The future of the internet could be paywalls

I've been getting weird e-mails for quite some time now, and this got me thinking about the future of the internet.

LLM-generated e-mails are becoming harder to spot, and some of them are landing in my inbox.

We are at the point where generating such messages is cheap, and a lot of people think it is a cool idea to spam you with personalized messages that were not written by a real human. Their agents gather some info about you from the internet and make them look personalized.

What happens when the supply of text is almost infinite and generating it is even cheaper? How do we keep using our regular tools without getting bombarded with a lot of nonsense?

I think the future could be where you will have to pay a minimal amount to send an e-mail. And the money goes to the recipient. That's the only way I see to prevent stupid e-mails. So, if someone replies, you have not spent any money on it and get it back.

There is no solution that would work for everyone. Some people want to tie your e-mail to a government ID and introduce a scoring system. But who would want that? I would rather pay some money.

The future looks sad.

Social Media

I can also see this for social networks. Every time I open Twitter or LinkedIn, I see a ton of generated replies and posts. What's the point of all of this? It just stops people from reading it.

If a person does not put any effort into writing an article, why even bother reading it?

How do all these people imagine the future, when billions of messages can be easily generated, but there is a finite number of people who can read them, and why would they want to read them? They are killing the internet for no benefit. These social network bots are pointless. They won't make you famous or rich.

All they do is kill interaction between people and their ability to express themselves.

Another problem that I see with social networks is that they generate more data every year. It's so easy to generate images, videos and text now, and social networks have to store this garbage. At some point, the ads served on such social networks would not generate enough revenue to cover the costs.

I see two options here and both are bad: charge users for messages or limit their activity somehow (perhaps by removing old content).

Another option is private communities with high trust, where you can't get inside without someone inviting you, at the cost of losing access because of the bad behavior of the invited person.

Every option will suck either way, especially for newcomers.

Bots race

Large companies are automating their support systems, to the point that it becomes impossible to reach real people. I still remember the time when I could easily call or message support and get a fast response from a human. Nowadays, phone numbers are hidden and chats are run by bots. Everybody is optimizing costs.

There are companies such as Amazon that already charge you for better human support.

Regular users are frustrated. What do some of the users do? They weaponize their own bots to talk to these chats and get refunds, discounts and so on.

How will such a system function in the future, when both sides are bots and it's not possible to solve legitimate problems?