9 ms·

Yeah, also as a teenager in the 90s I distinctly remember thinking that the internet was going to make everyone smarter. The world's information at our fingerti

by Reedx 6y ago

Yeah, also as a teenager in the 90s I distinctly remember thinking that the internet was going to make everyone smarter. The world's information at our fingertips! It'll unlock a new golden age for the entire globe! Oh, how naive...

cheald 6y ago
I think the error is in mistaking knowledge for wisdom. Knowledge is a powerful tool, but without the wisdom to productively apply it, can be used for great destruction.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  These days I see a lot of smarts without knowledge.
neltnerb 6y ago
To be fair, we've been alive at this point twice that long... kind of hard to blame 15 year old me for poorly predicting events more than 15 years out. ;-)
worik 6y ago
It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed. We are in a "eternal September". It will pass (not literally eternal) I would not go back. It is brilliant
- djaychela 6y ago
  >It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is, and in addition it's meshed with the bugs in our code (confirmation bias springs to mind) to allow disinformation to spread, and people to seek sources that confirm their beliefs rather than actually inform them of the truth.
  - echelon 6y ago
    The Internet is a tool that requires effort to use and derive value from. Unfortunately, advertising companies built low-effort dopamine funnels on top and plugged everyone up. This has amplified the more basal animal instincts humans come pre-wired with. Outrage, lust, want, and envy are being micro-stimulated in all of us, constantly, all for the objective function optimization of engagement and ad revenue. Attention has been hijacked, fears have been stoked, and people have been made to hate each other. We've evolved as individuals and devolved as a whole.
  - serf 6y ago
    >I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is the now-informed go and inform the uninformed, affecting everybody in a slow and gradual manner -- regardless of the individuals participation. One didn't have to read in order to be affected by the advent of the printing press.
    - post_below 6y ago
      I've never bothered to research it, but I've always wondered if there were groups that saw the printing press as evil. In the same way that some thought about radio, TV and now the internet. In any case any issues with digital media giants aren't the result of the internet, but rather late stage capitalism.
      - coffeeling 6y ago
        > I've never bothered to research it, but I've always wondered if there were groups that saw the printing press as evil. You can safely bet money on that.
- rectang 6y ago
  It's oft forgotten how much more uncertainty we lived with in the pre-internet era. Once you've gotten used to the memex it's hard to imagine life without one.
  - hnick 6y ago
    Sometimes at work over lunch we have debates or arguments that could easily be solved with a quick google but it's just more fun to let it run its course.
  - ethbro 6y ago
    I was reminiscing the other day about the Encyclopedia Britannica set we bought when I was a child. Probably within the last 10 years dictionaries were sold. A few years later, Microsoft Encarta [0] was available on CD. And a decade later, that was gone itself because of the internet. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta
blantonl 6y ago
Do you not remember the wretched hive of scum and villainy that was Usenet?
- dimator 6y ago
  Oh man, that was the best. It was large enough to have basically every interest. All while still having the basic functionality of reading and replying to text. Your "feed" was chronological messages, rather than a psychologist-engineered addiction engine.
  - mac01021 6y ago
    So... Reddit?
    - Aco- 6y ago
      you seemed to have missed the part where they said 'rather than a psychologist-engineered addiction engine'
      - mac01021 6y ago
        What does reddit do based on psychology?
- kingaillas 6y ago
  I do, but usenet's reach, as compared to current social media outlets, was minuscule. The broader world wasn't aware of it, nor did it care.
- monoideism 6y ago
  Arguably, it became that after the Eternal September in 1993, when the hoi polloi joined in via AOL.
  - iso947 6y ago
    Alt.wealey.crusher.die.die.die was an early example of cyberbullying. That group, and the people using the internet, used their power to really harm Wil Wheaton, and that was well before eternal September
andrepd 6y ago
I always get sad when I think of the techno-optimism of the 90s and the early net. I think it actually was still present well into the 00s, which were a golden age in their own way (blogs, forums, communities). Then mainstream facebook hit like a ton of bricks..
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Facebook is AOL 2.0. AOL was equivalently vapid - and often just as toxic - in the 90s.
  - ianwalter 6y ago
    Yes, I remember joining KKK chatrooms on AOL as a kid and spamming them with "White Chowder! White Chowder!". Good times.
  - beardedwizard 6y ago
    This. People are wearing rose colored glasses, but the scale has changed and the barriers to entry removed.
  - lilbaine 6y ago
    Hopefully FB goes the same way AOL instant messenger did.
- syshum 6y ago
  2005 is where I place the beginning of the end
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I should have seen it coming in 97 when I introduced an acquaintance to IRC or similar, expecting the same enlightenment I saw, and the first thing he did was start spamming channels with swears as a laugh.
    - jacobush 6y ago
simias 6y ago
I have similar memories, in particular I remember thinking "well, people watch garbage on the TV because there's a relatively limited amount of channels, so you end up with dumb programmes that cater to the lowest common denominator. With the internet we'll all be able to find niche content that interests them and that'll be the end of that." I guess I wasn't entirely wrong about having a lot more niche content, although in hindsight thinking that trash TV was a technological issue was very naive. If anything trash shows (be it on TV or the internet) are trashier than ever due to the increased competition.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  The good stuff on TV today is far better than the best pre-internet TV. (My parents wouldn't let me watch Green Acres, telling me it was trash. By the time I was an adult, it wasn't in syndication anymore. Eventually it shows up on Netflix, I watch it to see what I had missed. It's total trash. Didn't make it through a single episode. It's much the same for the rest, like My Favorite Martian, etc.)
  - hnick 6y ago
    There's an interesting talk about that by Jonathan Blow, using the common phrase 'The Medium is the Message'. The eventual topic is mobile game design but he starts off with TV and how commercial and other constraints influence show (and game) design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
