11 ms·
Ask HN: The Internet is getting lame. What's next?
The internet used to be a really cool place full of wild ideas and weirdos.
Now its like a tidy, tightly policed suburban shopping mall.
Whats the next big thing?
- doctorshady 11y agoHonestly? I've taken to hanging out on phone conferences with friends a lot more recently. It's not exactly a high bandwidth medium, but there's a lot you can squeeze into mu-law as a codec, and I'd genuinely like to see the network stretched in interesting ways. I guess the most obvious thing for a non-realtime discussion would be like a bulletin board; 818-260-6100 is an example of one for jobs on a small scale. The phone network has been around for over a century in some form now, and has remained as open as it always has. Just how I see it, anyway.
- hucker 11y agoI like this. I've started to try to call my friends more instead of messaging them through some social network, this seems like the natural extension to that. Does iOS or Android offer some kind of built in conference function? Or do you use a service or something self hosted?
- at-fates-hands 11y agoI thought Google hangouts allow for conference calling. I'm not sure what the limits are in terms of how many people you can have on a hangout at a time. I'm pretty sure this was one of the selling points of hangouts to begin with. http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/ http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/
- hucker 11y agoOver the regular phone network?
- doctorshady 11y agoMost phones have a three-way calling feature. With most cell phones, it's done via the switching equipment rather than the cell phone itself to avoid generational loss from the mobile codec/reception issues. You can string a bunch of three-wayed calls together if you want. The switching equipment itself also has some pretty interesting conference related features. There's a line of equipment called the DMS-100 that's pretty popular for wireline stuff. It has a function where it'll pretend a conference bridge is a ringing number when it's empty. When someone else gets on, it'll play a short burst of ringtone to indicate it, and conference together quite a few people. AT&T runs one of these in the bay area; 415-274-0001.
- unimpressive 11y agoYou might want to look into what phreakers were doing from the 60's onwards for an idea of how you can stretch the phone network. An old favorite was voicemailboxes as a sort of forum. You'd take over some poorly secured company voicemailbox and use it as a communications hub. Of course nowadays the theft aspect is no longer necessary.
- lsiunsuex 11y agomobile apps tightly policed private boutiques
- minthd 11y agocuration. create you own corner of the net.
- ionwake 11y agoPlug for my startup - www.sagebump.com to integrate and RANK all your personalised social news accounts It's alpha but check it out brah
- beauzero 11y agoI agree. I haven't been on Facebook for at least 2 months. The Verge has become boring and more opinion than fact. News sites have become so overburdened with ads that they don't load well. I stream radio and go to developer sites...that's about it. Twitter -> blog is about the only useful information gathering form factor I use for gathering news. It's a mess out there.
- leftnode 11y agoHahahaha what, that's completely crazy.
- jaunkst 11y agoNo urls or domains. Search engines becoming deep linked discovery services for web applications. Favicons are replaced with full size icons and structured data for discovery registration.
- gukov 11y agoThis is already happening. You have to click on the address bar in Safari to see the full URL. People google everything, even domains like "facebook.com" or even "google.com." Gmail's favicon displays the amount of unread emails.
- Sakes 11y agoIn its simplest form the internet is just a bunch of computers connected to each other. So, if you are looking for a place where people can express themselves without the fear of repercussions, all you need is anonymity. You don't need something to replace the internet for that, just a sub space where people can't have their writings/ideas/creations tied to their real identity.
- kordless 11y agoThings are far from boring if you look closely. 1. The Intercloud. Clouds of clouds of clouds. Containers and virtualization play a part in this, but much is left to be done in building out less-opinionated stacks, which become deployment targets. 2. Pay-to-deploy what used to be SaaS software onto various deployment targets on the Intercloud based on trust levels. Enables the MSaaS (managed SaaS) software model. Enables 'house hosting' private data. 3. Blockchain contracts applied to MSaaS'd APIs to enable routing of data to other MSaaS'd APIs based on privacy policies. Also applies to payments for #2 and target validation via #1.
