7 ms·

I still find the web to be so beautiful. I can talk and meet people all around the world. I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic, in 4

by dannyw 6y ago

I still find the web to be so beautiful. I can talk and meet people all around the world. I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic, in 4K60 resolution, on-demand. I can make a livelihood without ever stepping feet out of my home; and conversely, work from almost anywhere that'll give me a visa. The digitized information of our civilization is just one search away.

diggan 6y ago
I agree with you overall, but the internet never been more geofenced than what we see today. Tons of content is no longer available to me as I live in the EU and apparently american companies care so much about my privacy that I can no longer access their websites. Growing up in the 90s, I remember a internet that was without geographical limitations and people doing things for love of that thing, not the perversion we see today...
- bserge 6y ago
  It looks to me like it will get worse... I hope not.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Well, the EU has passed regulations and if I'm a business and don't make money from you and it takes money/effort to even verify whether I'm compliant with those regulations (or if I simply consider them a risk), nothing personal, but I'm going to geoblock you. That's not a comment on whether the regulations are good or bad. It's just that, as a business, if you're not a profitable customer or potential customer, I don't want to interact with you if you create any risk/cost for me.
  - diggan 6y ago
    Yeah, that makes sense. My point is just that, the web is all business now, and people use that to justify their decisions. It didn't use to be that way, but because of the commercialisation of the internet, we're now here, which means tons of people no longer has access to information they would if the web was still focusing on being open.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      It's not all business although commercial activity, or would-be commercial activity, certainly dominates. But a lot of that commercial activity, e.g. most newspapers, simply wasn't online at all at first. And the pioneers in that space found that they had to find ways of monetizing if they were to remain in business. (Which most of them weren't really able to do so they went out of business or radically downsized.) I'd argue that, overall, people have access to way more information than they did 10-20 years ago even if some of that information is paywalled, geoblocked, or in some other form of walled garden. The Internet (including the Web) of the mid to late-ish 90s may have been refreshingly non-commercial and open relative to today but it was also much smaller.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Exactly. People seem to forget that the web is just a way to instantly communicate with other humans, most of whom don’t follow the same exact vision for how things should be ran and monetized. Widespread commerce and monetization of previously 100% open (or previously non-existent) information was only a matter of time once monster-in-the-middle attacks were solved with SSL.
- benbristow 6y ago
  Grab a VPN and that won't be a problem anymore.
  - diggan 6y ago
    Sure, that does solve the problem for me as an individual but what about the rest of the people who don't understand proxies and wouldn't even be able to install one with the instructions?
    - whiddershins 6y ago
      Third party vpns like nord or express vpn or whatever are trivial to install. I’m not commenting on whether they are a good idea to use, but they are easy.
    - papito 6y ago
      Express VPN is fool-proof. The most advanced thing you can do is flash your router with their firmware in order to do house-wide VPN switch for all devices.
    - anonymou2 6y ago
      Tor is very easy to use, just download the bundle and there you go.
- adventured 6y ago
  > the internet never been more geofenced than what we see today. That's because it's increasingly mirroring the real world when it comes to nationalism, regulations, barriers to access, censorship, culture. That outcome was always inevitable, nothing could prevent it. Nations were never going to allow an unencumbered Internet or Web to remain in their territory. If you think the Internet is geofenced now, just wait until you see what it looks like in another ten years. It's going to get dramatically worse. It'll be almost unrecognizable compared to the Internet of 2010. We're only maybe 1/3 the way to our fully balkanized destination. There is also no going back. Governments now understand the technology and will increasingly tightly regulate it accordingly, no matter what it looks like or what it's called. They no longer view it as a separate entity, they view it as falling under the same exact regulatory domain as everything else in the physical space that they claim dominion over. If you have any business or development dreams you want to pursue on the Internet, do it as soon as possible, do not wait. The Internet and Web will only suck more in the future.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    I does indeed seem inevitable. That's why I'm surprised that some still believe cryptocurrencies are going to escape that fate somehow, even though money is even more critical for governments to control than information. But in terms of suckiness I think that it's not primarily caused by regulation (although the cookie law does try very hard to inflict maximum pain for zero gain). The funding model is just broken and I don't really see a way to fix it without losing even more freedom and privcy.
bserge 6y ago
It's truly one of the greatest achievements of this century... possibly ever. I really hope TPTB don't mess it up, it seems they're always trying to. Not enough people appreciate it, just like they don't appreciate the computing power and amount of knowledge in their pockets. I see people on buses, on the streets, in cafes, just endlessly scrolling down in Facebook or something, seeing random people's videos and images... Seems like such a waste imo.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  It was last century, wasn't it?