post_below 6y ago
Maybe not naive... The internet hasn't created any new behavior, at most it has amplified a few existing human tendencies. Not all of them bad ones. I suspect once we've finished adjusting to the new digital reality it will have, on balance, made us smarter. If giving more people access to more information and a place in the cultural conversation doesn't improve things then the human race was doomed anyway.
- ethbro 6y ago
  I used to think that, but I don't think it's going to happen unless we criminalize some level of human impulse hacking. At their base, social media platforms specifically engineer their desired behavior, powered by obscene amounts of money and technical effort, but largely independent of their users' own preexisting wants and needs. Facebook et al. are the 21st century equivalent of a <blink> tag.
mbesto 6y ago
This is exactly the premise of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. Basically the internet has created an explosion of information, but it's become increasingly harder to actually find the right information. So the general premise that "we should be smarter because we have the world's info at our fingertips" is counterbalanced by "there's equally, if not more, disinformation we need to wade through to get to that info"
- jfengel 6y ago
  I don't think it's hard to find the right information. It's right up front. It's just very easy to walk past the right information in favor of attractive lies. Most of the time people aren't ignorant of the truth. They just dismiss it as a conspiracy.
  - mbesto 6y ago
    Oh really? Example - just google "COVID hospitalization rates". You'll find hundreds of different sites/sources all varying degrees of accuracy. This is mentally taxing.
    - iso947 6y ago
      It’s a complex subject. On the one hand you have someone normally healthy who contracts covid, tests positive, and goes in for breathing difficulties. On the other hand you have someone who has tested positive but gets in a car crash. We used to pay people to take the raw facts and distil useful information. It was called journalism. Clickbait and conspiracy pays more than actual journalism though.
    - usaar333 6y ago
      Because it's too simplified of a question. That's highly dependent on things like age, sex, and pre-existing conditions. Population wide numbers are in turn dependent on population structure and in turn who gets it. You see similar problems in places like /r/covid19 on reddit where people argue about IFR with few accepting the meaninglessness of the question. Complexity is hard, but I don't think the world is better if we oversimplify things.
telesilla 6y ago
For many of us, exactly that happened. I treasure the internet. My theory is that it just amplified the reality of who humanity really is, at our core. Part wonder, part beast.
lilbaine 6y ago
The internet did and was sharing a wealth of knowledge and changed the world. Personally I saw a large change in both the online community and it's nature when FB, Google and other online conglomerates became more concerned about stock investors interests, Snowden revelations, and the 2016 election. Online communities changed as well as commerce. The internet can still be a beacon of learning and knowledge however, in my opinion initial motivations which brought it's golden age were not based on commerce. Now they are. The culture of the internet has changed. We lost the "initial internet culture", and since this change, it's nature has also changed along with it's initial purpose. We can bring it back only if we choose to do so.
jfim 6y ago
To be fair, there is a lot of information available at our fingertips nowadays, much more than anything we could get in the 90s. Information back then was scattered, the tools to look for it (Altavista, Yahoo, Archie, Veronica, etc.) were rather weak in retrospect. Wikipedia didn't exist in the 90s, nor did GitHub, Thingiverse, and so on. A lot of things like online banking, stock brokerages, bill pay, video chatting, online gaming, and so on weren't as good as we have it now. None of that was accessible without being tethered to a phone or Ethernet jack. What has changed is the arrival of platforms that started optimizing for engagement, impressions, views, clicks, targeting, and eyeballs, because all of that can be monetized. The people who would be glued to the boob tube now are glued to social media, and instead of getting content fed from Rupert Murdoch and other media barons, it comes from whomever does a better job of paying for ad impressions, gaming social media, and creating clickbait content to get their viewpoint heard.
- qwertox 6y ago
  I agree, yet I miss platforms like Geocities, where, with no intention of harm, you could create an anonymous site and just write about your hobby. That's no longer possible nowadays. The website counter was the like-button of those days.
  - jopsen 6y ago
    What is stopping you?
    - xwdv 6y ago
      Having to choose where to host it, what blog engine to use, write your own static site builder or go with something prebuilt, which analytics solution, what to name the site, how to SEO optimize your content, picking keywords, using keywords, how to create a newsletter, how to moderate comments and filter spam, what CDN to use, how to build a responsive design for mobile, put a GDPR disclaimer, write a privacy policy, how to display tasteful ads, where to display social media sharing icons, which affiliate campaign provider to go with, gzip or br encoding, jpeg or webp images, what url structure to use, what meta tags, how to title a page, test the rendering in different browsers, picking a font, finding a fast font provider, polyfills, minimize JS file size, picking stock images for articles, promoting your blog post on HN, gaming HN to get some upvotes, coming up with things to write about... fuck this.
darawk 6y ago
I think this is actually a little unfair. The internet has actually done all the things we hoped it would do. It has just also done some other things that we didn't anticipate. I'm still hopeful that these are basically just growing pains of novel technology and media, and as our relationship to it matures, we'll develop better patterns around it.
petre 6y ago
Yup, go figure, it made everyone dumber and more paranoid, just like TV. Who would have guessed, ads, tracking, nazis, thought police.
bamboozled 6y ago
Yup it really felt like a stepping stone to a better place. Maybe it still is, just it has some slipper moss growing on it.
flokie 6y ago
The reality is that it did. Do you distinctly forget having to go to a library to do research for a book report? Only getting the slice of news offered locally? The internet is amazing! Easy to forget when we're wired for extraordinary to feel ordinary in time.
copperx 6y ago
I clearly remember sitting in front of the computer, web browser open, saying to myself "I better enjoy this beautiful technology now, before advertising and capitalism take over it." I imagined advertising everywhere. Sadly, I wasn't wrong.