- hucker 11y agoWhile these things may or may not be interesting developments in the infrastructure of the internet, it doesn't really counteract what OP is saying. Streamlined, boring, closed garden social networks and ad-filled "news". And only the techies are left on the IRC servers :(
- kordless 11y agoI tell you what is boring: people voting down responses because they don't agree with them and then having nothing to contribute other than a lame rationalization. Better?
- hucker 11y agoYou have kind of a point there, the advent of {up,down}voting on sites adds to the dullness by putting disincentives on controversial speech. HN is slightly better, but reddit it a great example of this. The most visible content is the lowest common denominator of comments, often cringy jokes and quips. While 4chan has its fair share of issues, the content is often interesting (to me) because they don't rank posts at all. EDIT: And for the record I didn't downvote you, I'm not even allowed :/
- kordless 11y agoI implied you downvoted me, but shouldn't have. Apologies. It was a blaming statement because I colluded the downvote with the 'rationalizations'. To clarify my original post a bit, I would say that the Internet is infrastructure, and that changes in that infrastructure give way to changes in the way it is used for all sorts of things. Once a good amount of decentralization with infrastructure happens, we're going to see really interesting use-cases popping up. Robot vacuums with cryptowallets to keep themselves updated, for example.
- k2enemy 11y agoI'm rooting for http://ipfs.io http://ipfs.io.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- phusion 11y agoOooo this is interesting, it seems that P2P type stuff has been gaining steam again, since we can't trust anything hosted anymore.
- kordless 11y agoYou can trust hosted things as long as you trust the deployment targets. Or, more specifically, have a trusted relationship with the deployment target.
- theseatoms 11y agoHow does it do DNS? Like Namecoin? Reading the site now..
- kordless 11y agoWe'll need a bridge into the current (centralized) DNS system. For now there is a domain that does that automatically for you.
- k2enemy 11y agoIPNS (The Inter-Planetary Naming System) is a step in that direction... http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxdXBFca7D/example#/ipfs/QmThrNbvLj7afQZhxH72m5Nn1qiVn3eMKWFYV49Zp2mv9B/ipns/readme.md http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsN...
- sktrdie 11y agoIs everything Inter-Planetary?
- joshu 11y agoMobile was the next thing.
- Vektorweg 11y agoIts going to be GNUnet without fancy JS sites.
- dlss 11y agoUrbit perhaps?
- k2enemy 11y agoIf you really want to get weird, urbit: https://github.com/urbit/urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit
- adventured 11y agoYou mean the Web perhaps, rather than the Internet. In this case it's a critical distinction. There is no replacement for the Internet coming, and it's not the source of the lameness - it's an infinite blank canvas that you paint upon, that most future technology will rely on. Globally we've got trillions of dollars sunk into development of the Internet's infrastructure and the services/businesses riding on top of the Internet. The Internet will be similar 50 years from now, to what it is today: a 'dumb pipe.' In the same way that transmission lines don't change much, nor do water pipes.
- DickingAround 11y agoBitcoin. Cant ask for more crazy, more potential, or less regularity.
- roymurdock 11y ago"Bitcoin" can hardly be considered a community...you can watch the prices/drama but it's basically the same as watching a soap opera. It's a cool/potentially useful concept, but definitely not the next internet.
- brighton36 11y agoWtf? You've never been to r/Bitcoin I take it...
- scuba7183 11y agoso then you're actually talking about Reddit, not bitcoin
- at-fates-hands 11y agoI think it would be interesting to do away with search engines. It's so easy to find stuff these days, if we could instill the idea of discovery and actually exploring the internet again, I would dig that.
- kctess5 11y agoSo... Don't use a search engine.
- m52go 11y agoThis is my exact frustration. If you want something intellectually exciting with no ads, no filter bubble, and no click-bait, I'm building Canon of Man. You can sample it at: https://canonofman.meteor.com https://canonofman.meteor.com It's not launching until Monday, but follow @canonofman on Twitter or sign up on the site and I'll let you know when it's live.
