4 ms·

The Internet Isn’t Meant to Be So Small

clpm4j 4y ago
"I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it." The internet is still vast. People just choose to congregate and use the same handful of apps. People are choosing not to go out and find it. Most people are also choosing not to go out and create it. It's a people problem, not a tech problem, in my opinion.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  It doesn’t help when search engines only want to show the most SEO optimized trash available though.
  - _piif 4y ago
    The issue is that there is a lot of literal trash in form of autogenerated content from bots to search through. You need a ranking of some kind if you want to find anything of relevance which will always be subject to exploitation by others. I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then.
    - horsawlarway 4y ago
      I think this is basically it. The problem is that any automated discovery mechanism is quickly ruined by automated spam/ads created to exploit it. So the most reliable discovery mechanisms are still small communities of real people. But because they're good - they attract more and more people until the quality reverts to the mean, and it's mostly just junk/spam/ads again. Social media companies are extremely prone to cancer - if you will. A large part of long they survive is in how good they are at fighting off the junk created by their own users. In a way - the internet (or at least the DNS system) is just the top level social media company that made absolutely no attempt to fight the cancer. It's value died a long time ago, and it's mostly a wasteland of junk now.
    - bsder 4y ago
      > I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then. It was a problem back then, but we had multiple search engines instead of just Google. If you optimized for Google, you almost certainly de-optimized for the others. Once Google became the defacto monopoly, websites didn't have to worry about this anymore. What people need is a search engine that they can tune to themselves. Unfortunately, the net is really big now, and it's not clear how you can index it in a cost-effective manner.
    - bdw5204 4y ago
      In the early web (circa 2000 and earlier), search engines were awful so most people used human-curated directories (Yahoo, DMOZ), web rings or links pages to find new web sites to visit. The web rings were organized groups of web sites that linked to each other in a circular fashion and it was normal for every web site to have a links page that linked to similar sites much like you'd still see on a college professor's personal site. I'm familiar with this because I heavily used the web of that era as a pre-teen. Since search engines are now flooded with automatically generated trash, the solution is probably a return to the old ways this problem was solved before Google.
- macrolocal 4y ago
  One complication is that mainstream tech spends billions precisely to prevent them from doing that.
- ghusto 4y ago
  In the same way that people "choose" one of two political parties, sure. Hide the alternatives, and it becomes a monopoly problem, not a people problem. I'll burn some imaginary internet points and go further; it's an American problem. The kind of behaviour that's making this possible is easy in poorly regulated capitalism. We have capitalism in Europe too, but there are sensible guide-rails. That's not socialism, it's just common sense.
- causi 4y ago
  Personally I just hate the transition from "the catalog" to "the feed". No matter what information source you're looking at it's just an endless scrolling list of content or links to content, all of it implicitly ephemeral. I miss going to a site and clicking on a category of thing and then getting everything of that type presented to me in a visually appealing way. If I wanted, say, reviews of digital media players I would get a grid of nice thumbnails, and if I wanted to only look at, say, Sony products that was one click. Now you have to make bricks without straw by using a tag system that doesn't return results in any particular order and may or may not include everything.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Is it really though? I would imagine most people don’t have websites full of information anymore because they’ve also consolidated into a few small websites.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > People just choose to congregate and use the same handful of apps. And this has always been true, even in "the days when the internet was vast" according to the author. Back when AOL was the largest internet provider, most AOL subscribers thought AOL was "the Internet", just as many Facebook users now seem to believe that Facebook is "the Internet". The AOL subscribers had no idea that they could go anywhere on the Internet, not just to the places that AOL pointed them. (I was on CompuServe in those days, not AOL, and CompuServe users seemed to be at least somewhat more savvy on average--and CompuServe wasn't as insistent on being a gatekeeper as AOL was.)
- etrautmann 4y ago
  I think it’s not so binary. Defaults and friction matter, so the design of platforms shapes the content in fundamental ways where it may be hard to imagine the alternatives.
- onetokeoverthe 4y ago
  [dead]
- zamnos 4y ago