by Reedx 6y ago

cheald 6y ago

I think the error is in mistaking knowledge for wisdom. Knowledge is a powerful tool, but without the wisdom to productively apply it, can be used for great destruction.

WalterBright 6y ago
These days I see a lot of smarts without knowledge.

neltnerb 6y ago

To be fair, we've been alive at this point twice that long... kind of hard to blame 15 year old me for poorly predicting events more than 15 years out. ;-)

worik 6y ago

It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed. We are in a "eternal September". It will pass (not literally eternal) I would not go back. It is brilliant

djaychela 6y ago
>It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is, and in addition it's meshed with the bugs in our code (confirmation bias springs to mind) to allow disinformation to spread, and people to seek sources that confirm their beliefs rather than actually inform them of the truth.
- echelon 6y ago
  The Internet is a tool that requires effort to use and derive value from. Unfortunately, advertising companies built low-effort dopamine funnels on top and plugged everyone up. This has amplified the more basal animal instincts humans come pre-wired with. Outrage, lust, want, and envy are being micro-stimulated in all of us, constantly, all for the objective function optimization of engagement and ad revenue. Attention has been hijacked, fears have been stoked, and people have been made to hate each other. We've evolved as individuals and devolved as a whole.
- serf 6y ago
  >I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is the now-informed go and inform the uninformed, affecting everybody in a slow and gradual manner -- regardless of the individuals participation. One didn't have to read in order to be affected by the advent of the printing press.
  - post_below 6y ago
    I've never bothered to research it, but I've always wondered if there were groups that saw the printing press as evil. In the same way that some thought about radio, TV and now the internet. In any case any issues with digital media giants aren't the result of the internet, but rather late stage capitalism.
    - coffeeling 6y ago
      > I've never bothered to research it, but I've always wondered if there were groups that saw the printing press as evil. You can safely bet money on that.
rectang 6y ago
It's oft forgotten how much more uncertainty we lived with in the pre-internet era. Once you've gotten used to the memex it's hard to imagine life without one.
- hnick 6y ago
  Sometimes at work over lunch we have debates or arguments that could easily be solved with a quick google but it's just more fun to let it run its course.
- ethbro 6y ago
  I was reminiscing the other day about the Encyclopedia Britannica set we bought when I was a child. Probably within the last 10 years dictionaries were sold. A few years later, Microsoft Encarta [0] was available on CD. And a decade later, that was gone itself because of the internet. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta

blantonl 6y ago

Do you not remember the wretched hive of scum and villainy that was Usenet?

