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I don't think that's all of it. The Internet used to be these networks that we could, through tools, arrange to be around us. We'd have our e-mail network and o
by cwyers 9y ago
I don't think that's all of it. The Internet used to be these networks that we could, through tools, arrange to be around us. We'd have our e-mail network and our Usenet network and our IRC network, and we have ways to view all those things that aggregated among different e-mail servers and different USENET groups and different IRC channels, and gave us a view around How We We Engaging With The Content (e-mail for one-to-one or one-to-many longform discussion, USENET for many-to-many longform discussion, IRC for short-form discussion, both one-to-one and many-to-many). Now, instead of forming the center of our own Internet experience, there's these silos -- Twitter, Facebook, Slack -- and we form a network around the silo instead of our networks having us at the center.
Now, having large number of people makes many of the features of these silos more desirable, they're not unrelated. But if you could find a way to scale up the "me-centric" view of the web to modern needs, then everyone -- early adopters and the mass audience -- would both benefit, I think.
- jancsika 9y ago> But if you could find a way to scale up the "me-centric" view of the web to modern needs, then everyone -- early adopters and the mass audience -- would both benefit, I think. Even assuming there were adequate mindshare to develop and maintain such an effort-- let's even just pick a modern day USENET-- how are you going to pay the bills?
- wcummings 9y agoUSENET still exists, and someone pays the bills. Ditto for IRC. People still use them. Though RSS is kinda dying, I'll give the author that.
- YCode 9y agoIt seems to me the way connections are built on the Internet is different now. It used to be for example that 90% of the people I knew online I didn't know in person. These days that percentage might be inversed. Not saying it's the only factor, but when connections are built via real-life relationships instead of communities of interest and then sprinkled with automated personalized content aggregation perhaps you end up with an environment where everyone seems to live in their own bubble of information overload.