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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,

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.
  - echelon 6y ago
    It doesn't matter what the populations of the users are! My partner uses TikTok, and I do by extension. The only place demographics matter in this argument is how they affect where and how the money is being spent. Incumbents are turning our field into a fiefdom to lock in eyeballs. Some of this is just unconscious natural evolution because of the gravity their decisions have, but some of it is quite deliberate. Google shuttered Google Play Music because it doesn't have the numbers they want and they have another internal effort that duplicates the functionality. With one choice, they changed the music listening behavior of millions of people. YouTube Music sucks at discoverability and favors replays of the same music. In the old web, this didn't happen. This is a small, unimportant anecdote. It's a drop in the sea of changes that are turning the internet to shit. There are hundreds of events and changes I can point to. I'll cut to the chase: Google, Apple, and Facebook need to be split up by the DOJ. Google shouldn't have a browser or any say in web standards, AMP should die, Apple shouldn't lock down iPhone, and Facebook should have extremely flexible data portability. All of these companies should have their ad units stripped away and instead do bidding. There are too many negatives (spying, ads disguised as search results, etc) to having these in the same business units. I haven't touched on it yet, but the Cableization of streaming is also something we need to address. It's a very close parallel to what's happened with the walled gardens. At the heart of the issue is anticompetitive behavior and how it erodes the commons. This has nothing to do with Gen-Z and everything to do with FAANG.
    - georgebcrawford 6y ago
      I get a lot of what you're saying, but I think you're conflating signal-to-noise with disappearance of the old weird web. It's still there, there's just a lot more other stuff out there too. For the most part I agree with what you say about big tech and their dominance, but you don't have to use their products for the most part. The web standards are the big problem in that context. Genuine question - why do you feel you have to use TikTok?
      - chaosharmonic 6y ago
        The problem is that these platforms have, in a very meaningful sense, taken the place of communications infrastructure. The bulk of us use Messenger or iMessage/FaceTime or some other over-the-top service for things we would have otherwise texted, or sent over email, or called someone about using a dialer, and that contributes to the vendor lock-in that they have. It's the new IRC, or AIM, but with an even wider capability gap and a userbase billions deep. Even RCS doesn't solve this, because they're still a technically inferior spec - they don't support E2EE, and they still depend on phone numbers, with the terrible user experiences of arbitrary last-century identifiers and the phone companies you (generally) have to subscribe to to get them. Until social media companies or their chat protocols are forced into some sort of interoperability - a thing we can do, under antitrust law - no amount of data portability will fix this. Because it's a consequence of their owning our networks, not just our content.
- FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
  > Stallman. Not sure what to make of this. Is this a reference to his tarnished sainthood or that the modern web has largely ignored his sage advice? Or something else?

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.
- echelon 6y ago
  It doesn't matter what the populations of the users are! My partner uses TikTok, and I do by extension. The only place demographics matter in this argument is how they affect where and how the money is being spent. Incumbents are turning our field into a fiefdom to lock in eyeballs. Some of this is just unconscious natural evolution because of the gravity their decisions have, but some of it is quite deliberate. Google shuttered Google Play Music because it doesn't have the numbers they want and they have another internal effort that duplicates the functionality. With one choice, they changed the music listening behavior of millions of people. YouTube Music sucks at discoverability and favors replays of the same music. In the old web, this didn't happen. This is a small, unimportant anecdote. It's a drop in the sea of changes that are turning the internet to shit. There are hundreds of events and changes I can point to. I'll cut to the chase: Google, Apple, and Facebook need to be split up by the DOJ. Google shouldn't have a browser or any say in web standards, AMP should die, Apple shouldn't lock down iPhone, and Facebook should have extremely flexible data portability. All of these companies should have their ad units stripped away and instead do bidding. There are too many negatives (spying, ads disguised as search results, etc) to having these in the same business units. I haven't touched on it yet, but the Cableization of streaming is also something we need to address. It's a very close parallel to what's happened with the walled gardens. At the heart of the issue is anticompetitive behavior and how it erodes the commons. This has nothing to do with Gen-Z and everything to do with FAANG.
  - georgebcrawford 6y ago
    I get a lot of what you're saying, but I think you're conflating signal-to-noise with disappearance of the old weird web. It's still there, there's just a lot more other stuff out there too. For the most part I agree with what you say about big tech and their dominance, but you don't have to use their products for the most part. The web standards are the big problem in that context. Genuine question - why do you feel you have to use TikTok?
    - chaosharmonic 6y ago
      The problem is that these platforms have, in a very meaningful sense, taken the place of communications infrastructure. The bulk of us use Messenger or iMessage/FaceTime or some other over-the-top service for things we would have otherwise texted, or sent over email, or called someone about using a dialer, and that contributes to the vendor lock-in that they have. It's the new IRC, or AIM, but with an even wider capability gap and a userbase billions deep. Even RCS doesn't solve this, because they're still a technically inferior spec - they don't support E2EE, and they still depend on phone numbers, with the terrible user experiences of arbitrary last-century identifiers and the phone companies you (generally) have to subscribe to to get them. Until social media companies or their chat protocols are forced into some sort of interoperability - a thing we can do, under antitrust law - no amount of data portability will fix this. Because it's a consequence of their owning our networks, not just our content.
FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
> Stallman. Not sure what to make of this. Is this a reference to his tarnished sainthood or that the modern web has largely ignored his sage advice? Or something else?