8 ms·

Most of this is nonsense. Most of what you're describing is simply an extension of Eternal September. "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just

Most of this is nonsense. Most of what you're describing is simply an extension of Eternal September. "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just that newcomers don't care about them so much. And that's okay. Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? Their main use case is Instagram or TikTok. A ThinkPad makes no sense for them. But I can still buy one. Social media platforms "took over" in the sense of having more eyeballs. But so what? Few if any of those eyeballs are really interested in the things that I'm interested in from websites, blogs, etc. Moreover, websites and blogs are still around, and just as populated as they ever were. It's just that there's a bigger population on social media sites. There ARE multiple search engines. DuckDuckGo even has good policies. True, none of them may be as good as Google. But pretty much ALL of them are better than Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, and all of the old-school competitors who lost to Google. The only thing on this list that's a halfway decent point is Firefox user share. Just to the extent that browser engine monoculture gives Google a lot of power. But as long as the engine is open source, and there's a possibility of more privacy-conscious players leveraging it (e.g. Brave, Vivaldi, etc), then I can live with that. The "positive" bit about Rust being "the language of the future" gives me the impression that you're mostly mourning geek culture being delegated to a side subculture, instead of being the dominant culture of the Internet itself. To an extent, it is a bummer to no longer be at the forefront of the hype wave. But to be honest, now that I'm middle-aged I don't so much care about being at the forefront of the hype wave anyway. As long as I have my crufty greyboard corner in the Internet's basement, I'm happy. And that doesn't really seem to be going anywhere.

