html, so not a lot) to get something out there!
Much like an amusement park with a sign that says "You must be at least this tall ----" the old internet was "You must be at least this smart/motivated".
Discoverability was also harder. Much much harder. Even if you did publish it might not ever be found, or seen, or used.
Today typing in a text box, and adding to a conversation (like this one) that someone else is going to read changed where the bar is.
To that end there are still plenty of focused communities that are less tribal, less emotional, than your average social media post. These remain great sources of not only information but community as well.
I find the places focused around work (like HN) and my hobbies to be the most interesting and engaging -- less "critical" and more thoughtful.
> alive internet theory is a séance with this living internet. Resurrecting tens of millions of digital artifacts from the Internet Archive, visitors are immersed in a relentless barrage of human expression as they travel through the life of the web as we created it—every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.
I like this a lot. It sort of turns internet history into a lava lamp.
For those struggling with the styling on the splash page, the slider at the top lets you pick an era and stick with it.
The constant re-styling of the page was annoying enough to make me close the tab and not come back.
I thought it was cool, the UIs of the past evoke lost memories of past eras. But sadly, the images glitched out and stopped displaying after I manually changed the date. Probably due to my internet connection haha
I thought it was cool, but the changing text sizing/wrapping made it difficult to read. I kept having to re-find my spot. But I read slow and was too lazy to just click on the era I wanted to set it back while I kept reading. Keeping the text layout consistent with the changing theme would have been a nice touch, and maybe a good future enhancement.
> This website has been temporarily rate limited
Although being stuck at loading something was reminiscent of my early internet experience in a way, the site’s backend seems to be rate-limited and unable to serve. Will check back later!
Seems more 'undead' than alive given the methodology.
I agree that "the internet will always be filled with real people: looking for each other". The question is will they be able to successfully find each other, and how can they be sure they have?
This ties in well with the Dark Forest theory of the Internet: that the public Internet becomes dead while humans flee to hidden, invite-only, private spaces.
https://charlottedune.substack.com/p/the-dark-forest-theory-...
Presumably, the value in finding each other will be the key to determining you have found someone real. If you literally can't tell the difference, then what does it matter? But many of us believe that there are important differences, that do matter, and that the dead internet can never truly provide.
If the connection is real, one would think the people would eventually want to meet. We've all seen the stories of people being catfished and how devastating it is for some people. How long is an acceptable amount of time for someone to engage in an online relationship (of any kind, not necessarily romantic), before finding out it's been a chatbot the whole time?
I just met someone, I think last year, who I've known via forums and chat for over 20 years now. I was looking for a place to watch the eclipse and totality was going right through his backyard. Imagine if I drove down there it was just some random address that an AI gave me after 20 years of talking. I'd lose my mind.
Some people's only friends are people they know online, through games or forums. Imagine finding out your only friend in the world isn't even real. That's very dark.
This seems like something the bots should have to disclose upfront. I hate not knowing if I'm talking to a real person or not. Imagine spending hours in an online debate with what is ultimately a chatbot... what a waste. If I want to talk to a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot. There is a reason we are here in the comments instead of just pasting the link into ChatGPT and going back and forth with it.
by using the internet or by using a website? if we included digital telephone would the answer be getting their phone number? i wish hosting a website was as easy as hosting a phone call.
Hosting a website might be easier now. Services like netlify make it pretty simple
Its a cool idea, just beware. Saw some dead kids and some NSFW among the otherwise interesting content.
I'm open to and interested in the thesis and discourse this website supposedly offers, but the medium forcefully expels me.
Perhaps there could be a static 1.0 version we can read or listen to?
edit: Okay, I get it now. It's an automatic aggregator! Only the style auto-change is egregious then, but the actual webapp is great!
another edit, sorry: The call-to-action button should be at the top, not the bottom. On mobile you have to scroll to see it and it can be missed.
Isn't the fact that most of the material comes from the Internet Archive somewhat a refutation of the Alive Internet Theory, which is that the internet is alive now, as opposed to some past archived point in time? (yes, I know the IA archives contemporary materials, but the purpose and majority of the content are from the past)
Funny to have read this today - I read this this morning, and just happened to go to a small gallery in Guelph (small town near Toronto) presenting similar ideas: https://artgalleryofguelph.ca/exhibition/soft-internet-theor...
agreed about the point that this has nothing to do with dead internet theory.
A similar idea, but without the timeline idea and with YouTube videos instead of archive.org was this:
YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views (astronaut.io)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772
1362 points by monort on July 14, 2019 | 239 comments
I still like that one, maybe it appeals to more people here because the UI is more polished, and the video selection criteria work really well.
Although it also has the feel of seeing stuff that you're not meant to see sometimes.
It has an almost meditative feel to me, I like it.
