6 ms·

> offers much more opportunities to create and collaborate than any other time in the past. We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers

> offers much more opportunities to create and collaborate than any other time in the past. We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers, galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video chats, joomla, wikis etc etc in the year 2003. Not much has been added. Video is perhaps the only thing that we didnt have. A big deal but it s not everything. The main change was the format - mobile. The internet today feels less vibrant, less mysterious, with less corners to explore, and it's not because we 've exhausted it all. Even the news have become extremely repetitive, with every site posting the same stories slightly rephrsed. People keep parroting the same obsessive ideas over and over and over in their comments. Everything is memes, and that everything is actually a small number of ideas being produced every day, possibly countable in one hand. You have to dig hard into social forums to find a unique perspective, as the self-congratulating, selfimportant crowds seem to have crowded out everyone else. Anecdotally, how many sites do you find yourselves browsing daily?

taurath 7y ago
It’s because we’ve given over to aggregators. When we need to actually get something done, they’re useful. If you want to explore though, they’re less useful. You need wiki links and webrings and recommendations that aren’t driven by algorithm.
NeoBasilisk 7y ago
Yeah, the consolidation has been relentless. I also share the sentiment that a lot of the "innovation" online these days is merely skin-deep, but I can't say whether it's just my perspective after being online for 20 years.
aglavine 7y ago
My take is that next step is to bring virtual back to reality again. We should have new media (social networks) associated with old media to do this, similar to the transition that music did but for news and virtual communities.
jakub_g 7y ago
There's a lot of stuff that changed: - Past: fewer people online, mostly curious and quirky ones; now: everyone's online - Past: fewer creators; now: everyone's a creator with an FB/Instagram - Past: doing stuff for fun; now: doing stuff for $$$ (maybe not all but definitely lots). Thousands of thousands of YouTubers. We're flooded with content every day. - With so much content to consume, the desire for creation vanishes. - I also feel like the societies getting more well-off kills the innovation. When I was a student I couldn't really afford many things, so I had to be creative to get around that. Now you just pay a few bucks to some internet giant and all your problems are solved. - I feel like facebookization killed many online communities. What used to be an independent phpbb board with a logical structure, room for customization and some tools for admins to manage it, became an FB group that is impossible to navigate and manage sensibly, with posts ordered by an algorithm, and which spams me with notifications at the least convenient times. - Other downside of power grab by FB: I hate when all my real-life friends get spammed by every little post on every shitty FB group I make. This totally killed the anonymity of the net and separation between various communities. - Societal radicalization means there's more trolls and aggressive people than before, which makes me less keen to engage in discussions with strangers (apart from HN, one of few places that keeps the level). - I used to read news on the internet to save time (among other reasons). Now with all the heavy ads-bloated, video-bloated, SEO-optimized gibberish content split in 15-pages slideshow, and clickbaity headlines, I think it might be actually more informative and time efficient to read and oldschool newspaper or watch evening news. - Having said that, maybe it's just the old guard getting old, and having less time to explore -- getting busy with work, families etc.? On Reddit, there are lots of very weird subcommunities I'd never think of. My younger brother still plays Deluxe Ski Jump like it's early 2000s, and hangs out with the other guys who do the same.
- greggman2 7y ago
  > With so much content to consume, the desire for creation vanishes. Those would seem to be contradictory statements. There must be desire for creation for there to so much content created.
  - asjw 7y ago
badrabbit 7y ago
You have to realize your experience is not everyone's experience. And nostalgia is a lie. > We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers, galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video chats, joomla, wikis Signal,whatsapp,ipfs,discord,slack,github,confluence,twitter,twitch,stackoverflow and so much more from a "techie" perspective. But have you considerer how much more accesible the internet has become? Forums were nice but you had to find the right one and once that site shuts you might lose all content and all the people you know there but for most people social media is better. IRC,icq,etc.. Were not very secure,they were not multi media friendly either. You heard of Viber? Super popular in non-western countries on-par with whatsapp. Skype you say? Zoom,webex,logmein and the like make video chat and desktop sharing a breeze. Learning things is so much better too: pluralsight,udemy,cybrary and MOOCs were not a thing in 2003. Free webhosting ,document editing,job hunting anf so much more (excluding things like uber,doordash,instacart that provide IRL services). But more than all that,there are so many more options for just about everything now. The past always looks shinyand guess what,the internet is even more mysterious now for those who get curious enough! I think like most you're only looking at the popular sites and apps. E.g.: peertube vs youtube or HN vs Reddit. Daily I frequent 5-10 sites on a regular basis but I visit a lot more than that when finding external content on those sites,certainly a lot more than 10+ years ago.
- buboard 7y ago
  Half the services you mention either - require a phone and phone number to sign up - lock you in - will shut down next year unless someone buys them and bastardizes them to oblivion - are services that replace services that were bought and bastardized (skype). they re bound to repeat the cycle - arent as popular / dont work (ipfs vs torrents) - lock content away from search engines - are basically rehashes of the same idea with much heavier browser footprint for the sake of ... i dont know what really - Are all platforms - they dont specialize, they force you inside an eternally septembered community . I Liked having separate accounts in separate forums - having many identities is a virtue - and good for privacy - are Incremental updates. E2E encryption is the one thing that matters, for the rest, we had flash video converence in 2003, and it worked better than webrtc solutions today - MOOCs are not a successful thing today either though. good that we have all that content, but it wasn't enabled by any of the aforementioned companies. I m not sure i m convinced we have a fundamentally different - or better - internet today. Everythinig you mention is repackaging. (and we had job ads and lots of free webhosting too btw. You know neocities, they re even named out of nostalgia for geocities, craigslist is still a thing).
marcosdumay 7y ago
Yeah, let me repeat the observation that those things are passing through a phase of hyperoptimization with money being the only goal, that I post every time some discussion like this appears. Internet content is not even the worst case of hyperoptimization around, nor by far the most concerning. There's something to say about how companies measure and treat their employees. But yes, it's a problem, and very hard to solve. I don't even understand what is causing it. We aren't in some sudden crisis where we need to optimize everything, and in the end it goes even against its own goal so it's not rational anyway. Yet, it's everywhere.
shpongled 7y ago
Yeah the consolidation is the biggest component I've noticed. I find myself only going to a handful of websites on a regular basis
polynomial 7y ago
> Not much has been added. Apart from "smart" phones, which had tremendous repercussions for your otherwise remarkable list.
- buboard 7y ago
  I did mention the mobile format. Which is responsible largely for the dumbed-dowb, featureless, memoryless internet I experience
criddell 7y ago
> Anecdotally, how many sites do you find yourselves browsing daily? That's an interesting question. If you had asked how often do you use the web my answer would be all day, every day with multiple simultaneous connections. But browsing? One or two places mostly out of habit and even the frequency of that is declining.