  - bserge 6y ago
    Yeah, but it was kind of very late, and it only really picked up this century, so I decided to go with that heh
tannhaeuser 6y ago
The web != all things transferred over TCP/IP. Talk and meet? Skype, Zoom don't run on "the web" as such; need dedicated apps even if those may be based on Electron. Video (Youtube) only has left Flash-based playback behind like 3 or 4 years ago; the resulting DRM required for video playback hasn't made purist happy, and resulted in a bitter controversy over TBL accepting interfaces to proprietary DRM into (proprietary) browsers. Digitized information of our civilization being one search away hasn't been my experience at all in the last five years or so, with ads and ad-heavy sites being shoved onto you all the time. Even if it were, there's no strategy going forward to preserve that wealth for generations to come in times of monopolization. As the first ever website demonstrates, the web originally was a means for easy self-publishing of digital text. Today, with platforms, verticals, network effects, the privacy minefield the web has become, and the complexity of the browsers left standing to support modern experiences as expected by consumers, it's questionable if that has actually been achieved.
- bluetomcat 6y ago
  The web of today is a siloed fragmentary space, a media outlet and an amplifier of mass culture. For a minority of people it still is the “repository of knowledge” that was originally envisioned, but for the majority it is a continuation of their lowly existence in digital form. The spirit of the early web was around building hierarchical multi-level directories of stuff, around search and categorization. The Web 2.0 ideology changed all that to transform it into a user-centric “social” experience that required you to use an online identity, build your own profile and be passively bombarded with stuff on your personalized feed.
- dasil003 6y ago
  There's certainly a lot more noise than ever before, but self-publishing to the web has never been easier. Yes, we must remain vigilant against real threats to the open web (social media silos, Chrome dominance & AMP, etc), but thinking back to when I was a kid where you basically had to go to the library to get any information at all, on balance we are far better off now. The fact that commercialism and greed has corrupted the original high-minded ideals and innocence of the early adopters is nothing new—that is true of every great idea through the history of civilization.
breck 6y ago
Right? It's still so amazing. I would say more amazing than ever (thanks to new trailblazers like Alexandra Elbakyan). I was just a kid growing up far removed from the information and happenings of the rest of the world and the web was this magical new thing that connected me to it. It was a bit of a firehose at first (well, I guess still is), but I loved it. The only difference between now and then is that now I know how it all works. Back then the technology was completely magic. It's still just as magical in the human sense, and I am so grateful to TBL and CERN for making it happen and giving it the public! It has been so game changing for me and I grew up in the USA, I have to imagine it would be even more game changing to people curious about the world who grew up in more remote places.
- tylerjwilk00 6y ago
  Ditto. Grew up in the middle of nowhere. The Web gave me access to libraries of information and the work of great minds. It sparked my interest in computers and put me on the career I'm still on to this day. Through other Internet technologies (IRC,IM) I was able meet and interact with other like minded individuals. It's still fascinating but some of the original magic does seem lost but perhaps it's just nostalgia.
sneak 6y ago
> I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic, in 4K60 resolution, on-demand. There are tons of entirely legal topics for which this statement is simply not true. Censorship is rampant on the modern web. Of course, one is free to self-host, but there are special bandwidth deals for the 4K60 platforms that allow them to stream to millions of users, something you won't be permitted to do from the internet connection you have presently.
gniv 6y ago
Your comment reminded me of this video of David Bowie from 1999: https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1339427341387313155 https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1339427341387313155
- andrepd 6y ago
  The excerpt above it, from "The sovereign individual", is pretty depressing. A brand of techno-optimism that we now see has completely fell flat.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Graeber's Utopia of Rules has a terrific post-mortem, eg why we don't have jet packs. Not the whole answer, but still thought provoking.
  - no-s 6y ago
    The Sovereign Individual is a futurist observation. Bowie sold his catalog and continued to be great. Others achieved similar transcendence. Why do you think it's flat? Does it seem mundane now? I experienced that era and it still seems like a magical transformation to me.
neatze 6y ago
Leaning through is why I really love web, there nothing you can't learn on internet, faster then it was ever possible, arguably.
verylittlemeat 6y ago
I think people underestimate how much of the spirit of the old internet still exists. For example, many twitch channels have an active offline chat that isn't advertised or even sanctioned by the actual streamer. I lurk/idle in the offline chat for a streamer who gets maybe 200-300 viewers per stream and there are now about a dozen of us from all over the world who have become friends over a decade. At this point many of us have met in real life or sent each other packages. When I was younger I was very active on a small independent irc server and it was almost an identical experience.