echelon 6y ago
> Most of this is nonsense. > Most of what you're describing is simply an extension of Eternal September. "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just that newcomers don't care about them so much. You're missing my point. I don't care that the tech stack changed. I care that everything is locked down and inherently inflexible. Everything has become a rental and we don't have autonomy in the choices.
- StevePerkins 6y ago
  Your comment literally begins with "We've lost so much". "We" haven't. The websites and blogs and desktop applications that you're talking about still exist, as does the general computing hardware to work with it. What's happened is that newer, more vapid content has emerged. Along with more locked-down hardware for working with that. Aimed at a totally different audience of non-technical people, that never would have been "us" anyway. It's the argument of an old white guy, who's mad that immigrants have changed the neighborhood. Yeah, maybe so. But our favorite old restaurants are still there. The bridge club is still open, right next to the bingo hall. It's just that we're a subculture now, instead of the dominant scene.
  - echelon 6y ago
    > Your comment literally begins with "We've lost so much". > "We" haven't. Yes, we have. Look at what's happened to Reddit in the last decade. Companies with that much power over the signal can adjust what we see. Change the ratios to favor content that earns them money. It destroys open discourse. Facebook, Google, and Apple are all doing this. TikTok only lets beautiful people through! I like the app, but that's pretty fucked up. The browser is becoming a monoculture. AMP is taking precedence in the search order. The web long tail is atrophying because there aren't eyes on it anymore. I can't share apps I write with friends that use iPhone. Stallman. It's happening in industry too. Redis and Linux are now AWS. You are seeing past me.
    - StevePerkins 6y ago
      I am disagreeing with you. You are using the term "we" to describe 1990's Internet denizens, and 2020's TikTok browsers, as being the same cultural entity. From that POV, "our" online experience has degraded. I am saying that these are different groups altogether. That the latter has supplanted the former in terms of size and dominance. That all of the things I cared about in the 1990's are still alive and perfectly accessible to me today. That it may be somewhat sad to see the "Internet culture" of old become a subculture, as the casuals rolled in and took it mainstream, but that "we" still exist and are doing fine.
WA 6y ago
Sums up my thoughts in this perfectly. Thanks for writing.
laumars 6y ago
I think he’s point was more about the walled gardens and monoculture. Everything was independent and variety was rife. In fairness, this change hasn’t just happened with IT either. Cars have gotten harder to self-repair. Hardware has increasingly become disposable. Even the life of things like TVs have gotten shorter as they’ve become “smarter”. In general, consumers have gotten lazier and more motivated by pretty things rather than longevity. A trend businesses are very keen to encourage because it makes them more money. It’s not all bad though. For example social networks and smart TVs have become a weird godsend during the lockdown. Would we have coped without them if we didn’t have them? Probably. But I’m still glad we had them.
- novok 6y ago
  I think you forgot MSFT being the super monoculture that hard blocked linux being installed on desktop machines with OEMS. IE6 being the scourge it was and pretty much the only option until firefox came out. How MSFT killed netscape & got an antitrust lawsuit over it. The entire encryption export fight & the clipper chip fight and so on. We look at the past with rose colored glasses. I don't think people really looked at how long lasting their hardware was back then, it was more of a happy accident. We still 'disposed' of hardware with glee, more because of huge moore's law gains. I think a lot of people still use a lot of older hardware you're not aware of either. People use cars from the early 2000s still. People using cars from the 70s wasn't much of a thing in the 90s and american manufacturers were far less reliable.
  - laumars 6y ago
    I hadn’t forgotten about Internet Explorer. But in fairness, Linux wasn’t really quite ready as a primary OS until around the time kHTML and Gecko became good enough most of the time. Plus Opera was free from 2000 too. Before then Internet Explorer was actually the better browser, as painful as it is to write that. I did also occasionally use a browser I’d written myself too (because that was semi-possible with Web 1.0 standards). I also used to use an IRC client I’d written myself. The more annoying walled garden was Windows itself. The 80s and early 90s has such variety then Windows dominated. If there’s one thing that’s better today its that applications are now platform agnostic just so long as Blink/WebKit/Gecko runs on it. So Linux is as much a first class citizen as Windows and macOS.
bartread 6y ago
> Moreover, websites and blogs are still around, and just as populated as they ever were. It's just that there's a bigger population on social media sites. This is absolutely true, but it's also true to say that they're very hard to find nowadays. You can in part blame the dominance of the major platforms, but I think the real culprit is probably SEO: it's very hard to out-SEO anybody with a marketing budget, or the kind of bottom feeders who are willing to spew out spun or other low-quality content that spams search results. There's a bitter irony in realising that, back in the day, I used to bemoan the first page of search results being cluttered with "junk" from GeoCities or wherever, when I was looking for "real", "authoritative" information, whereas now I'd be much more welcoming of that kind of content appearing on page 1 of the search results. And maybe that gets to the truth of it: good, interesting, worthwhile content has always been pretty hard to find online. You had to work for it 20 years ago, and you still have to work for it now.
- wolco 6y ago
  I was deeping through the old web recently. Sites either had really small pictures or full sized pictures scaled down. You just don't see more than 1024px sized quality anymore. Browsing photothumbs instead of scrolling is so much quicker and offers more depth. We did lose a lot. We gained more people with shallower content. Being able to lookup and find a picture of most people is an advantage. But losing flickr quality and album length means instead of a photoset you get a highlight photo with mayhe four combined. Maintaining old sites were always an issue. Costs / site changes brought down good sites/pages so deadlinks were a huge problem. The waybackmachine could bring a site back but they rarely deep indexed or saved media so you mostly got a page full of 'x's. Someone on here could easily build a better search engine indexing older websites and bring life back to those sites. But be warned you've changed. Waiting a week or two or months between replies was common. Having tiny text on mobile is the norm so get ready to scroll. There was a lot of shallow content with some real gems. Patience is required.
