Is the internet becoming unusable? Does it have a life beyond the constant barrage of annoying pop-ups, cookies, self-playing video commercials, captchas, paywalls and requests to turn off your ad blocker?

In this week's podcast, we discuss all the things we think are wrong with the World Wide Web and consider what should be done to rescue the internet, looking at ideas to make it a more informative, quality-assured and user-friendly space.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• Spotify Removes Tens of Thousands of Indie Songs For ‘Artificial Streams’
• Where Does the Majority of Internet Traffic Come From?
• Kiss Your Browser Goodbye: The Radical Future of Media Beyond the Web
• The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet
• The Appification Of Everything Will Transform The World's 360 Million Web Sites
• The Appification of Everything and Why it Needs to End
• Mises Institute: The Truth About the "Robber Barons"

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing what's gone wrong with the internet. Nick, it's all gone wrong. What's gone wrong with the internet?

Well, I don't know what it was in particular that triggered my sudden realisation about how terribly the internet, I mean specifically the World Wide Web, so the kind of websites essentially, things with content on them. I think maybe it was just a cookie pop up too far and I just snapped and I thought that's it, I'm sick of the internet. And so pop up asking you for consent for cookies every single damn website you look at. Can we send you notifications? Every website wants to send you notifications. Websites you visited once want to send you bloody updates and you have to constantly fight against that. You tell Chrome you're not interested in any of them and still they appear. Google search is terrible. All you get now is ads, list articles, duplicate content, it doesn't even bother. It seems to search what it thinks you want rather than what you actually want. Advertising everywhere. The worst is on mobile. You know, if you look at a website on mobile, all it is is pop ups, adverts, videos that automatically run. Every site that used to be good gets more and more terrible as the marketing people discover they can make money out of advertising on it. You know, sites like Reddit getting worse and worse. I read it started auto playing advert videos and I uninstalled it because I was just so annoying. And, you know, and then of course, well, even non sort of non web based services are getting worse streaming. I don't know if you've noticed, but streaming quality now is really worse than it was for video. Managing apps on your phone is annoying. You know, they all want to be your best friend. They all want to send you notifications all the time. I while I was researching this podcast, right, this exact podcast, I looked at a site called Digital Music News. There was a pop up to ask if I want to subscribe to their new daily newsletter, right? That was then overlaid immediately with a pop up asking for consent to keep tracking cookies on my computer. That was then overlaid with a pop up asking me to disable my ad blocker. And all of this is to say nothing about the terrible content, you know, that I mean, all of it, like Facebook, it's just boomers moaning about stuff. And news sites are now just, you know, mainly recycled tweets, everything. And then, you know, loads of things that used to be good have disappeared from the Internet. You can't the Internet archive isn't particularly comprehensive, which is not a criticism, because it's good that it exists at all. But you know, and then and then even things, you know, cloud services, of course, are always annoying to have to rely on. Google is about to remove its free cloud photo storage, for example, that's going to be limited from now on. Spotify, which a lot of people rely on to listen to music, I don't, I've got an iPod, that they, you know, routinely remove bands and things for various legal reasons and stuff. So you might really like some music, and then it's disappeared, you know, forever. Steam, you know, I've got extensive Steam library. And I can't play a game on my laptop, if my son is using the same Steam library, even if it's a different game on my PC, because it won't let you. It's so incredibly annoying. So anyway, a whole bunch of things that I've to moan about. And you know, the last few weeks, I found myself reading books, listening to my iPod, watching DVDs, and really enjoying the fact that I'm not dependent on the internet to do any of those things. And I just wondered if I suddenly turned a corner and become an old fart, or whether the internet really is getting crapper

and crapper by the day. Wow. Okay. I feel like we can, I'm sure if we had Peter Coghill here, I'm sure he would sort of launch a robust defense of the internet.

Yeah, I think he would probably, he would probably say that, you know, all of those are problems that can be solved by more things that would make it work. Yeah, more apps.

More services. All you've got to do is subscribe to this, you know, password manager, and then you subscribe to a service that reduces notifications. So you subscribe to Adblock. And you know, yeah, exactly. But I mean, the thing is that 20 years ago, if you were on the internet, you didn't have to worry about any of those things. You could just look at interesting things on bulletin boards.

Yeah. I mean, some of the things you mentioned that I think, because to do with maybe our data was being harvested previously. And now we're being asked for permission to do that. So yeah, good thing. But that's only part of it. Chris, what are your thoughts? Are you in the Nick camp on this?