  I agree it's a people problem - but in the other direction. If you don't use Facebook or aren't part of some groups, if you don't have a bunch of Instagram friends, if you don't use YouTube, If you don't have TikTok installed; whatever your reason for that is your own business, but if you're complaining that people aren't creating content, or that there's no content, and then purposefully ignoring where the people are and where the content is, I think that's on you.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  It’s absolutely not true that it’s a “people problem” not a “tech problem”. Tech companies have deployed many billions of dollars, and the smartest minds in the world to ensure that their little fiefdoms are the ones that become the internet. First, they deploy psychology and tap into basic human behavior knowledge, to ensure people are addicted to their platform and spend most of their time there instead of anywhere else. Further, companies like Apple originally made it difficult for an open source, or a hobbyist to create an app that can be distributed on iPhones, first by instituting their $100 dev account requirement, and then building an insanely Kafkaesque approval process. Then there’s the bait and switches. Google went ahead and bought Blogger/Blogspot when it got popular and then stopped investing in it beyond making it easier to insert Adsense. Then Google destroyed the non-Twitter sharing ecosystem by bringing the majority of the RSS ecosystem to Google Reader, and killing it basically overnight. Apple used to provide simple personal website publishing with their iWeb products, which they pulled. Then there were the non investment and destruction of Flash, which had become a huge source of internet creativity with no equivalent alternative. Apple famously killed Flash, and probably for good reasons considering Adobe was focused simply on extracting money from it, but Apple didn’t bother creating any authoring tools that made it possible for random middle school kids to create cool stuff with. Facebook originally presented its pages as something that would be openly accessible to the internet. But once people created a bunch of them started requiring logins. We rightfully criticize MS for their embrace, extend and extinguish strategy that they’ve deployed against so many of their competitors. The reality, however, is that even “better” companies like Apple, Google, have done the same thing, except they’ve done it to the Open web, and because the open web doesn’t have billions of marketing and lobbying dollars to complain, we didn’t even realize that was happening.
gmuslera 4y ago
What is small is the human brain. Everyone want to be in "the" place where everyone else (or at least, they want to connect with) is, all those silos promise that in a way or another. Federated solutions, using @domain or service, rss feeds and so on are some solutions for a less centralized internet, but with the number of people on internet moving most of them to one different system is not easy. And again, that still would be one, not a diverse plethora of really different systems.
paulddraper 4y ago
The internet is vast and growing ever more vast. It's getting a "skinny waist," a la TCP.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Sorry, what does TCP have to do with it?
  - paulddraper 4y ago
    An analogy. TCP is the "skinny waist" of the internet protocol stack. https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html Large websites are becoming the "skinny waist" of the web. A wide variety of users and a wide variety of content, exchanged over relatively few pipes.
  - 2snakes 4y ago
    Vast vs. skinny comparison, but from a technical networking perspective.
pgrote 4y ago
The way I read it, the author of the article isn't wanting an expanded internet. The author's focus seems to be on siloed places to exist online. I was confused as they lament the loss of google reader. You still have those options available through RSS using other tools. At the same time they prefer a regulated, regimented site with rules and expected behavior. UGC will always have all sides of cultures, viewpoints and opinions, which is what the internet on whole provides.
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  google reader was a social rss reader. I could read and click share, and read things from my friends feeds as they were also sharing. There was also threaded commenting. It was also extremely lightly regulated compared to what we have now. It was generally either chronological by feed or chronological all feeds. you put what you want in the hopper, your friends add a few things here and there, and then that was it, you saw the posts from those people. It was an actual rss reader and in return they were probably collecting metrics about what people thought was worth the read, who was sharing with who . . .. that's all stuff that I don't know that I minded sharing with the google of old. I can see why it's easy to feel that way now but it's a completely unrecognizable company to the one that was running g-reader.
sublinear 4y ago
You don't really need search engines or platforms to publish your best content and get the best audience. The history of the music industry is a goldmine of lessons about publicity and censorship. The problem is cultural and will resolve itself when there's just barely enough "cool" people out there who reject the notions of trying to be the next big podcast, instagram star, youtube personality, etc. It doesn't need to be a sweeping change, but enough to make others see the opportunity and creative freedom of being independent. Those creatives are statistically unlikely, but not because of a lack of talent. Rather it's a lack of incentive. There's always enough talent and interest to support the independent thing away from corporate interests. When things become homogenous enough to piss enough people off in ways that mean more to them than money, it will happen. EDIT: oh here come the anti-capitalists... hehe that's a clue about where values are today. need to be more brave than that if you want good art to come back. past a certain point, money is pretty damn orthogonal to creativity. i.e. just make stuff and put it out there for the cultural impact instead of whether you got attribution or got paid; you're not a loser for doing that.
- teucris 4y ago
  While there are people chasing fame, artists trying to reach a huge audience aren’t always doing it for fame. When you have to make a choice between pursuing creativity and eating, I’m pretty sure I know which you’ll pick. There is a path that lets you (possibly) do both: generating revenue from a very large audience. That requires making concessions according to which walled gardens and silos exist, making content with broad appeal or appeases the gate keepers.