  - bartread 6y ago
    Indeed, and there are already search engines like https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ and https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/, which offer more direct access to content off the beaten track.
libraryatnight 6y ago
As someone who sympathizes with the parent, I think it's mostly a lament for a lost favorite hangout. What happened to the internet, for me, feels like when a local restaurant gets featured on diners drive ins and dives and suddenly you can't just walk in and sit down, if you get a table it's too loud and crowded to enjoy, they can't function on just the usual staff so they hire a bunch of asshole hipster waiters that ignore you, and the food quality wavers. The internet got popular. The people who remember it before it was ubiquitous miss what it was and are disappointed by what it became.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  The nuance and poetry of this comparison to a favorite local diner is a refreshing breath of air and conjured up a very similar sensation in thinking about what the web is now compared to the one we had. Thank you.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Here you go : https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/
pbourke 6y ago
> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? Because it used to be that you could start as a browser/gamer and transition to becoming a creator/tinkerer without having to change devices. You can become a creator using the software available in the walled gardens, but only a certain kind - a content producer for the almighty ad engine. The general purpose computer has not disappeared, but it’s no longer the first or default exposure to computing for young people. The phone or tablet is a plateau which will trap many who might move beyond it due to simple economics - it’s hard to justify yet another device if the phone or tablet can do everything that you need it to at the moment.
demux 6y ago
> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? Their main use case is Instagram or TikTok. A ThinkPad makes no sense for them. But I can still buy one. The point is that the structure of the contemporary internet has caused their use case to be what you stated it is. What used to be a plethora of possibilities is now a small number of tailored experiences, and this is directly because of the heavy centralization of the internet. You commented about OP's mention of rust but I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on DHT. The internet could entirely be supported by p2p infrastructure and maintain all the aforementioned properties, yet the predominant connotation of p2p is piracy. This is a more nuanced discussion than you give it credit for.
- visarga 6y ago
  I find the current day internet beats the Winamp era in entertainment, learning, open source, travel, job hunting, hobbies, shopping, art and games. They all have more content, better and more accessible. In the beginning, when the internet was roamed by students and tech guys, there was much enthusiasm for the possibilities, which unfortunately didn't pan out as expected when much of the rest of the world joined in. But that doesn't mean we can't find better options today than before.
Barrin92 6y ago
> "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just that newcomers don't care about them so much. the switch to software as a service has reduced the ability as well as need for people to fix bugs in software and to in a sense even operate their own software. This is a loss. I used to teach intro CS classes at my uni and over the last few years even beginner CS students didn't know how to install an OS or do rudimentary networking stuff, skills people picked up in ca 2000 just by toying around with their desktop systems. The entire thesis is faulty to begin with, people not caring doesn't mean that loss of skills isn't bad. We're also in a continuous decline of physical skills. People may not care that they can't swim, they do care though when they're drowning. (a statistic that sadly has been going up) People don't care about their software being locked down because they don't even know what open software is like. If you're so coddled you don't get to experiment you don't care because you're stunted in development, not because the skills are not valuable.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  Part of the reason for students being unable to install an os or get a network to work is because CS degrees now equal a lot of money, and the people that tinkered with computers all through childhood often lose their places to the kids that spent their time studying how to get into a good university, instead of studying how to do things with computers.
- meroes 6y ago
  And yet there are more compsci than ever, and the field is more diverse. Why does it matter they haven't installed an OS before? Technology advances and the average use case changes too. At some point CS majors stopped knowing what punchards were for. No field is for one specific group. All these complaints come off as trying to lament the inevitable. Compensation and diversity are both up, so however you slice it why not mention that too?
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    > And yet there are more compsci than ever this isn't even true. Number of computer science graduates fell, and has stagnated since the mid aughts. The field is also one of the least diverse, and the reason compensation is up is because there's a shortage of labour, that's how supply and demand works, and it's why so many foreign CS students and tech workers migrate to the US, because the need for tech talent vastly outstrips the number of qualified workers. None of this is inevitable, decline in technical excellence is a preventable choice, both on a cultural and policy level. This however is only doable if kids, from a young age, have the liberty and power to experiment with the tools they are given, rather than destroying their technical literacy by spoon-feeding them locked down tech and services.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alasdair_ 6y ago
> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? I care about this. It’s the same reason I care about consoles versus pc’s. If all a young person has is a console, it’s difficult for them to realize they can change things, instead of just being a consumer. I’m finding it difficult to put into words, but just this week I had to buy my three young children some kind of computer for school. The school suggested chromebooks because they were easy yet I just couldn’t bring myself to get them and got some refurbished macbooks instead. The reason, I guess, is that I want my children to understand technology and to be able to hack it to suit their ends. I don’t want a media consumption device, I want them to have computers. Literally the only reason that I can do the things I can do today is because when I was young, I had access to an 8-bit computer that I could easily write code on, even though I mostly just played games on it. If I’d had a console instead, my life would have been much poorer.