Last time I opened it, for example, I saw a video of an old man playing a guitar, lots of hobby sports matches, and videos of private celebrations etc
Didn't encounter any NSFW stuff, but it's probably possible as far as YouTube can't prevent it, so if you must be 100% sure, you probably shouldn't open it.
hey everyone - creator here thanks for engaging with this project & all the feedback and thoughts!
i know this isn't the "solution" to dead internet theory but i felt compelled to make this piece in response. i wanted to feel "overwhelmed" with human content in the same way i feel overwhelmed by AI content these days. More thoughts in the precursor post linked on the site (https://news.spencer.place/p/alive-internet-theory). if this sparks new ideas for you on how to engage with this topic id love to see.
and sorry for the unexpected NSFW - i'll add a warning to the site
p.s. site should be working again! & you can also add it to your home screen as a PWA
Algorithmic internet can be eventually filled with bots and AI. But when you curate your own follow list you are pretty much immune.
That's exactly my kind of humor: the page "aliveitheorie" remains black because I'm not allowing a Java script.
I've felt that people who espouse the dead internet theory have a much different experience of the internet than I do. For me, browsing the web, reading articles, watching YouTube videos, consuming Twitter/X/Bsky/Mastodon feeds, is all very active. There's interesting information that I engage with. I learn new things. I get to experience new art forms that I didn't think existed.
I think for people who gravitate to dead internet theory, the internet is more akin to flipping through thousands of channels on network TV, searching for a 5 minute segment of a show they like hidden in an ocean of ads, syndicated slop and reality TV. They use the internet in a passive way to entertain and so can't imagine anyone else would be consuming information in a different way.
It's nice to see people actively pushing back against what I consider a cynical attitude.
What sites they're using is a big part of it. My sites are content from people I know, aggregators like HN that pool together quality content, educational resources, sub-Reddits, and entertainment. The entertainment can be fake and I don't really care if it's good. The sub-Reddits vary considerably in content quality. So, my sites are mostly living people.
It's also how we spend our time. Popular culture encourages people to only do it through devices. I spend most of my time away from devices or only passively using them (eg listening). I mostly focus on people all day at two jobs. My intuition is built on human experiences. There's a lot of variety in that in our area. On specific topics, they mostly converge towards talking points due to media, Hollywood, educational system, views in their physical area, and their religion. Maybe in that order.
Haven't read the rest of the site but I really enjoyed the way you present it using the slider with the prevalent styles of certain periods
Not sure what it's meant to be, it grinds to a halt on my M2 -- if there was a message, it's lost.
AHHH volume control!
It's of no surprise that bots and now even ai powered ones are on the internet. I think OP misunderstands the problem. It's not so much that bots/ai/synth will outnumber. Quantity is unimportant because 1 bot with thousands of accounts is able to manipulate and change what's being discussed. It's that it makes you think there's human activity when there is not. 1 bot has the power to censor online speech on some platforms. Which is how you end up with the dead internet because real people whose speech is censored wont keep trying to talk about it on that platform.
A platform that's declining, will hesitate to ban bots or may even have their own synthetic engagement to justify that it 'looks like' they are still as popular as ever even though people have moved on.
Having experienced the internet on forums, then social medias, then this nearly entirely synthetic era. It's very clear we are living in the dead internet era.
Someone should just make a no bots forum. I’m against requiring ID but there must be a way to do it.
Digg is in the process of being relaunched. I still haven't received an invite, but the marketing around it seems to be positioning it as a human-first platform. I guess it remains to be seen how it plays out.
I like this, makes me wonder what a curated internet by a benevolent dictator could offer.
I like the sentiment but how will you know as time goes on that the things were uploaded or created by real humans? The early things yes, but as I got closer to now I was less sure, which kind of disproves the alive internet theory.
do we need a NSFW flair here on hn as well..
Uh, definitely NSFW. Did not expect to see porn and other questionable graphic material. I mean, that is what I remember from the "alive internet", so it's not wrong perhaps, but maybe should be flagged as such.
Shouldn't have clicked the website while I was on a bus. Now I had to see some ss cheeks in public
This must be labeled NSFW.
NSFW.
Is it even more proof that the Internet is dead, that we are now in the Nostalgia Phase. Looking back fondly at what it once was.
Awful site, this is just a strawman. The dead Internet theory does not claim that real people do not upload things to the Internet, there was never any doubt about that.
The site has absolutely no grasp on what "dead Internet theory" is or what it claims.
>every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.
Which is then followed by a barage of mostly historical photos. Which is very weird, since these historical photos are certainly automatically uploaded from archives and are not some authentic individual expressions by individual Internet users, which makes the whole thing fully orthogonal to both claims.
Dead Internet theory in its original statement is the claim, that most users of the Internet are consumers who mostly read discussions, but do not participate. The small part of users who are actively participating are then engaged by "bots", supposedly to further certain agendas by the creators of the bots, like manufacturing a consensus or deliberately creating infighting.
If you just skim through the linked Wikipedia article you will immediately understand that this thesis can not be disproven by any amount of uploaded archive material.
people forget that even before LLMs, the Internet was already shit. a third was SEO slop by ESL thirdworlders, another third - a kulturkampf battlefield. looking for the good parts had never been easy.
[dead]