"I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it." The internet is still vast. People just choose to congregate and use the same handful of apps. People are choosing not to go out and find it. Most people are also choosing not to go out and create it. It's a people problem, not a tech problem, in my opinion.

the_only_law 4y ago
It doesn’t help when search engines only want to show the most SEO optimized trash available though.
- _piif 4y ago
  The issue is that there is a lot of literal trash in form of autogenerated content from bots to search through. You need a ranking of some kind if you want to find anything of relevance which will always be subject to exploitation by others. I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    I think this is basically it. The problem is that any automated discovery mechanism is quickly ruined by automated spam/ads created to exploit it. So the most reliable discovery mechanisms are still small communities of real people. But because they're good - they attract more and more people until the quality reverts to the mean, and it's mostly just junk/spam/ads again. Social media companies are extremely prone to cancer - if you will. A large part of long they survive is in how good they are at fighting off the junk created by their own users. In a way - the internet (or at least the DNS system) is just the top level social media company that made absolutely no attempt to fight the cancer. It's value died a long time ago, and it's mostly a wasteland of junk now.
  - bsder 4y ago
    > I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then. It was a problem back then, but we had multiple search engines instead of just Google. If you optimized for Google, you almost certainly de-optimized for the others. Once Google became the defacto monopoly, websites didn't have to worry about this anymore. What people need is a search engine that they can tune to themselves. Unfortunately, the net is really big now, and it's not clear how you can index it in a cost-effective manner.
  - bdw5204 4y ago
    In the early web (circa 2000 and earlier), search engines were awful so most people used human-curated directories (Yahoo, DMOZ), web rings or links pages to find new web sites to visit. The web rings were organized groups of web sites that linked to each other in a circular fashion and it was normal for every web site to have a links page that linked to similar sites much like you'd still see on a college professor's personal site. I'm familiar with this because I heavily used the web of that era as a pre-teen. Since search engines are now flooded with automatically generated trash, the solution is probably a return to the old ways this problem was solved before Google.
macrolocal 4y ago
One complication is that mainstream tech spends billions precisely to prevent them from doing that.
ghusto 4y ago
In the same way that people "choose" one of two political parties, sure. Hide the alternatives, and it becomes a monopoly problem, not a people problem. I'll burn some imaginary internet points and go further; it's an American problem. The kind of behaviour that's making this possible is easy in poorly regulated capitalism. We have capitalism in Europe too, but there are sensible guide-rails. That's not socialism, it's just common sense.
causi 4y ago
Personally I just hate the transition from "the catalog" to "the feed". No matter what information source you're looking at it's just an endless scrolling list of content or links to content, all of it implicitly ephemeral. I miss going to a site and clicking on a category of thing and then getting everything of that type presented to me in a visually appealing way. If I wanted, say, reviews of digital media players I would get a grid of nice thumbnails, and if I wanted to only look at, say, Sony products that was one click. Now you have to make bricks without straw by using a tag system that doesn't return results in any particular order and may or may not include everything.
edgyquant 4y ago
Is it really though? I would imagine most people don’t have websites full of information anymore because they’ve also consolidated into a few small websites.
pdonis 4y ago
> People just choose to congregate and use the same handful of apps. And this has always been true, even in "the days when the internet was vast" according to the author. Back when AOL was the largest internet provider, most AOL subscribers thought AOL was "the Internet", just as many Facebook users now seem to believe that Facebook is "the Internet". The AOL subscribers had no idea that they could go anywhere on the Internet, not just to the places that AOL pointed them. (I was on CompuServe in those days, not AOL, and CompuServe users seemed to be at least somewhat more savvy on average--and CompuServe wasn't as insistent on being a gatekeeper as AOL was.)
etrautmann 4y ago
I think it’s not so binary. Defaults and friction matter, so the design of platforms shapes the content in fundamental ways where it may be hard to imagine the alternatives.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
[dead]
zamnos 4y ago
I agree it's a people problem - but in the other direction. If you don't use Facebook or aren't part of some groups, if you don't have a bunch of Instagram friends, if you don't use YouTube, If you don't have TikTok installed; whatever your reason for that is your own business, but if you're complaining that people aren't creating content, or that there's no content, and then purposefully ignoring where the people are and where the content is, I think that's on you.
rhaway84773 4y ago
It’s absolutely not true that it’s a “people problem” not a “tech problem”. Tech companies have deployed many billions of dollars, and the smartest minds in the world to ensure that their little fiefdoms are the ones that become the internet. First, they deploy psychology and tap into basic human behavior knowledge, to ensure people are addicted to their platform and spend most of their time there instead of anywhere else. Further, companies like Apple originally made it difficult for an open source, or a hobbyist to create an app that can be distributed on iPhones, first by instituting their $100 dev account requirement, and then building an insanely Kafkaesque approval process. Then there’s the bait and switches. Google went ahead and bought Blogger/Blogspot when it got popular and then stopped investing in it beyond making it easier to insert Adsense. Then Google destroyed the non-Twitter sharing ecosystem by bringing the majority of the RSS ecosystem to Google Reader, and killing it basically overnight. Apple used to provide simple personal website publishing with their iWeb products, which they pulled. Then there were the non investment and destruction of Flash, which had become a huge source of internet creativity with no equivalent alternative. Apple famously killed Flash, and probably for good reasons considering Adobe was focused simply on extracting money from it, but Apple didn’t bother creating any authoring tools that made it possible for random middle school kids to create cool stuff with. Facebook originally presented its pages as something that would be openly accessible to the internet. But once people created a bunch of them started requiring logins. We rightfully criticize MS for their embrace, extend and extinguish strategy that they’ve deployed against so many of their competitors. The reality, however, is that even “better” companies like Apple, Google, have done the same thing, except they’ve done it to the Open web, and because the open web doesn’t have billions of marketing and lobbying dollars to complain, we didn’t even realize that was happening.