echelon 6y ago

> Most of this is nonsense. > Most of what you're describing is simply an extension of Eternal September. "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just that newcomers don't care about them so much. You're missing my point. I don't care that the tech stack changed. I care that everything is locked down and inherently inflexible. Everything has become a rental and we don't have autonomy in the choices.

StevePerkins 6y ago
Your comment literally begins with "We've lost so much". "We" haven't. The websites and blogs and desktop applications that you're talking about still exist, as does the general computing hardware to work with it. What's happened is that newer, more vapid content has emerged. Along with more locked-down hardware for working with that. Aimed at a totally different audience of non-technical people, that never would have been "us" anyway. It's the argument of an old white guy, who's mad that immigrants have changed the neighborhood. Yeah, maybe so. But our favorite old restaurants are still there. The bridge club is still open, right next to the bingo hall. It's just that we're a subculture now, instead of the dominant scene.
- echelon 6y ago
  > Your comment literally begins with "We've lost so much". > "We" haven't. Yes, we have. Look at what's happened to Reddit in the last decade. Companies with that much power over the signal can adjust what we see. Change the ratios to favor content that earns them money. It destroys open discourse. Facebook, Google, and Apple are all doing this. TikTok only lets beautiful people through! I like the app, but that's pretty fucked up. The browser is becoming a monoculture. AMP is taking precedence in the search order. The web long tail is atrophying because there aren't eyes on it anymore. I can't share apps I write with friends that use iPhone. Stallman. It's happening in industry too. Redis and Linux are now AWS. You are seeing past me.
  - StevePerkins 6y ago
    I am disagreeing with you. You are using the term "we" to describe 1990's Internet denizens, and 2020's TikTok browsers, as being the same cultural entity. From that POV, "our" online experience has degraded. I am saying that these are different groups altogether. That the latter has supplanted the former in terms of size and dominance. That all of the things I cared about in the 1990's are still alive and perfectly accessible to me today. That it may be somewhat sad to see the "Internet culture" of old become a subculture, as the casuals rolled in and took it mainstream, but that "we" still exist and are doing fine.

WA 6y ago

Sums up my thoughts in this perfectly. Thanks for writing.

laumars 6y ago

I think he’s point was more about the walled gardens and monoculture. Everything was independent and variety was rife. In fairness, this change hasn’t just happened with IT either. Cars have gotten harder to self-repair. Hardware has increasingly become disposable. Even the life of things like TVs have gotten shorter as they’ve become “smarter”. In general, consumers have gotten lazier and more motivated by pretty things rather than longevity. A trend businesses are very keen to encourage because it makes them more money. It’s not all bad though. For example social networks and smart TVs have become a weird godsend during the lockdown. Would we have coped without them if we didn’t have them? Probably. But I’m still glad we had them.