- hodwik 11y agoThe weirdos are all still out there. Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit. There just wasn't that many of us, so you'd talk to people unlike you. I knew my bbs friends all by their first and last names, had photos of them, would talk to the better ones on the phone, they were some of my best friends despite them usually being completely different from myself. These days, I don't know a single person on the internet, and I rarely interact with people on the internet who are different from me, so I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost. The internet used to be like a dive-bar in an ivy-league college town, full of geniuses and weirdo townies. These days it's more like the city of New York -- no one knows you, and no one cares to.
- beamatronic 11y agoIn the BBS days, the bar was higher to getting online. Some technical knowledge was required, and there were extra costs. I'd like to know the modern day equivalent. I would be interested in seeing some sort of mesh network become popular, completely separate from "The Internet", with completely different protocols and paradigms, that you could access and participate in, just by sticking an antenna on your roof, plugging in some kind of adapter, and running some software. Or perhaps you could utilize existing Wifi hardware and run a completely different set of protocols on it.
- pachydermic 11y agoYou're pretty much exactly describing HAM radio. Well you need to pass a test to transmit, but still...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- blackbeard 11y agoYou should pass a test to transmit but there's a ton of pirate activity out there. I have some respect for rule breakers on that front because the barrier to breaking the rules is pretty high. If I had the inclination I'd build a QRP station and learn Morse. My days of burning fingers on a soldering iron and climbing up trees is gone now.
- bobajeff 11y agoUSB Drives. Just distribute USB drives to everyone everywhere: On the subway. On the bus. At college campuses. At bars. At night clubs. ...
- tacone 11y agoLike they do in Cuba? http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16030/cubas-usb-drive-internet/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a1...
- chippy 11y agoWhat would you put on them? I've a small stack of them collected as swag from various conferences.
- bobajeff 11y agoWebpages, videos, audios, images, fonts etc. basically any format out there that anyone can open on whatever machine or device.
- veddox 11y agoI would find that very dubious - my internal antivirus would be giving red alert... I don't think I would accept one of those drives.
- smacktoward 11y agoBeing disconnected.
- giantdongfuz 11y agoEh you're probably just looking in the wrong place for a community.
- aburan28 11y agoA internet where people do not have to think about whether or not they should post a link on their Facebook about controversial issues and can actually be themselves. A internet where I feel I can ask a dumb question on StackOverflow as I progress in learning new programming techniques. Everyone projects their crafted image to the world via the current internet when in reality they are completely different. I could go on and on but overall I would summarize that we need an internet with no ads, a place where we don't have to fear 24/7 about some stupid tweet from years ago being in a data brokers database forever
- Simulacra 11y agoREAL LIFE. Real Life is the next internet! In the future, people will go outside and talk to one another, face to face! We will congregate in libraries and bookstores, and drink coffee that doesn't suck or cost over $2 a cup. The future is coming....
- tacone 11y agoActually people are already talking face-to-face. It's still a bit expensive at the moment though, as it requires smartphones with a decent front camera and fast connectivity, but early results are encouraging.
- Simulacra 11y agoTouché!
- branchless 11y agoless than $2 a cup <-- here is your internet weirdo :-)
- Simulacra 11y agoMeet me at the waffle house, I could buy three people a cup of coffee for two dollars :-S
- hodwik 11y agoI keep thinking this same thing myself, and have tried to work the IRL-angle, but when you're an adult no one really wants to meet you. Up until the early 00s, I used to hang out at a coffee/cigarette bar where I knew just about every single person who walked through the door, and people would sit there for hours and hours talking to strangers about very interesting stuff, while drinking insane amounts of coffee and chain smoking. If those sorts of places still exist, I have no idea where they are.
- eropple 11y ago
- calebm 11y agoVR + WebGL
- tgibson 11y agoI stumbled upon the Ethereum project not too long ago. It sounds pretty interesting and possibly full of wild ideas and weirdos too... https://www.ethereum.org/ https://www.ethereum.org/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kleer001 11y agoStart a farm. That'll be quite the challenge for you.