gmuslera 4y ago

What is small is the human brain. Everyone want to be in "the" place where everyone else (or at least, they want to connect with) is, all those silos promise that in a way or another. Federated solutions, using @domain or service, rss feeds and so on are some solutions for a less centralized internet, but with the number of people on internet moving most of them to one different system is not easy. And again, that still would be one, not a diverse plethora of really different systems.

paulddraper 4y ago

The internet is vast and growing ever more vast. It's getting a "skinny waist," a la TCP.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Sorry, what does TCP have to do with it?
- paulddraper 4y ago
  An analogy. TCP is the "skinny waist" of the internet protocol stack. https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html Large websites are becoming the "skinny waist" of the web. A wide variety of users and a wide variety of content, exchanged over relatively few pipes.
- 2snakes 4y ago
  Vast vs. skinny comparison, but from a technical networking perspective.

pgrote 4y ago

The way I read it, the author of the article isn't wanting an expanded internet. The author's focus seems to be on siloed places to exist online. I was confused as they lament the loss of google reader. You still have those options available through RSS using other tools. At the same time they prefer a regulated, regimented site with rules and expected behavior. UGC will always have all sides of cultures, viewpoints and opinions, which is what the internet on whole provides.

jethro_tell 4y ago
google reader was a social rss reader. I could read and click share, and read things from my friends feeds as they were also sharing. There was also threaded commenting. It was also extremely lightly regulated compared to what we have now. It was generally either chronological by feed or chronological all feeds. you put what you want in the hopper, your friends add a few things here and there, and then that was it, you saw the posts from those people. It was an actual rss reader and in return they were probably collecting metrics about what people thought was worth the read, who was sharing with who . . .. that's all stuff that I don't know that I minded sharing with the google of old. I can see why it's easy to feel that way now but it's a completely unrecognizable company to the one that was running g-reader.

sublinear 4y ago

You don't really need search engines or platforms to publish your best content and get the best audience. The history of the music industry is a goldmine of lessons about publicity and censorship. The problem is cultural and will resolve itself when there's just barely enough "cool" people out there who reject the notions of trying to be the next big podcast, instagram star, youtube personality, etc. It doesn't need to be a sweeping change, but enough to make others see the opportunity and creative freedom of being independent. Those creatives are statistically unlikely, but not because of a lack of talent. Rather it's a lack of incentive. There's always enough talent and interest to support the independent thing away from corporate interests. When things become homogenous enough to piss enough people off in ways that mean more to them than money, it will happen. EDIT: oh here come the anti-capitalists... hehe that's a clue about where values are today. need to be more brave than that if you want good art to come back. past a certain point, money is pretty damn orthogonal to creativity. i.e. just make stuff and put it out there for the cultural impact instead of whether you got attribution or got paid; you're not a loser for doing that.

teucris 4y ago
While there are people chasing fame, artists trying to reach a huge audience aren’t always doing it for fame. When you have to make a choice between pursuing creativity and eating, I’m pretty sure I know which you’ll pick. There is a path that lets you (possibly) do both: generating revenue from a very large audience. That requires making concessions according to which walled gardens and silos exist, making content with broad appeal or appeases the gate keepers.