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In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web. Standards & many applications that implemented them (includ

In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web. Standards & many applications that implemented them (including commercial) were attempted to be designed to make online computer use possible and beneficial. This is the domain of academics, committees, and concerned individuals creating the means of useful computing & communication, outside of parasitic desperation to inject unnecessary rent-seeking lock-ins into everybody's lives.

superflyguy 8y ago
Swell history lesson, but I don't care about academics and nor do the vast majority of internet users. They can use the internet too, of course, but there's no point moaning about web pages getting larger. I was using the internet in the 90's and it sucked - literally everything about the internet is better today. My life would be no different whether a web page was 5 megs or 5k just like it makes no difference if moby dick was 100k or 100 megs. It's still getting downloaded on my phone, getting copied onto my Kindle etc.
- subsection1h 8y ago
  > I don't care about academics [...] literally everything about the internet is better today. The average message posted to comp.lang.c before Eternal September was far batter than the average message posted to HN, Proggit, etc. But many of the former were written by academics, so you probably don't care.
- white-flame 8y ago
  My post has nothing to do with web page size. This is specifically on how monetization has affected that which we use for personal communication and seeking information.
ben509 8y ago
> In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web. It was extracted from tuition paid by undergraduate students and taxes paid by taxpayers. And that money all eventually came from dirty capitalism.
- white-flame 8y ago
  It's not some nebulous evil of "capitalism" that is the issue here, it is the issue of filtering, manipulation, and distribution of people's private communications & data, and of the effective "town square". Money can be and has been made without these practices, which the laws have not caught up with, and to which there's strong ethical disagreement. And yes, it cost a lot of money to get online and/or host data back then, which was subsidized by piggybacking corporate and university internet presence. Nowadays it's dirt cheap to personally host & access tons of content, so there's even less need to monetize.

superflyguy 8y ago

Swell history lesson, but I don't care about academics and nor do the vast majority of internet users. They can use the internet too, of course, but there's no point moaning about web pages getting larger. I was using the internet in the 90's and it sucked - literally everything about the internet is better today. My life would be no different whether a web page was 5 megs or 5k just like it makes no difference if moby dick was 100k or 100 megs. It's still getting downloaded on my phone, getting copied onto my Kindle etc.

subsection1h 8y ago
> I don't care about academics [...] literally everything about the internet is better today. The average message posted to comp.lang.c before Eternal September was far batter than the average message posted to HN, Proggit, etc. But many of the former were written by academics, so you probably don't care.
white-flame 8y ago
My post has nothing to do with web page size. This is specifically on how monetization has affected that which we use for personal communication and seeking information.

ben509 8y ago

> In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web. It was extracted from tuition paid by undergraduate students and taxes paid by taxpayers. And that money all eventually came from dirty capitalism.

white-flame 8y ago
It's not some nebulous evil of "capitalism" that is the issue here, it is the issue of filtering, manipulation, and distribution of people's private communications & data, and of the effective "town square". Money can be and has been made without these practices, which the laws have not caught up with, and to which there's strong ethical disagreement. And yes, it cost a lot of money to get online and/or host data back then, which was subsidized by piggybacking corporate and university internet presence. Nowadays it's dirt cheap to personally host & access tons of content, so there's even less need to monetize.