- WallWextra 11y agoTalking to weirdos on the internet is one of my primary forms of recreation. I find IRC is a good place to do it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mikelyons 11y agoThe private web, your home server, your decentralized secure/encrypted mesh net.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoAll of the above. Mesh should have been a thing by now. Better late than never. (I hope.)
- dasil003 11y agoThe weirdos and ideas are still there, just drowned out by the masses. I'm not sure anything can replicate the feel of the early internet because it's inextricably linked to the entire cultural context in which it was born, not to mention the physical limitations that the entire world had been used to but were newly lifted by the internet. However in regards to the suburban shopping mall feel, I think the answer there is movements like IndieWeb, and the general spirit of open source which is stronger than ever. There's no rolling back the clock on the commercialization of the internet, and the indie stuff can't really match the aesthetics, but then again when enough people get bored punk kills disco.
- seiji 11y agoThe weirdos and ideas are still there, just drowned out by the masses. So, just like real life? Not helpful at all. The Internet was an introvert's dream. Then the popular extroverted high school kids took over our entire Internet media and platforms. We've lost empires to the people who were destined to rule the world anyway. Turns out it's easier to rule introverts online than to rule real life populations who can fight back.
- bane 11y agoYou're probably a) part of groups that have now grown up and merged into the collective internet and diluted b) need to find new groups that interest you For my part, there's huge thriving communities of like-minded nerds all over the place, you just have to look outside of popular places. Pouet, atariage, msx.org, nectarine radio, tons of messageboards, hell; my local neighborhood messageboard is full of crazy internet weirdos of my type. HN and some very narrow reddits are kind of cliche, but they work also. I keep saying it here, but there's absolutely nothing to stop old-style internet communities from springing up again, except that the draw of megasites like reddit and facebook seem to steal all the mindshare. Heck, even IRC is still around. Heck telnet BBSs are still around http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html Just set up the community you want, run it your way, don't compromise and run it like a hobbyist should. The advertise it on other like-minded places (heck, setup a web-ring!) and you're off!
- KaiserPro 11y agoWe're where we've always been; usenet and IRC.
- cosarara97 11y agoAs a kid born with internet access: how do you use usenet these days? Does your ISP give you access?
- a3n 11y agoA good part of usenet is in google groups. Otherwise there are any number of paid providers. There may still be ISP or uni providers, but I don't think that access method is much of a Thing anymore. Some paid providers: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usenet+providers https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usenet+providers Once you have an account, wherever you get it, you can usually access usenet via their browser interface, or with many email clients (like Thunderbird), or with specific usenet clients. I used to be on a variety of comp.lang.* groups, but I haven't accessed usenet for years. I hear it's still more than useful for technical and other interests.
- rbosinger 11y agoI think the internet will become more and more invisible. Everything will be connected to it and just "do it's thing" (like the electrical grid). The web itself will eventually tone down. There will be less unique web apps, individual blogs and online stores as these things fold into the bigger players. As security issues get worse and worse companies will be a lot tighter with their APIs, means of access, etc. Things will be more locked down in general (Apple-like) and most people will be fine with that. Once we get to this point the weirdos will find some service to call their own and it's less likely that everyone else will care about those groups. Basically, I see the internet getting busier on a technical level (amount of information/packets flowing around) but quieter in a social sense.
- danesparza 11y agoI'd argue that the maker movement is the next incarnation of "wild ideas and weirdos". It has a higher cost of entry than the internet does (you actually have to know a few things in order to build stuff). Also: sharing stuff with people who would like to learn is still a cool thing to do. Perhaps you should mentor some people and then collaborate on your own weird ideas?
- jianshen 11y ago+1! I've met some of the most creative "weirdos" in the maker community and in particular the "hacker spaces" [1] around the world. Hacker spaces aren't as numerous however but I love that people have been organizing more and more mini maker faires [2] all over the world. [1] https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/ https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/ [2] http://makerfaire.com/map/ http://makerfaire.com/map/
- dingaling 11y agoOne problem with hackerspaces, at least in my corner of UK, is that they are very expensive and this acts as a filter for the types of people who go there. For meeting an eclectic mix of fascinating oddballs, on the cheap, nothing beats an astronomy or geology club. They are great social-status-levellers. Executives, dropouts and just plain odd folk all chatting together.with
- aaren 11y agoWhat's your idea of expensive, just so I can calibrate against my corner of the UK?