taurath 7y ago

It’s because we’ve given over to aggregators. When we need to actually get something done, they’re useful. If you want to explore though, they’re less useful. You need wiki links and webrings and recommendations that aren’t driven by algorithm.

NeoBasilisk 7y ago

Yeah, the consolidation has been relentless. I also share the sentiment that a lot of the "innovation" online these days is merely skin-deep, but I can't say whether it's just my perspective after being online for 20 years.

aglavine 7y ago

My take is that next step is to bring virtual back to reality again. We should have new media (social networks) associated with old media to do this, similar to the transition that music did but for news and virtual communities.

jakub_g 7y ago

There's a lot of stuff that changed: - Past: fewer people online, mostly curious and quirky ones; now: everyone's online - Past: fewer creators; now: everyone's a creator with an FB/Instagram - Past: doing stuff for fun; now: doing stuff for $$$ (maybe not all but definitely lots). Thousands of thousands of YouTubers. We're flooded with content every day. - With so much content to consume, the desire for creation vanishes. - I also feel like the societies getting more well-off kills the innovation. When I was a student I couldn't really afford many things, so I had to be creative to get around that. Now you just pay a few bucks to some internet giant and all your problems are solved. - I feel like facebookization killed many online communities. What used to be an independent phpbb board with a logical structure, room for customization and some tools for admins to manage it, became an FB group that is impossible to navigate and manage sensibly, with posts ordered by an algorithm, and which spams me with notifications at the least convenient times. - Other downside of power grab by FB: I hate when all my real-life friends get spammed by every little post on every shitty FB group I make. This totally killed the anonymity of the net and separation between various communities. - Societal radicalization means there's more trolls and aggressive people than before, which makes me less keen to engage in discussions with strangers (apart from HN, one of few places that keeps the level). - I used to read news on the internet to save time (among other reasons). Now with all the heavy ads-bloated, video-bloated, SEO-optimized gibberish content split in 15-pages slideshow, and clickbaity headlines, I think it might be actually more informative and time efficient to read and oldschool newspaper or watch evening news. - Having said that, maybe it's just the old guard getting old, and having less time to explore -- getting busy with work, families etc.? On Reddit, there are lots of very weird subcommunities I'd never think of. My younger brother still plays Deluxe Ski Jump like it's early 2000s, and hangs out with the other guys who do the same.

