Imagine some aliens visit us. And imagine you’re explaining the Internet to them. And after you explain about computers and data and signals and wires, you summarize: “Yeah, almost all the human knowledge ever discovered is now available to just about everyone, for free, within seconds. Also, all the art is free to look at, and all the music is (almost) free to listen to. And also, you can add to it whenever you want, and you can talk to anyone instantly.”

And then the aliens worship you, because you must be gods, and you must have achieved some kind of transcendent enlightenment, with all of that perfectly frictionless communication of knowledge and beauty.

On paper, the Internet looks like something that would drastically change humanity for the better.

Misuse of the Internet

But day-to-day, what do we find ourselves using the Internet for? We read stories about people we barely know doing things that don’t concern us. We follow clickbait titles into poorly written articles that are utterly unimportant. We binge-watch videos of people falling down or otherwise embarrassing themselves. We argue with strangers on platforms that are poorly suited for truth-seeking conversation.

Altogether, this is the pattern I see: the Internet, while capable of delivering just about any information that our greatest aspirations could demand, is mostly delivering information perfectly tuned to our lowest aspirations. By that I mean the set of desires and urges that are more “hardwired” in our brains: the desires that are directly dopaminergically conditioned; the appetite (epithumetikon) part of Plato’s three-part soul; the “lower pleasures” that J.S. Mill said thoughtful humans would move beyond. These are things like raw sexual desire, anxiety about social status, rash action in response to outrage, enjoyment of slapstick humor, etc.

That alone isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t quite agree with J.S. Mill that “higher” pleasures are always better than “lower.” But these basic urges are predictable, and that makes them levers by which human behavior can be manipulated. The most popular parts of the Internet are optimized to trigger these urges as fully as possible, capturing attention for the profit of the major players. There’s already plenty written on the phenomenon of superstimuli, and that’s what I’m referring to here.

The alternative

It doesn’t have to be that way. I can unequivocally say the Internet is a positive influence on my day-to-day life and has been for years. I insist on not abandoning the vision that those hypothetical aliens have for us. I insist that this unbelievably powerful tool should be as liberating, enriching, and life-changing as one would naively expect if they only heard about it. I insist that my experience of “frictionless communication of knowledge and beauty” should be as good as it sounds.

Half of that is just curbing our own addictions to low-quality content. This is something that’s widely talked about now, and I don’t have much to add. There are apps you can use to make your phone less addicting, and in any case you should be setting rules for yourself about when and how much you use certain sites and apps.

But the other half of the battle is actually finding and using the Good Internet. The Good Internet is the subset of the Internet that actually makes your life better. It is hidden in plain sight—like an optical illusion, it’s all there, but you can only see it if you tune out the more prominent information.

Where does one find the Good Internet among all the vitriol of Twitter, the fake sanctimoniousness of Reddit, the stupidity of Facebook, the vanity of Instagram? I’ll tell you some places to start.

Chat communities

Whatever your interest is (and it’s your job to have respectable interests), the Internet can connect you with good-natured communities of people who share that interest. Better yet, it can connect you with subject matter experts who would’ve otherwise been very hard to reach.

Not Reddit

I am not talking about Reddit, which is the easy way to find a community for your “thing.” Reddit is a good place to start, but it’s too… powered. The power dynamics are stronger and more direct than in a real-life conversation, and this has unintended consequences. Voting on comments to increase or decrease their visibility will inevitably pressure people to only recite simple affirmations of the group’s core views—because nothing else will get enough votes to be visible. The mob takes power and rules forever, and the conversation gets watered down and boring.

“But my niche subreddit is different!” you say. Maybe it is. Small subreddits are able to be more organic and interesting. But by virtue of being connected to the rest of Reddit (and having better content), they’ll eventually swell, and as a result their content will get simpler and more formulaic over time.

Characteristics of good chat communities

We evolved to be social in person, so my view is that the best online social platforms are those that emulate aspects of real-life communication, such as:

• Manageable size: The ideal group size for a healthy online community is probably under Dunbar’s number (150). Remember I’m talking about a community. Many online “communities” are really just crowdsourced entertainment. When half a million people all compete to post the funniest cat video, that’s not a community, it’s a market.
• Persisted names: You want members to have distinct, memorable names, even if they’re fake names. This way, users can earn reputations based on how they contribute to the community. Most platforms have persisted names; the forum site 4chan famously doesn’t. Reddit has persisted names, but the communities are so large you won’t remember most of them.
• No voting system: This one is hard to reason out, but the examples speak for themselves. Group voting on content incentivizes more bland content that individual members don’t actually want.
• Ability to “ignore”: In real life, if you don’t like somebody, you can stop talking and listening to them. In an online community, you want the ability to “mute” specific users who don’t contribute, or contribute negatively. I don’t mean banning users from the group; I mean muting them only for yourself. Group-wide bans make for power-hungry leaders, but individual mute/blocklists are a non-coercive way to lower someone’s influence. This is a surprisingly rare feature on group chat platforms, but the biggest platforms (Facebook, Twitter) usually have it.
• Single, central forum: You want at least one destination where every member of the community is present. A “bulletin board” or “central forum” for coordinating community-wide guidelines and events. Then more targeted groups can branch off of that. Discord communities usually have this model.