dimator 6y ago
Oh man, that was the best. It was large enough to have basically every interest. All while still having the basic functionality of reading and replying to text. Your "feed" was chronological messages, rather than a psychologist-engineered addiction engine.
- mac01021 6y ago
  So... Reddit?
  - Aco- 6y ago
    you seemed to have missed the part where they said 'rather than a psychologist-engineered addiction engine'
    - mac01021 6y ago
      What does reddit do based on psychology?
kingaillas 6y ago
I do, but usenet's reach, as compared to current social media outlets, was minuscule. The broader world wasn't aware of it, nor did it care.
monoideism 6y ago
Arguably, it became that after the Eternal September in 1993, when the hoi polloi joined in via AOL.
- iso947 6y ago
  Alt.wealey.crusher.die.die.die was an early example of cyberbullying. That group, and the people using the internet, used their power to really harm Wil Wheaton, and that was well before eternal September

andrepd 6y ago

I always get sad when I think of the techno-optimism of the 90s and the early net. I think it actually was still present well into the 00s, which were a golden age in their own way (blogs, forums, communities). Then mainstream facebook hit like a ton of bricks..

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Facebook is AOL 2.0. AOL was equivalently vapid - and often just as toxic - in the 90s.
- ianwalter 6y ago
  Yes, I remember joining KKK chatrooms on AOL as a kid and spamming them with "White Chowder! White Chowder!". Good times.
- beardedwizard 6y ago
  This. People are wearing rose colored glasses, but the scale has changed and the barriers to entry removed.
- lilbaine 6y ago
  Hopefully FB goes the same way AOL instant messenger did.
syshum 6y ago
2005 is where I place the beginning of the end
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I should have seen it coming in 97 when I introduced an acquaintance to IRC or similar, expecting the same enlightenment I saw, and the first thing he did was start spamming channels with swears as a laugh.
  - jacobush 6y ago

simias 6y ago

I have similar memories, in particular I remember thinking "well, people watch garbage on the TV because there's a relatively limited amount of channels, so you end up with dumb programmes that cater to the lowest common denominator. With the internet we'll all be able to find niche content that interests them and that'll be the end of that." I guess I wasn't entirely wrong about having a lot more niche content, although in hindsight thinking that trash TV was a technological issue was very naive. If anything trash shows (be it on TV or the internet) are trashier than ever due to the increased competition.

WalterBright 6y ago
The good stuff on TV today is far better than the best pre-internet TV. (My parents wouldn't let me watch Green Acres, telling me it was trash. By the time I was an adult, it wasn't in syndication anymore. Eventually it shows up on Netflix, I watch it to see what I had missed. It's total trash. Didn't make it through a single episode. It's much the same for the rest, like My Favorite Martian, etc.)
- hnick 6y ago
  There's an interesting talk about that by Jonathan Blow, using the common phrase 'The Medium is the Message'. The eventual topic is mobile game design but he starts off with TV and how commercial and other constraints influence show (and game) design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

post_below 6y ago

Maybe not naive... The internet hasn't created any new behavior, at most it has amplified a few existing human tendencies. Not all of them bad ones. I suspect once we've finished adjusting to the new digital reality it will have, on balance, made us smarter. If giving more people access to more information and a place in the cultural conversation doesn't improve things then the human race was doomed anyway.

ethbro 6y ago
I used to think that, but I don't think it's going to happen unless we criminalize some level of human impulse hacking. At their base, social media platforms specifically engineer their desired behavior, powered by obscene amounts of money and technical effort, but largely independent of their users' own preexisting wants and needs. Facebook et al. are the 21st century equivalent of a <blink> tag.