- abakker 11y agoI can't help but agree that the communities seem to be disintegrating around the edges - but only in the feeling of community from the way the old generalized communities used to be. On the other hand, its hard to find something in real life that doesn't have an internet forum or 3 devoted entirely to it. I feel like a huge portion of my interests can fit neatly into existing forums that form their own specialized communities. Of course, there is no semblance of real anonymity there, I can use a pseudonym, but it would certainly not hold up to a determined investigator - public or private. Of course, another trend here which really pushes things away from the anonymity/community is that the rise of Social profiles being tied to true identity has become a common denominator across a lot of the content sources on the net. Mobile access has also pushed us toward sole points of access to many of those communities. Sure, you can still log into many sites with a username and password from any old computer, but as more and more sites become personalized it becomes inconvenient to manage the multiplicity of web presences on a phone without resorting to using apps that are permanently logged in and tied to your single point of access. Finally, the burden of defeating spambots has become nearly impossible without some strong anti-spam membership requirements. defeating spam has become a huge driver for anti-anonymity. The problem is, that even if you defeat bots, the giant number of people participating in discussions virtually guarantees that someone will post something in need of moderation under a pseudonym. A friend of mine at the NYT said they had to implant special filters to moderate the amazing amount of hate speech that would end up as non-sequitur comments on nearly every article. They are not alone in that experience. Its not so bad, all in all, but the internet is a big place now. Some part of my thinks that when communities are small, they self-manage much more easily since there is a kind of group-accountability. On the broader internet, this isn't true anymore. on large public websites, it isn't true. But thats why we self-organize into smaller communities like Hacker News. As they get bigger, the rules necessarily become more strict because the feeling of accountability for the community's well-being on an individual basis goes down. </rationalization>
- a3n 11y agopedantic: The Internet (the public network of networks) is just fine, and hasn't fundamentally changed for decades. /pedantic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet Some of the service providers of the services that run on top of the Internet may or may not be lame, but that's a content issue, not an Internet issue. :)
- mrdrozdov 11y agoWho needs the internet when you have Rationality Theory! http://lesswrong.com/ http://lesswrong.com/
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoThis is the ultimate downside of predictive ads and content: if the Internet only sees you as someone to give what they already want, obviously you'll get bored with the same crap over and over. This is what happens when we relegate all of our discovery to community aggregators like Reddit and HN, or social media sites like Facebook and Twitter that are, at the end of the day, there to sell you ads. I was never into MySpace, and before Facebook came along I remember MY FRIENDS telling me about this funny video called "Leeroy Jenkins."
- return0 11y agoMaybe they should try the opposite, like facebook or twitter giving you the least relevant content to your interests. That's how one finds rare gems
- return0 11y agoThe internet has become too easy. It was interesting when it required deep technical knowledge just to make it work, that ensured a certain amount of savviness and weirdness among participants. I suggest you try communities that are built around hard-to-understand technologies. There are definitely interesting discussions among scientists, for example, but they 're mostly reserved for face-to-face meetings in conferences. Perhaps the best answer is to build the next big thing yourself.
- krapp 11y ago>The internet has become too easy That's a good thing. The world is an infinitely better place now that any idiot can get onto the internet, and does. A few nerds and greybeards losing their sense of cultural superiority is a price worth paying. Given that there are over a billion people accessing the internet now, there are vastly more savvy and weird people on it than ever before, but it's understandable if that makes it feel less hip to be a part of.
- return0 11y ago> That's a good thing I never meant to say that it was a bad thing. OTOH, I think savviness (meant to be elite-level expertise) is a constantly moving goalpost, which means that at any time there is a fixed number of savvy people (which roughly translates to a fixed number of weird people as well). It used to be that they were easy to find on the internet, but nowadays because of the huge crowds they are impossible to find.