novok 6y ago
I think you forgot MSFT being the super monoculture that hard blocked linux being installed on desktop machines with OEMS. IE6 being the scourge it was and pretty much the only option until firefox came out. How MSFT killed netscape & got an antitrust lawsuit over it. The entire encryption export fight & the clipper chip fight and so on. We look at the past with rose colored glasses. I don't think people really looked at how long lasting their hardware was back then, it was more of a happy accident. We still 'disposed' of hardware with glee, more because of huge moore's law gains. I think a lot of people still use a lot of older hardware you're not aware of either. People use cars from the early 2000s still. People using cars from the 70s wasn't much of a thing in the 90s and american manufacturers were far less reliable.
- laumars 6y ago
  I hadn’t forgotten about Internet Explorer. But in fairness, Linux wasn’t really quite ready as a primary OS until around the time kHTML and Gecko became good enough most of the time. Plus Opera was free from 2000 too. Before then Internet Explorer was actually the better browser, as painful as it is to write that. I did also occasionally use a browser I’d written myself too (because that was semi-possible with Web 1.0 standards). I also used to use an IRC client I’d written myself. The more annoying walled garden was Windows itself. The 80s and early 90s has such variety then Windows dominated. If there’s one thing that’s better today its that applications are now platform agnostic just so long as Blink/WebKit/Gecko runs on it. So Linux is as much a first class citizen as Windows and macOS.

bartread 6y ago

> Moreover, websites and blogs are still around, and just as populated as they ever were. It's just that there's a bigger population on social media sites. This is absolutely true, but it's also true to say that they're very hard to find nowadays. You can in part blame the dominance of the major platforms, but I think the real culprit is probably SEO: it's very hard to out-SEO anybody with a marketing budget, or the kind of bottom feeders who are willing to spew out spun or other low-quality content that spams search results. There's a bitter irony in realising that, back in the day, I used to bemoan the first page of search results being cluttered with "junk" from GeoCities or wherever, when I was looking for "real", "authoritative" information, whereas now I'd be much more welcoming of that kind of content appearing on page 1 of the search results. And maybe that gets to the truth of it: good, interesting, worthwhile content has always been pretty hard to find online. You had to work for it 20 years ago, and you still have to work for it now.

wolco 6y ago
I was deeping through the old web recently. Sites either had really small pictures or full sized pictures scaled down. You just don't see more than 1024px sized quality anymore. Browsing photothumbs instead of scrolling is so much quicker and offers more depth. We did lose a lot. We gained more people with shallower content. Being able to lookup and find a picture of most people is an advantage. But losing flickr quality and album length means instead of a photoset you get a highlight photo with mayhe four combined. Maintaining old sites were always an issue. Costs / site changes brought down good sites/pages so deadlinks were a huge problem. The waybackmachine could bring a site back but they rarely deep indexed or saved media so you mostly got a page full of 'x's. Someone on here could easily build a better search engine indexing older websites and bring life back to those sites. But be warned you've changed. Waiting a week or two or months between replies was common. Having tiny text on mobile is the norm so get ready to scroll. There was a lot of shallow content with some real gems. Patience is required.
- bartread 6y ago
  Indeed, and there are already search engines like https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ and https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/, which offer more direct access to content off the beaten track.

libraryatnight 6y ago

As someone who sympathizes with the parent, I think it's mostly a lament for a lost favorite hangout. What happened to the internet, for me, feels like when a local restaurant gets featured on diners drive ins and dives and suddenly you can't just walk in and sit down, if you get a table it's too loud and crowded to enjoy, they can't function on just the usual staff so they hire a bunch of asshole hipster waiters that ignore you, and the food quality wavers. The internet got popular. The people who remember it before it was ubiquitous miss what it was and are disappointed by what it became.

dvtrn 6y ago
The nuance and poetry of this comparison to a favorite local diner is a refreshing breath of air and conjured up a very similar sensation in thinking about what the web is now compared to the one we had. Thank you.
the-dude 6y ago
Here you go : https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/

pbourke 6y ago

> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? Because it used to be that you could start as a browser/gamer and transition to becoming a creator/tinkerer without having to change devices. You can become a creator using the software available in the walled gardens, but only a certain kind - a content producer for the almighty ad engine. The general purpose computer has not disappeared, but it’s no longer the first or default exposure to computing for young people. The phone or tablet is a plateau which will trap many who might move beyond it due to simple economics - it’s hard to justify yet another device if the phone or tablet can do everything that you need it to at the moment.