mbesto 6y ago

This is exactly the premise of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. Basically the internet has created an explosion of information, but it's become increasingly harder to actually find the right information. So the general premise that "we should be smarter because we have the world's info at our fingertips" is counterbalanced by "there's equally, if not more, disinformation we need to wade through to get to that info"

jfengel 6y ago
I don't think it's hard to find the right information. It's right up front. It's just very easy to walk past the right information in favor of attractive lies. Most of the time people aren't ignorant of the truth. They just dismiss it as a conspiracy.
- mbesto 6y ago
  Oh really? Example - just google "COVID hospitalization rates". You'll find hundreds of different sites/sources all varying degrees of accuracy. This is mentally taxing.
  - iso947 6y ago
    It’s a complex subject. On the one hand you have someone normally healthy who contracts covid, tests positive, and goes in for breathing difficulties. On the other hand you have someone who has tested positive but gets in a car crash. We used to pay people to take the raw facts and distil useful information. It was called journalism. Clickbait and conspiracy pays more than actual journalism though.
  - usaar333 6y ago
    Because it's too simplified of a question. That's highly dependent on things like age, sex, and pre-existing conditions. Population wide numbers are in turn dependent on population structure and in turn who gets it. You see similar problems in places like /r/covid19 on reddit where people argue about IFR with few accepting the meaninglessness of the question. Complexity is hard, but I don't think the world is better if we oversimplify things.

telesilla 6y ago

For many of us, exactly that happened. I treasure the internet. My theory is that it just amplified the reality of who humanity really is, at our core. Part wonder, part beast.

lilbaine 6y ago

The internet did and was sharing a wealth of knowledge and changed the world. Personally I saw a large change in both the online community and it's nature when FB, Google and other online conglomerates became more concerned about stock investors interests, Snowden revelations, and the 2016 election. Online communities changed as well as commerce. The internet can still be a beacon of learning and knowledge however, in my opinion initial motivations which brought it's golden age were not based on commerce. Now they are. The culture of the internet has changed. We lost the "initial internet culture", and since this change, it's nature has also changed along with it's initial purpose. We can bring it back only if we choose to do so.

jfim 6y ago

To be fair, there is a lot of information available at our fingertips nowadays, much more than anything we could get in the 90s. Information back then was scattered, the tools to look for it (Altavista, Yahoo, Archie, Veronica, etc.) were rather weak in retrospect. Wikipedia didn't exist in the 90s, nor did GitHub, Thingiverse, and so on. A lot of things like online banking, stock brokerages, bill pay, video chatting, online gaming, and so on weren't as good as we have it now. None of that was accessible without being tethered to a phone or Ethernet jack. What has changed is the arrival of platforms that started optimizing for engagement, impressions, views, clicks, targeting, and eyeballs, because all of that can be monetized. The people who would be glued to the boob tube now are glued to social media, and instead of getting content fed from Rupert Murdoch and other media barons, it comes from whomever does a better job of paying for ad impressions, gaming social media, and creating clickbait content to get their viewpoint heard.

qwertox 6y ago
I agree, yet I miss platforms like Geocities, where, with no intention of harm, you could create an anonymous site and just write about your hobby. That's no longer possible nowadays. The website counter was the like-button of those days.
- jopsen 6y ago
  What is stopping you?
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Having to choose where to host it, what blog engine to use, write your own static site builder or go with something prebuilt, which analytics solution, what to name the site, how to SEO optimize your content, picking keywords, using keywords, how to create a newsletter, how to moderate comments and filter spam, what CDN to use, how to build a responsive design for mobile, put a GDPR disclaimer, write a privacy policy, how to display tasteful ads, where to display social media sharing icons, which affiliate campaign provider to go with, gzip or br encoding, jpeg or webp images, what url structure to use, what meta tags, how to title a page, test the rendering in different browsers, picking a font, finding a fast font provider, polyfills, minimize JS file size, picking stock images for articles, promoting your blog post on HN, gaming HN to get some upvotes, coming up with things to write about... fuck this.

darawk 6y ago

I think this is actually a little unfair. The internet has actually done all the things we hoped it would do. It has just also done some other things that we didn't anticipate. I'm still hopeful that these are basically just growing pains of novel technology and media, and as our relationship to it matures, we'll develop better patterns around it.

petre 6y ago

Yup, go figure, it made everyone dumber and more paranoid, just like TV. Who would have guessed, ads, tracking, nazis, thought police.

bamboozled 6y ago

Yup it really felt like a stepping stone to a better place. Maybe it still is, just it has some slipper moss growing on it.

flokie 6y ago

The reality is that it did. Do you distinctly forget having to go to a library to do research for a book report? Only getting the slice of news offered locally? The internet is amazing! Easy to forget when we're wired for extraordinary to feel ordinary in time.

copperx 6y ago

I clearly remember sitting in front of the computer, web browser open, saying to myself "I better enjoy this beautiful technology now, before advertising and capitalism take over it." I imagined advertising everywhere. Sadly, I wasn't wrong.