5 ms·

I've often wondered how much the Web as we know it depends on the current level of technology (bandwidth, resolution, processing speed, storage), vs how much it

by derekp7 10y ago

I've often wondered how much the Web as we know it depends on the current level of technology (bandwidth, resolution, processing speed, storage), vs how much it depends on the fact that it has a critical mass of people using it? Sure, sites such as Youtube would have a hard time over a 28.8k modem (not to mention low resolution/low color displays and slow CPUs). But things like Facebook or other community sites could still essentially exist and perform most of their function. Or is it that without current bandwidth, that even basic items (such as sharing low resolution pictures) would limit it to those who have enough patience? And how much of the ability to design modern web app interfaces is responsible for drawing in the masses? Is the eye candy what actually sells the net to the average person (in order to obtain critical mass)?

chrismcb 10y ago
Usenet and bbses existed for years. But something like Facebook would not have received critical mass with video and pics. Of course suicidal media on general wouldn't have gotten critical mass without a smart phone.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > suicidal media Now there's an interesting typo. (Or was that intentional?) Strangely fitting, even.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Interesting. When I was first using Facebook, I think nobody I knew had a smartphone. Most people may browse social media from their phones now, because it's convenient and the sites have streamlined their experience for that - but before mass adoption of smartphones, people did fine with a desktop browser.
et-al 10y ago
When you talk about the web as we know, are you talking aesthetics, or ecosytems? I'm having trouble drawing the comparison between technology vs critical mass of people. How the web looks has definitely changed with technology as we progressed from HTML -> Flash sites -> HTML5 and single-page web app sites, and of course now we can have streaming video that works as opposed to Quicktime or RealPlayer movies. And when you think of Twitter's rise, it's essentially blogging shrunk to one-liners, but what made it different was the ability to aggregate everyone's stream of consciousness to a single feed as opposed to browsing through a newsgroup, blog ring, or RSS reader. This couldn't happen without technology (though I guess a parallel could be forum threads where everyone posts their clipboard contents at that moment). In terms of ecosystems, I feel like they haven't changed too much. I checked Alexa's Top Sites and was able to draw parallels to most of them except for Wikipedia and to a certain extent YouTube. Collaborative editing of a collective source of (arguable) truth is definitely something of the 21st century, and YouTube's celebrity videologgers didn't quite exist unless you count the old Justin.tv (and that still required technology). > And how much of the ability to design modern web app interfaces is responsible for drawing in the masses? I would say the ease of expression is what brings in the masses. People may seem passive when they consume information now, but they still want to interact, and they do now do that through re-tweets or comments. I do think long-form content is diminishing because of our medium.
chriswarbo 10y ago
In the days of dialup it was more common to fetch a bunch of resources for offline viewing (e.g. newsgroups, POP email, downloading Web sites, and later using "accelerator" browser plugins and RSS). Not only was it much faster to browse locally, but it also saved money since connections were pay-per-minute. Whilst social media sites would still work under such restrictions, I think there'd be less emphasis on short back-and-forth conversations, and maybe less of a 'walled garden' effect; since the content would be saved locally, I imagine a variety of 'Facebook reader' applications springing up, scraping and presenting the information in different ways. There would also be implications for the ads and tracking which many sites subject their visitors to.
hannob 10y ago
I think there is a lot of evidence that these days the technology and performance is in almost all cases much better than needed. Large parts of the Internet are essentially nothing more than shipping text to users. Yet almost everyone doing this does so with hundreds of kilobytes of javascript. There's an almost crazy tendency to stuff all kinds of functionality into it that nobody asked for (e.g. news pages showing popups that a new item appeared on the startpage). Pretty much all of that would work with 1998s Internet without a whole lot of loss. Youtube is a more extreme example, but even there: The resolutions they support today are probably irrelevant for more than 90% of the content.
raldi 10y ago
Facebook with photos would have been unusably slow in the 1990s, though nobody would have had digital cameras anyway. A decade later, it would have been too much of a pain for those who did have them to post many pictures to their streams, since this was before smartphones made photo uploading easy. And a Facebook without photos would never reached the billion-user mark.

by derekp7 10y ago

chrismcb 10y ago

Usenet and bbses existed for years. But something like Facebook would not have received critical mass with video and pics. Of course suicidal media on general wouldn't have gotten critical mass without a smart phone.

kbenson 10y ago
> suicidal media Now there's an interesting typo. (Or was that intentional?) Strangely fitting, even.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Interesting. When I was first using Facebook, I think nobody I knew had a smartphone. Most people may browse social media from their phones now, because it's convenient and the sites have streamlined their experience for that - but before mass adoption of smartphones, people did fine with a desktop browser.

et-al 10y ago

When you talk about the web as we know, are you talking aesthetics, or ecosytems? I'm having trouble drawing the comparison between technology vs critical mass of people. How the web looks has definitely changed with technology as we progressed from HTML -> Flash sites -> HTML5 and single-page web app sites, and of course now we can have streaming video that works as opposed to Quicktime or RealPlayer movies. And when you think of Twitter's rise, it's essentially blogging shrunk to one-liners, but what made it different was the ability to aggregate everyone's stream of consciousness to a single feed as opposed to browsing through a newsgroup, blog ring, or RSS reader. This couldn't happen without technology (though I guess a parallel could be forum threads where everyone posts their clipboard contents at that moment). In terms of ecosystems, I feel like they haven't changed too much. I checked Alexa's Top Sites and was able to draw parallels to most of them except for Wikipedia and to a certain extent YouTube. Collaborative editing of a collective source of (arguable) truth is definitely something of the 21st century, and YouTube's celebrity videologgers didn't quite exist unless you count the old Justin.tv (and that still required technology). > And how much of the ability to design modern web app interfaces is responsible for drawing in the masses? I would say the ease of expression is what brings in the masses. People may seem passive when they consume information now, but they still want to interact, and they do now do that through re-tweets or comments. I do think long-form content is diminishing because of our medium.

chriswarbo 10y ago

In the days of dialup it was more common to fetch a bunch of resources for offline viewing (e.g. newsgroups, POP email, downloading Web sites, and later using "accelerator" browser plugins and RSS). Not only was it much faster to browse locally, but it also saved money since connections were pay-per-minute. Whilst social media sites would still work under such restrictions, I think there'd be less emphasis on short back-and-forth conversations, and maybe less of a 'walled garden' effect; since the content would be saved locally, I imagine a variety of 'Facebook reader' applications springing up, scraping and presenting the information in different ways. There would also be implications for the ads and tracking which many sites subject their visitors to.

hannob 10y ago

I think there is a lot of evidence that these days the technology and performance is in almost all cases much better than needed. Large parts of the Internet are essentially nothing more than shipping text to users. Yet almost everyone doing this does so with hundreds of kilobytes of javascript. There's an almost crazy tendency to stuff all kinds of functionality into it that nobody asked for (e.g. news pages showing popups that a new item appeared on the startpage). Pretty much all of that would work with 1998s Internet without a whole lot of loss. Youtube is a more extreme example, but even there: The resolutions they support today are probably irrelevant for more than 90% of the content.

raldi 10y ago

Facebook with photos would have been unusably slow in the 1990s, though nobody would have had digital cameras anyway. A decade later, it would have been too much of a pain for those who did have them to post many pictures to their streams, since this was before smartphones made photo uploading easy. And a Facebook without photos would never reached the billion-user mark.