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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. Fr

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.
    - georgebcrawford 6y ago
      We’re definitely on the same page. I’ve been evangelising about interoperability for several years, meeting blank or glazed over stares the whole way. I’m definitely jaded.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  StevePerkins has already done an excellent job trying to showing you why you're wrong. I don't know why this is so hard for you to grasp. For people who liked the way things were in 1990 (or whenever) all that technology is still out there and in use (with a few minor and largely unimportant exceptions). It's even better than it used to be! You can get an RPi system for HOW MUCH! these days. Internet service is often good enough to host your own (small) server if you really want to do that. If you don't, there are dozens of excellent cheap hosting services. Everybody uses open source compilers. Linux is everywhere, opening stuff up (not all stuff, but a lot of stuff). Now, do the majority of people who use "the internet" use any of this stuff, or even care about. They do not. I would suggest that what you care about is precisely what Steve noted: Eternal September. You're unhappy that the vast majority of users of "the internet" don't care about the sorts of tools, platforms and culture that you do (and to a large extent, I do too). But those platforms, tools and capabilities have not gone away. They are all out there, and in most ways are healthier than ever. They have not become a part of the majority experience of "the internet" (Android doesn't really count, though in a few small ways, it's notable). That might matter to you. But it doesn't mean that the things you prefer are gone, or that "the internet" has been turned to shit. It means there's more than one "the internet" out there, and most people interact with a version of it that you don't like. You can rail against that if you like, but please don't claim that it has destroyed the other versions, because it hasn't.

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.
  - georgebcrawford 6y ago
    We’re definitely on the same page. I’ve been evangelising about interoperability for several years, meeting blank or glazed over stares the whole way. I’m definitely jaded.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
StevePerkins has already done an excellent job trying to showing you why you're wrong. I don't know why this is so hard for you to grasp. For people who liked the way things were in 1990 (or whenever) all that technology is still out there and in use (with a few minor and largely unimportant exceptions). It's even better than it used to be! You can get an RPi system for HOW MUCH! these days. Internet service is often good enough to host your own (small) server if you really want to do that. If you don't, there are dozens of excellent cheap hosting services. Everybody uses open source compilers. Linux is everywhere, opening stuff up (not all stuff, but a lot of stuff). Now, do the majority of people who use "the internet" use any of this stuff, or even care about. They do not. I would suggest that what you care about is precisely what Steve noted: Eternal September. You're unhappy that the vast majority of users of "the internet" don't care about the sorts of tools, platforms and culture that you do (and to a large extent, I do too). But those platforms, tools and capabilities have not gone away. They are all out there, and in most ways are healthier than ever. They have not become a part of the majority experience of "the internet" (Android doesn't really count, though in a few small ways, it's notable). That might matter to you. But it doesn't mean that the things you prefer are gone, or that "the internet" has been turned to shit. It means there's more than one "the internet" out there, and most people interact with a version of it that you don't like. You can rail against that if you like, but please don't claim that it has destroyed the other versions, because it hasn't.