Well, I am. I am. But I mean, the question I would ask is, like, what did you, what did you expect, really? You know, I mean, we've got this massive democratisation of the production of information, you know, and like, it was very de rigueur about 10 years ago, maybe to go through stats about what was going on. But it is actually still quite instructive to say, you know, the growth in internet users has been, you know, massive. It's now the, you know, the vast majority of the world's population are internet users. You've got maybe around 2 billion websites in existence, you know, admittedly, a third or a quarter of which might be active. But in the early 90s, it was measured in the in the hundreds or thousands, you know, of websites around. So, you know, we just had this huge ballooning of the amount of information. And it's all entirely uncurated, you know, I mean, like, I kind of think like, imagine if you go to the library, and all the books are in just like a big messy pile on the floor. And the only means you've got of finding anything is by asking someone, you know, to find some books for you, you know, based on your particular interests. And that person has then got a vested interest in fobbing off, you know, books by particular authors on you. And then other people have worked out how to get their books onto the top of the pile in some way. And then if you remember that, like 99% of the books are written by utter morons. That's the internet, right? So what did you give everybody the ability to make information and push it out there and you have no curation, you have no real governance of the process? What did you expect is a mess, you know, so we just got to the stage where we've, you know, it's like, it's like those hoarders, and they suddenly get to the stage where they're like, Oh, Christ, we've got to move house now, because there's all this stuff here. That's where we where we are, we've reached a stage where we just need to move house, we should just burn the

got it. Okay. So So here's the question, then. That's what's gone wrong. That's what's gone wrong. I mean, we can continue talking about what's gone wrong. But everything you've said sort of sounds pretty sort of, you know, plausible to me. I don't particularly disagree with anything there. What happens next? Or what do we want to happen? Or what do we think will happen? Is that a good line of inquiry? Chris? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think.

I think for me, if you look at the origin of the problem of what's going on with the internet at the moment, and then think about fixing those, that's probably the way to, you know, consider how you're going to improve what's what's available at the moment. And key to me, you know, one of the problems, which was sold as a massive benefit, was the fact that anybody can, that there's no barrier to producing information. Right. And so that means that, you know, you know, information coming out of, you know, the CERN laboratory is kind of on the same footing with, you know, something some flat earthers written somewhere, right? And there's no, there's no real hierarchy in that information that exists in the finding of it. So there are, you know, a lot more flat earthers out there than there are CERN laboratories, right? And so they're creating more and more information. And I've got no real means of sifting that and discarding that and looking for things. So the fact that there are no barriers to creating information, and there's no intrinsic hierarchy in that information is a major problem as far as I'm concerned. The other major thing that's sort of driving it is our means to access it, right? So everybody uses, you know, search engines, and those search engines are free. I just don't think this model works, right? When you go and buy a newspaper, you pay, you know, the shop gets some money, and then the newspaper eventually gets some money, and the journalists get some money. And that's why they produce it. The whole model is built on you getting information for free. That means somebody's having to try and make money from that information in some way. And it's not by producing it. It's by, you know, it's by filling it full of stuff, or, you know, making it more about selling items to you. I've got a question. I've got a question.

So that means like, you know, if the product's free, guess what? You're the product, right? Quite, yeah. And that's hence all these pop-ups and what we're talking about. People always want marketing to you. And secondly, this sounds some similarities to another podcast we did where we're talking about the changing nature or different online cultures, right? And one of the things I think for your analysis, Nick, or Peter, was that it was the games with the worst sort of, the most toxic atmosphere, environment, were those which were free. And the ones that you paid for had a nicer environment. But anyway, just a couple of points there. Nick, I interrupted you.

Yeah, no, I just, so I've got a question because I think there's a puzzle in my mind here, which is that whether or not you're paying for it, the demand, the revenue that someone gets from advertising or the revenue that they get from having people pay for them ought to be driven by the same things, right? So I suppose what I mean is if you're willing to pay a pound for quality journalism and, you know, that's, and get a newspaper in return, then quality journalism online ought to be able to attract more income from advertisers because, you know, more people want to see that. So the question is, why was there demand for quality journalism, if there was, if it wasn't just being imposed on us? Why was there demand for quality journalism when it was newspapers, but there's no demand for quality journalism when it's free? Well, because you

couldn't, because there was no, because there was no alternative previously, you know, or there