- kedean 11y agoIt's not a good thing OR a bad thing. It's different. The sad thing is that a culture of real sharing (not 'social media' sharing, but actual sharing of knowledge, life experiences, and ideas) has been traded for a place that anyone can find any piece of information they could ever want, and contact any person they could ever want. I think both have very high merit, and can't really be compared. It's not a 'good thing' that we've transitioned from one to the other, it's just a change that the old guard has to deal with.
- mhhf 11y agoEthereum
- rajacombinator 11y agoMessage boards are still pretty good for finding some genuine internet culture ... just hard to find good message boards. (Need some more interests I guess ...) The excessive overcommercialization is pretty annoying though. There's only so much content marketing spam I can take ... Gonna have to go back to reading books soon.
- Tycho 11y agoI think a well selected Twitter feed preserves all the cool aspects of the internet.
- 1arity 11y agoThe next big thing is the small things. All of them. People will start talking to strangers in big cities, instead of just looking at their phones. People will have conversations again. The phone will listen, and suggest information at various points, evidence for your arguments, statistics to back you up, come backs, jokes. Strangers will actually meet other strangers in real life, first, unmediated by any online vetting. There will be some app to enhance this process and that app won't violate or distort the inescapable risk and reward of actually saying "Hi" to someone you've never previously met. The next big thing is rich annotations of the things we do and places we go. Having sex? Your phone / wearable will suggest some useful music, idea or other helpful info. Visiting some new area? You'll get intelligence about interesting gatherings, art openings, deals, parties, happening right now nearby. At the supermarket, gazing at the cold items, which to buy? You'll get purchase suggestions and recipe ideas to inform your choice. The next big thing is people aren't "going to" the internet. It will come to them. People will get back to living normally, just normal lives enhanced with relevant timely information. The internet will become less overt and more covert. After a brief period of being a visible tangible thing in the world, it will recede back into the periphery, ever present, like a collective subconscious. It will be re-absorbed by the world it emerged from, enhancing that world. The actual "library index" internet ( and its interaction "searching" ) will become rapidly less and less important once the critical mass of software, algorithms, and wearable tech brings us this new golden age. The quiet internet. The silent internet. The internet of nothing. Like Seinfeld -- a show about nothing. The internet will be an internet about nothing. That's what it has been best for anyway, pictures of cats, trivia, distraction. Now it will be absorbed back into the culture it emerged from, subtly modulating the rhythms of daily life that it was used for anyway. The shouting internet, news, headlines, adverts, games, apps. The feed. The Consumer. All that will fade away, like the fading of a roaring train. Like the peace that returns to a quiet glade once the busload of snapping gabbling tourists has departed. We'll all get less gawkish and more introspective. Our interactions less "selfie and me me me" and more "you and me, here, now". And all these companies, with their fetishisms of "big company" are going to become, or be presented to us, as a whole lot smaller. The original idea of villages, and geocities, and usenet, and turn of the century blogs, and lots of tiny stuff, disconnected stuff, will come back. Zuckerberg will eat his words, it won't be about "connecting the world", it will be about "connecting a community", one community at a time. They'll spin it as a "return to their roots, after all, they started as a Harvard social network", and yet we'll all, old enough, will know that it's just spin. Google won't be distributing "all the world's information", it will be making sense of information in "your world." Company names will increasingly become less bombastic and more like single letter diminutives, the way hipsters sign their emails "j". Hackers will be obsessed with doing things that don't scale. No, really don't scale. Ever. Everyone's ambitions will become a lot smaller, or will seem to. We'll increasingly live in even more populated cities, and after a brief gaudy explosive renaissance of "ALL THE THINGS RIGHT NOW" we'll value our personal, quiet, disconnected, small world lives more and more, subtly enhanced. We'll delight in the tiny things, the meaningless, trivial interactions. Gen Z will look ancient with its selfie obsession, and prescient with its incognito mode and ephemera. The internet of nothing is coming. And not yet. People, cool people, will actually say "my internet." Internet will lose its "the". An internet of all the small things is the next big thing.