by dannyw 6y ago

diggan 6y ago

I agree with you overall, but the internet never been more geofenced than what we see today. Tons of content is no longer available to me as I live in the EU and apparently american companies care so much about my privacy that I can no longer access their websites. Growing up in the 90s, I remember a internet that was without geographical limitations and people doing things for love of that thing, not the perversion we see today...

bserge 6y ago
It looks to me like it will get worse... I hope not.
ghaff 6y ago
Well, the EU has passed regulations and if I'm a business and don't make money from you and it takes money/effort to even verify whether I'm compliant with those regulations (or if I simply consider them a risk), nothing personal, but I'm going to geoblock you. That's not a comment on whether the regulations are good or bad. It's just that, as a business, if you're not a profitable customer or potential customer, I don't want to interact with you if you create any risk/cost for me.
- diggan 6y ago
  Yeah, that makes sense. My point is just that, the web is all business now, and people use that to justify their decisions. It didn't use to be that way, but because of the commercialisation of the internet, we're now here, which means tons of people no longer has access to information they would if the web was still focusing on being open.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    It's not all business although commercial activity, or would-be commercial activity, certainly dominates. But a lot of that commercial activity, e.g. most newspapers, simply wasn't online at all at first. And the pioneers in that space found that they had to find ways of monetizing if they were to remain in business. (Which most of them weren't really able to do so they went out of business or radically downsized.) I'd argue that, overall, people have access to way more information than they did 10-20 years ago even if some of that information is paywalled, geoblocked, or in some other form of walled garden. The Internet (including the Web) of the mid to late-ish 90s may have been refreshingly non-commercial and open relative to today but it was also much smaller.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Exactly. People seem to forget that the web is just a way to instantly communicate with other humans, most of whom don’t follow the same exact vision for how things should be ran and monetized. Widespread commerce and monetization of previously 100% open (or previously non-existent) information was only a matter of time once monster-in-the-middle attacks were solved with SSL.
benbristow 6y ago
Grab a VPN and that won't be a problem anymore.
- diggan 6y ago
  Sure, that does solve the problem for me as an individual but what about the rest of the people who don't understand proxies and wouldn't even be able to install one with the instructions?
  - whiddershins 6y ago
    Third party vpns like nord or express vpn or whatever are trivial to install. I’m not commenting on whether they are a good idea to use, but they are easy.
  - papito 6y ago
    Express VPN is fool-proof. The most advanced thing you can do is flash your router with their firmware in order to do house-wide VPN switch for all devices.
  - anonymou2 6y ago
    Tor is very easy to use, just download the bundle and there you go.
adventured 6y ago
> the internet never been more geofenced than what we see today. That's because it's increasingly mirroring the real world when it comes to nationalism, regulations, barriers to access, censorship, culture. That outcome was always inevitable, nothing could prevent it. Nations were never going to allow an unencumbered Internet or Web to remain in their territory. If you think the Internet is geofenced now, just wait until you see what it looks like in another ten years. It's going to get dramatically worse. It'll be almost unrecognizable compared to the Internet of 2010. We're only maybe 1/3 the way to our fully balkanized destination. There is also no going back. Governments now understand the technology and will increasingly tightly regulate it accordingly, no matter what it looks like or what it's called. They no longer view it as a separate entity, they view it as falling under the same exact regulatory domain as everything else in the physical space that they claim dominion over. If you have any business or development dreams you want to pursue on the Internet, do it as soon as possible, do not wait. The Internet and Web will only suck more in the future.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  I does indeed seem inevitable. That's why I'm surprised that some still believe cryptocurrencies are going to escape that fate somehow, even though money is even more critical for governments to control than information. But in terms of suckiness I think that it's not primarily caused by regulation (although the cookie law does try very hard to inflict maximum pain for zero gain). The funding model is just broken and I don't really see a way to fix it without losing even more freedom and privcy.