I haven’t found a platform that has all of the above features. But over the last two years or so I’ve been pleasantly surprised by WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord. They all have a handful of these features, and as a result they deliver a different, better social experience than the default choices.

How do you find a WhatsApp/Telegram/Discord group for your thing? Again, Reddit is a good place to start.

Wikipedia

You should be reading more Wikipedia. The free, instant, global collection of human knowledge is still about as impressive as it sounds.

“But anyone can write anything,” you say, “It can’t be reliable.” Have you heard of the wisdom of crowds? “Yes,” you say, “But crowds can still go very wrong!” Well, think of a time when the wisdom of the crowd utterly failed, when a huge group of people collectively got something wrong. Any chance they were from the same geographical region, or the same political camp, or the same philosophy/religion? Wikipedia largely avoids these liabilities. For every misguided tribe, there is a majority outside the tribe who will agree to correct their mistakes.

Is Wikipedia the only non-evil internet staple?

Does someone want to ruin Wikipedia for me?

— Lucy Steigerwald (@LucyStag) July 30, 2021

Is Wikipedia perfect? No. Editing Wikipedia is a cumbersome process, so it tends to be dominated by weird people who are obsessed with cumbersome editing. In a few cases you can find content that’s been included or excluded for political reasons (which is against Wikipedia’s stated policy). Still, it’s very good, and it’s the best of its kind that we have.

I’ll also mention Wikitravel: travel guides that are written Wikipedia-style. It’s just a ton of good information about any given destination, and it’s especially useful if you don’t know where to start. Since I discovered it, I’ve used it to help plan all of my international trips.

Blogs

You should be reading more blogs.

Most blogs are run by individuals and don’t make much money, if any. That means they exist independent of the social media outrage machine. They don’t have to grovel for more clicks, and they don’t have to grab the attention of the masses by continually wading into the culture war. Unlike standard news media, blogs are free to optimize their content for things other than in-group signaling and outrage.

When you find a blog you really like, you’ll wonder how you lived without it. You’ll be so much more eager to read a new post than to just scroll through Twitter again. For the past year I’ve been keeping up on Covid news from Zvi Mowshowitz, and as a result, 1) I’ve actually enjoyed reading Covid news, 2) I’ve been ahead of every Covid news story that turned out to be substantial, 3) I’ve been able to ignore every Covid news story that turned out not to be substantial, and 4) I was informed enough to make a prediction and plan my move to NYC right at the bottom of the Covid-driven dip in the housing market. Does that sound too good to be true?

Visit blogs when they’re linked to from Reddit/Facebook/Twitter, and if you like them, subscribe to email notifications so you can keep up with them in the future without going through Reddit/Facebook/Twitter. Or, you can save references to all your favorite blogs in one place, which brings us to—

RSS feeds

Every annoying thing social media algorithms do has already been solved 15 years ago. An RSS feed is an aggregated list of all the articles you want to read, in chronological order, with no ads, no “recommended” content being pushed on you, and no influence of algorithms at all. Does that sound too good to be true?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a protocol that nearly all websites follow. They allow their information to be read in a certain standard format (this site’s RSS feed is found at patrickdfarley.com/feed). Then an RSS aggregator app pulls the information from the sites you’ve specified and lists all their posts together in a single feed. You can click an article’s title card and read the whole article from within the app.

You can set up a designated RSS feed for political news, for travel blogs, for finance articles, fitness articles, etc.

When I want to read new content, I scroll through these feeds instead of Facebook or Twitter. At this point I have 7 different feeds with about 200 sources in total. Feedly is a popular, free, multi-platform RSS aggregator app that I’ve been using for years and highly recommend.

Wrapping up

I will say, using the Good Internet comes with a willpower cost that is probably impossible to eliminate entirely—it will always be easier to mindlessly scroll through a feed than to engage in ways that’ll benefit you. But if you’re careful to build good habits and cultivate boundaries for yourself, it’ll be easier than it sounds. I want as many people to find the Good Internet as possible. I want more people to be part of that blessed group that actually benefits from free information.

–pdf