demux 6y ago

> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? Their main use case is Instagram or TikTok. A ThinkPad makes no sense for them. But I can still buy one. The point is that the structure of the contemporary internet has caused their use case to be what you stated it is. What used to be a plethora of possibilities is now a small number of tailored experiences, and this is directly because of the heavy centralization of the internet. You commented about OP's mention of rust but I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on DHT. The internet could entirely be supported by p2p infrastructure and maintain all the aforementioned properties, yet the predominant connotation of p2p is piracy. This is a more nuanced discussion than you give it credit for.

visarga 6y ago
I find the current day internet beats the Winamp era in entertainment, learning, open source, travel, job hunting, hobbies, shopping, art and games. They all have more content, better and more accessible. In the beginning, when the internet was roamed by students and tech guys, there was much enthusiasm for the possibilities, which unfortunately didn't pan out as expected when much of the rest of the world joined in. But that doesn't mean we can't find better options today than before.

Barrin92 6y ago

> "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just that newcomers don't care about them so much. the switch to software as a service has reduced the ability as well as need for people to fix bugs in software and to in a sense even operate their own software. This is a loss. I used to teach intro CS classes at my uni and over the last few years even beginner CS students didn't know how to install an OS or do rudimentary networking stuff, skills people picked up in ca 2000 just by toying around with their desktop systems. The entire thesis is faulty to begin with, people not caring doesn't mean that loss of skills isn't bad. We're also in a continuous decline of physical skills. People may not care that they can't swim, they do care though when they're drowning. (a statistic that sadly has been going up) People don't care about their software being locked down because they don't even know what open software is like. If you're so coddled you don't get to experiment you don't care because you're stunted in development, not because the skills are not valuable.

alasdair_ 6y ago
Part of the reason for students being unable to install an os or get a network to work is because CS degrees now equal a lot of money, and the people that tinkered with computers all through childhood often lose their places to the kids that spent their time studying how to get into a good university, instead of studying how to do things with computers.
meroes 6y ago
And yet there are more compsci than ever, and the field is more diverse. Why does it matter they haven't installed an OS before? Technology advances and the average use case changes too. At some point CS majors stopped knowing what punchards were for. No field is for one specific group. All these complaints come off as trying to lament the inevitable. Compensation and diversity are both up, so however you slice it why not mention that too?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  > And yet there are more compsci than ever this isn't even true. Number of computer science graduates fell, and has stagnated since the mid aughts. The field is also one of the least diverse, and the reason compensation is up is because there's a shortage of labour, that's how supply and demand works, and it's why so many foreign CS students and tech workers migrate to the US, because the need for tech talent vastly outstrips the number of qualified workers. None of this is inevitable, decline in technical excellence is a preventable choice, both on a cultural and policy level. This however is only doable if kids, from a young age, have the liberty and power to experiment with the tools they are given, rather than destroying their technical literacy by spoon-feeding them locked down tech and services.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

alasdair_ 6y ago

> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? I care about this. It’s the same reason I care about consoles versus pc’s. If all a young person has is a console, it’s difficult for them to realize they can change things, instead of just being a consumer. I’m finding it difficult to put into words, but just this week I had to buy my three young children some kind of computer for school. The school suggested chromebooks because they were easy yet I just couldn’t bring myself to get them and got some refurbished macbooks instead. The reason, I guess, is that I want my children to understand technology and to be able to hack it to suit their ends. I don’t want a media consumption device, I want them to have computers. Literally the only reason that I can do the things I can do today is because when I was young, I had access to an 8-bit computer that I could easily write code on, even though I mostly just played games on it. If I’d had a console instead, my life would have been much poorer.