bserge 6y ago

It's truly one of the greatest achievements of this century... possibly ever. I really hope TPTB don't mess it up, it seems they're always trying to. Not enough people appreciate it, just like they don't appreciate the computing power and amount of knowledge in their pockets. I see people on buses, on the streets, in cafes, just endlessly scrolling down in Facebook or something, seeing random people's videos and images... Seems like such a waste imo.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
It was last century, wasn't it?
- bserge 6y ago
  Yeah, but it was kind of very late, and it only really picked up this century, so I decided to go with that heh

tannhaeuser 6y ago

The web != all things transferred over TCP/IP. Talk and meet? Skype, Zoom don't run on "the web" as such; need dedicated apps even if those may be based on Electron. Video (Youtube) only has left Flash-based playback behind like 3 or 4 years ago; the resulting DRM required for video playback hasn't made purist happy, and resulted in a bitter controversy over TBL accepting interfaces to proprietary DRM into (proprietary) browsers. Digitized information of our civilization being one search away hasn't been my experience at all in the last five years or so, with ads and ad-heavy sites being shoved onto you all the time. Even if it were, there's no strategy going forward to preserve that wealth for generations to come in times of monopolization. As the first ever website demonstrates, the web originally was a means for easy self-publishing of digital text. Today, with platforms, verticals, network effects, the privacy minefield the web has become, and the complexity of the browsers left standing to support modern experiences as expected by consumers, it's questionable if that has actually been achieved.

bluetomcat 6y ago
The web of today is a siloed fragmentary space, a media outlet and an amplifier of mass culture. For a minority of people it still is the “repository of knowledge” that was originally envisioned, but for the majority it is a continuation of their lowly existence in digital form. The spirit of the early web was around building hierarchical multi-level directories of stuff, around search and categorization. The Web 2.0 ideology changed all that to transform it into a user-centric “social” experience that required you to use an online identity, build your own profile and be passively bombarded with stuff on your personalized feed.
dasil003 6y ago
There's certainly a lot more noise than ever before, but self-publishing to the web has never been easier. Yes, we must remain vigilant against real threats to the open web (social media silos, Chrome dominance & AMP, etc), but thinking back to when I was a kid where you basically had to go to the library to get any information at all, on balance we are far better off now. The fact that commercialism and greed has corrupted the original high-minded ideals and innocence of the early adopters is nothing new—that is true of every great idea through the history of civilization.

breck 6y ago

Right? It's still so amazing. I would say more amazing than ever (thanks to new trailblazers like Alexandra Elbakyan). I was just a kid growing up far removed from the information and happenings of the rest of the world and the web was this magical new thing that connected me to it. It was a bit of a firehose at first (well, I guess still is), but I loved it. The only difference between now and then is that now I know how it all works. Back then the technology was completely magic. It's still just as magical in the human sense, and I am so grateful to TBL and CERN for making it happen and giving it the public! It has been so game changing for me and I grew up in the USA, I have to imagine it would be even more game changing to people curious about the world who grew up in more remote places.

tylerjwilk00 6y ago
Ditto. Grew up in the middle of nowhere. The Web gave me access to libraries of information and the work of great minds. It sparked my interest in computers and put me on the career I'm still on to this day. Through other Internet technologies (IRC,IM) I was able meet and interact with other like minded individuals. It's still fascinating but some of the original magic does seem lost but perhaps it's just nostalgia.

sneak 6y ago

> I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic, in 4K60 resolution, on-demand. There are tons of entirely legal topics for which this statement is simply not true. Censorship is rampant on the modern web. Of course, one is free to self-host, but there are special bandwidth deals for the 4K60 platforms that allow them to stream to millions of users, something you won't be permitted to do from the internet connection you have presently.

gniv 6y ago

Your comment reminded me of this video of David Bowie from 1999: https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1339427341387313155 https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1339427341387313155

andrepd 6y ago
The excerpt above it, from "The sovereign individual", is pretty depressing. A brand of techno-optimism that we now see has completely fell flat.
- specialist 6y ago
  Graeber's Utopia of Rules has a terrific post-mortem, eg why we don't have jet packs. Not the whole answer, but still thought provoking.
- no-s 6y ago
  The Sovereign Individual is a futurist observation. Bowie sold his catalog and continued to be great. Others achieved similar transcendence. Why do you think it's flat? Does it seem mundane now? I experienced that era and it still seems like a magical transformation to me.

neatze 6y ago

Leaning through is why I really love web, there nothing you can't learn on internet, faster then it was ever possible, arguably.

verylittlemeat 6y ago

I think people underestimate how much of the spirit of the old internet still exists. For example, many twitch channels have an active offline chat that isn't advertised or even sanctioned by the actual streamer. I lurk/idle in the offline chat for a streamer who gets maybe 200-300 viewers per stream and there are now about a dozen of us from all over the world who have become friends over a decade. At this point many of us have met in real life or sent each other packages. When I was younger I was very active on a small independent irc server and it was almost an identical experience.