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Ask HN: What are some great internet innovations of the past 10 years?
A long time ago the internet was a place where everything was possible and it allowed new radical innovations : marketplaces, search engines, blogs, social networks, Wikipedia ...I
I can't think of anything really creative in terms of products these past 10 years but I believe I am wrong and and older. And obviously there were more opportunities to come up with some thing really new at the beginning.
I'd be interested to know what are some innovation / new type of consumer products brought by the internet :
- in the past 10 years that are truly innovative
- since the the beginning of the internet and that have not ended up corrupt by bad actors and are still alive
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ArtWomb 6y agoI noticed in my feed the other day that Monero is introducing javascript client side wallets. And its just one of those ideas I can't get out of my head. I love the idea of every web site visitor as "digital bank". That instantly accrues some wuffie just by participating. And it opens up a huge range of "economic games" for all parties. Not just auctions, exchanges, casinos, and e-sports betting networks. But voting, stake holding, debt issuance, derivative products, commodity peer net grid computing. As well as a drop dead simple system for the allocation of public funds.
- mangodwango 6y agoIt’s a fantastic idea, but it’s also dead on arrival without first hand integration into Chrome. Brave is doing something similar with bats, but even that is limited. I think browser based mining is a huge deal, but Google has somehow managed to convince everyone that is malware instead of a legitimate threat to their business model.
- qplex 6y agoBiggest internet thing of the past decade is the smartphone and anything related.
- a3n 6y agoI think the modern internet is just TV anymore. Early internet was innovation. It was almost as if you had to innovate merely to get on and use it. Now it's a commercial resource, and the major effort will be extraction. Dislosure: I'm also old. I almost spelled "internet" with a capital 'I'. Harumph.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- didip 6y ago* The current self driving tech requires internet to function. It may not be where we want it, but it has progressed far. * Same with Drone technology. * I think voice recognition/digital assistant has evolved quite far the last 10 years. * P2P tech is exciting again thanks to blockchain progress and various civil unrest.
- cpach 6y agoSlack. It is, IMHO, a great step forward for chat rooms. It is palatable to people who would never bother with running irssi inside of tmux.
- anotheryou 6y agoirccloud would do 90% of the same though
- cpach 6y agoSo why does Slack have so much traction?
- anotheryou 6y agoThey sure did something right, but it wasn't innovation. Maybe right time, good marketing, good design, but I honestly have no Idea. I also don't understand why smaller software communities are now spread across gitter, discord and slack when a channel on freenode was perfect...
- anotheryou 6y agoOnly advantage over freenode I see: some archive/search (usually not good)
- detaro 6y agoSlack did neither invent graphical chat clients nor web chat. "running irssi inside of tmux" as the alternative is a massive red herring.
- vangelis 6y agoI guess Pidgin or Hexchat don't exist, eh.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoOr, y'know, AIM.
- Scarblac 6y agoTwitch launched in 2011 and nowadays it seems everything is a good idea for video streaming.
- aaron695 6y agoSci-Hub of course Smooth piracy of scientific articles. It took a lot of work. Other people tried different ways but it has succeeded where others didn't and even cost some people their lives they thought is so important.
- jobigoud 6y agoPrivate tutoring platforms. Now that video calls are ubiquitous we can get a private tutor on short notice for a one to one class tailored to our needs and goals, choosing a teaching style in a pool of hundreds. It's especially big in language learning.
- aaron695 6y agoPart of the problem is the 10 years. It takes ten years to innovate and prove it. Starlink started in 2015 and probably will change how the internet works. Lime started in 2017, this may work.
- zhte415 6y agoSeconding smartphone and the many apps that run on it, but not one in particular. Ten years ago few people had their head glued to a phone. Now, on any public transport (where I live) it's unusual to look up and see someone not looking at their phone. For many, a smartphone (or, the apps on it, and I don't think the app matters so much, simply the compulsion) is the first thing to check when waking up,; many app makers simply in the business of making an app compulsive. For many, a valuable conversation or thinking process is interrupted by an ping and 'very important' message for the constantly connected. But that's the norm for this many. For many more, the smartphone comes before, or completely substitutes, the need for a 'traditional' computer in providing internet connectivity for many different internet use-cases across the globe: from staying in touch to banking to running a business to becoming a celebrity. 'Innovative' is also an interesting choice of word. As an amateur follower of business jargon, 'innovation' wasn't used much in business speak (it certainly existed, but in a different sense than that I observe today). In the 90s and 00s 'creativity' was the buzz-word, hand-in-hand with 'out of the box'. 'Creativity' as a term seems to have fallen off a cliff in usage a little more than 10 years ago, with 'innovation' filling the gap. But unlike creativity, 'innovation' is used to reflect thinking that is very much 'inside the box (or push the edge, but don't get out)' way. Usage of this term is slightly different from the classical dictionary definition. 'Innovation' (today) as a term seems to refers to bringing an idea that already exists to fruition, or combining several pre-existing ideas with some sprinkles on the top, or an incremental process touted as 'the next big thing' when it's what existed before but improved a little/new angle taken - not 'creativity' from the 90s certainly, the term 'innovation' representing a lower risk appetite over the past decade, and a preference of small and frequent change over the traditional one-step 'creative disruption'. Note this is my observed adoption/morphing of the term in business language over the past few years.
- cpach 6y agoOk, another suggestion: The Noise Protocol Framework. https://github.com/noiseprotocol/noise_spec/commit/213237c43add01dc7f1bd8dfc4fb7fcbc6917521 https://github.com/noiseprotocol/noise_spec/commit/213237c43... https://noiseprotocol.org/ https://noiseprotocol.org/