I think we need to think that through. But one, one thing that I don't think helps is the, the mechanisms of consumption, right? The fact that most people are accessing the internet through their phone, that's a very different thing to buying a broadsheet newspaper, right? The way you're going to consume a broadsheet newspaper is you're going to sit down and luxuriate in it, and you know, read it over the weekend or whatever. Whereas on your phone, you're probably on a train or you know, something going somewhere. And so you're not, you're like, the attention span is, is less. I mean, all these things you see about writing, you know, content for online stuff is all about, you know, you've got that they all give you the time, you know, the reading time of the article, three minutes, you know, and they all say in the front sentence, you know, what the art, the conclusion of the article is always in the, in the front sentence. And that kind of model just does not lend itself to considered discursive content, right? You know, I mean, it's so, so I think that's, that's part of it that people are trying to get. Hey, look, I've got a phone, I can look at a video of a cat falling off a shelf, you know, or I can, you know, it's like, well, it's the cat every time, isn't it? So, so I think our mode of consumption probably affects that to some extent that it's like quick bite sized things, you don't have to engage your brain for. That's what, you know, all the things that go viral, they're not, you know, they're not really long, long considered pieces, are they? They're short little clips.

I think there's also a kind of cost benefit analysis that's going on, right, which is that how much does it take to produce worthy, you know, good journalism, right? That's quite resource intensive. How long does it take you to film your cat falling off a shelf? Not, not very long. So you can chuck out loads of cat videos, you know, and, and the fact that you've produced an entire newspaper full of stuff, just to get one advert in there that sells something to somebody. If you can get all of that alongside your, your viral cat video, why would you go to the bother of producing the, the journalism? So yes, there probably is still a market out there for journalism. It's just the cost of production is much greater. Yeah, well, I think, I think,

inconceivable. It's difficult to imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any answers to Nick's questions,

Chris? Not, not really. But I don't I don't think this is unique to to the internet. I mean, you know, we've had periods before where you've you've had kind of, you know, information democratisation and I'm thinking particularly of pamphleteering in the US, you know, in colonial America. And, you know, that started off, you know, you had to kind of Thomas Paine and, and, you know, a real kind of quality, kind of circulation of information among an intelligentsia that was very influential. And then slowly, it became more and more sort of slanderous and, you know, sensationalist and, and low rent, really, you know, in the, yeah, so that by the kind of, you know, mid, mid 19th century, you know, really wasn't a source of information you could trust at all. And, you know, and that kind of coincided with with the birth of newspapers. So I think there's there's hope that, you know, we will see the current situation resolved by, by something else. And I think fundamental to that is going to be the fact that there, I think the two things are linked. So the idea that anybody can produce information, and there's no judgment of it, and introducing payment for that information, I think they both serve the same purpose, because people will pay for the stuff that is good, which then means, you know, the production of it is limited to those who can be paid for. And it also just creates a model in which, you know, quality suddenly has a has a value again.

So yeah, it feels a bit like, you know, the old adage that the lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on. I wonder if the problem is that, you know, as you were saying, crap is easy to produce, right? So any information vacuum is going to get flooded with crap. And we just have to put up with this initial period where it's rather like when a sewage drain gets unblocked. And the first, you know, the first sort of three or four minutes, it's just, you know, mud and then you get water. Yeah. And I just wonder if that's here really, whether, you know, things like, I guess, Substack are the beginning of that sort of backlash, the inevitable backlash where people say, look, we need to sort this problem of crap out. And the only way we can do it is to is to get people to pay.

Okay. We're sort of, we need to draw to a conclusion really. But, you know, there's the solutions they've been offered. Incidentally, this podcast is available for free on the internet. I wonder where we fit into this sort of the quality crap ratio.

Oh, that's interesting because we don't have adverts though. We don't. We don't. We don't. And we're not sponsored. We don't ask for sponsorship or subscription. We do it for fun.

We do. Well, we do ask for subscription. We, in a sense. No, we're not asking people to pay. We're not asking people to pay. But I hear what you're saying. We need to start asking people to pay. So bad news listeners. Or good news, really, because you're going to be part of a, you know, a high quality gated community. Okay. Right. We'll stop there. As always, thanks for listening. If you've got any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast.alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you've enjoyed the podcast, what should

people do, Nick? Well, they shouldn't use the internet to like. What they should do is write us a nice handwritten letter on Basildon Bond and post it to us saying how much they like it.

It would be much appreciated. And in return, we might sort of give them an Aleph Insights or Cognitive Engineering podcast batch, I should imagine.

Or we could send them the podcast on a tape cassette. Yes, good idea. On a D90.

We could do a mix, actually, of all the best bits. Although that might not take up much of the tape. Thanks, as always, for listening. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.