greggman2 7y ago
> With so much content to consume, the desire for creation vanishes. Those would seem to be contradictory statements. There must be desire for creation for there to so much content created.
- asjw 7y ago

badrabbit 7y ago

You have to realize your experience is not everyone's experience. And nostalgia is a lie. > We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers, galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video chats, joomla, wikis Signal,whatsapp,ipfs,discord,slack,github,confluence,twitter,twitch,stackoverflow and so much more from a "techie" perspective. But have you considerer how much more accesible the internet has become? Forums were nice but you had to find the right one and once that site shuts you might lose all content and all the people you know there but for most people social media is better. IRC,icq,etc.. Were not very secure,they were not multi media friendly either. You heard of Viber? Super popular in non-western countries on-par with whatsapp. Skype you say? Zoom,webex,logmein and the like make video chat and desktop sharing a breeze. Learning things is so much better too: pluralsight,udemy,cybrary and MOOCs were not a thing in 2003. Free webhosting ,document editing,job hunting anf so much more (excluding things like uber,doordash,instacart that provide IRL services). But more than all that,there are so many more options for just about everything now. The past always looks shinyand guess what,the internet is even more mysterious now for those who get curious enough! I think like most you're only looking at the popular sites and apps. E.g.: peertube vs youtube or HN vs Reddit. Daily I frequent 5-10 sites on a regular basis but I visit a lot more than that when finding external content on those sites,certainly a lot more than 10+ years ago.

buboard 7y ago
Half the services you mention either - require a phone and phone number to sign up - lock you in - will shut down next year unless someone buys them and bastardizes them to oblivion - are services that replace services that were bought and bastardized (skype). they re bound to repeat the cycle - arent as popular / dont work (ipfs vs torrents) - lock content away from search engines - are basically rehashes of the same idea with much heavier browser footprint for the sake of ... i dont know what really - Are all platforms - they dont specialize, they force you inside an eternally septembered community . I Liked having separate accounts in separate forums - having many identities is a virtue - and good for privacy - are Incremental updates. E2E encryption is the one thing that matters, for the rest, we had flash video converence in 2003, and it worked better than webrtc solutions today - MOOCs are not a successful thing today either though. good that we have all that content, but it wasn't enabled by any of the aforementioned companies. I m not sure i m convinced we have a fundamentally different - or better - internet today. Everythinig you mention is repackaging. (and we had job ads and lots of free webhosting too btw. You know neocities, they re even named out of nostalgia for geocities, craigslist is still a thing).

marcosdumay 7y ago

Yeah, let me repeat the observation that those things are passing through a phase of hyperoptimization with money being the only goal, that I post every time some discussion like this appears. Internet content is not even the worst case of hyperoptimization around, nor by far the most concerning. There's something to say about how companies measure and treat their employees. But yes, it's a problem, and very hard to solve. I don't even understand what is causing it. We aren't in some sudden crisis where we need to optimize everything, and in the end it goes even against its own goal so it's not rational anyway. Yet, it's everywhere.

shpongled 7y ago

Yeah the consolidation is the biggest component I've noticed. I find myself only going to a handful of websites on a regular basis

polynomial 7y ago

> Not much has been added. Apart from "smart" phones, which had tremendous repercussions for your otherwise remarkable list.

buboard 7y ago
I did mention the mobile format. Which is responsible largely for the dumbed-dowb, featureless, memoryless internet I experience

criddell 7y ago

> Anecdotally, how many sites do you find yourselves browsing daily? That's an interesting question. If you had asked how often do you use the web my answer would be all day, every day with multiple simultaneous connections. But browsing? One or two places mostly out of habit and even the frequency of that is declining.