4 ms·

I saw some statistics showing that the majority of people in the US don't even have broadband (speed) internet, let alone a second computer. Here's an uncomfor

I saw some statistics showing that the majority of people in the US don't even have broadband (speed) internet, let alone a second computer. Here's an uncomfortable thought: The modern day personal website is someone's tiktok profile page. And it's thanks to the fact that everyone has a phone, and tiktok just works. There's an opportunity to learn from this model, though I'm not sure what the lesson is.

dfc 3y ago
I don't think you saw those statistics in the last decade. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  It was actually a few months ago. They specifically took issue with the methodologies of broadband companies in measuring home internet usage speeds. When they conducted their own tests across residential America, they determined that most people were unable to connect to the internet at speeds that we’d consider broadband. As someone who was just in the hospital for nine weeks in an area where the cell towers didn’t seem to provide anything higher than 3mbit in downtown St Louis with a >2 second lag time, I can verify that at least some Americans in my corner of the world live in places where broadband is just not a thing. And most of America is rural America. I retweeted it at the time, but annoyingly it looks like twitter doesn't have a way to search for retweets older than 7 days. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Atheshawwn%20filter%3Anativeretweets&src=typed_query&f=top https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Atheshawwn%20filter%3Anat... Here's some stats showing that some ~27M households (almost a quarter) don't have home internet at all, and presumably just use their phones: https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-households-are-without-internet-connection/ https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-househo... Frustratingly, I can find the wolfram alpha statistics I was calculating at the time, but not the article itself that I got them from. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=162.8+million+divided+by+america%27s+population+age+9+to+80 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=162.8+million+divided+b... EDIT: Aha, 162.8 million was the magic number that started turning some some search results. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/technology/digital-divide-us-fcc-microsoft.html#:~:text=Over%20all%2C%20Microsoft%20concluded%20that,particularly%20stark%20in%20rural%20areas https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/technology/digital-divide.... The study was from 2018, so I wonder how it's changed in the past five years.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    162.8 / 331.9 = 49% of the whole US population. That seems extremely different from loads of statistics which weren't tracking access but whether households actually had broadband at home. I'd like to see the actual proof of that and their real testing strategies instead of just taking Microsoft at their word on that one. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro... > Among all households in 2018, 92% had at least one type of computer and 85% had a broadband internet subscription. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer-internet-use.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer... > And most of America is rural America What? > Despite the increase in the urban population, urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population, down from 80.7% in 2010. > https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... As for those who just use their phones at home, if their phones do get above broadband speeds, would that not classify them as having home broadband?
vlan0 3y ago
I think your take hits the nail on the head. Most people have zero interest in running their own website.we live in a world where people have no clue how things work. They just want it to work and not have to understand how. People could change their own brakes and oil too. But how many folks want to? Not many. It doesn’t provide value to them. Just like a personal website wouldn’t provide value to them. Hence, like you said, social media pages are their “personal website”.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  The fact that most people don’t understand how things work is a testament to good design. You shouldn’t have to understand how a car works to use a car. You shouldn’t have to understand how a lightbulb works to switch on the lights. Abstraction allows us to build on prior technologies. It’s also a practical reality of living in a complex world. Someone using Excel isn’t thinking about how that app was programmed. Most computer programmers don’t have in-depth knowledge of how a CPU works. And they definitely don’t understand the chemistry of a transistor. The fact is we live in a world too complex to understand it all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
  - _factor 3y ago
    It’s only a bad thing if we live on a world we can’t breathe on anymore because the air filter guy fell asleep.
- nmz 3y ago
  There's also environmental factors to consider in anything physical, sure, you changed your oil, but what do you do with the oil now? There's no electrical pollution in running a server.
  - vlan0 3y ago
    If you live in the US. Auto parts stores take used oil. As do Walmarts with auto service centers. I’ve never had an issue.
samstave 3y ago
I've actually thought a bit about this over the years, and wrote a whitepaper in ~2002 on such... (sorry that file evaporated a decade+ ago) Whereby ; And this was prior to Cloud BTW (and I met with some goog eng friends in 2006 or so about it, but they said it would never be a thing: I wanted a cloud based desktop, with your personal encrytped access key being your phone, which you would dock, and then grab an instance of your desktop from the cloud... (a while later motorola tried to launch such a device...) Anyway, here is my current take: Every phone should be able to have a way to manage your own APIs such that your links to whatever media buckets you have/sub to - you can very easily just create little widgets that will pull your IGs, HNs, whatever and you can just slide the content-boxes around and organize a page very easily... Add a content-box (we attempted to build a site around this idea in ~2005 - no bueno - as mobile didnt exist as it does today) the content box will be [text, pics, audio, links, etc] and you can nest one on top of the other... So add an element - then drop it on top of another to have the link (think tooltip hover to whatever child box on parent) etc... Cloudflare the F out of it - and allow for black/whitelists of content within the profile of the user (never link to FB or Twixxxter, whatever) You get the gist.;
- murphyslaw 3y ago
  > I wanted a cloud based desktop, with your personal encrytped access key being your phone Sun used to have a desktop product similar to this, it worked with an authentication token like a company badge or whatever. You could go sit at any desk and login and you'd have your own desktop environment including audio. Of course the whole thing was proprietary and it was server side so you needed heavy servers. Also logging in remotely wasn't possible IIRC cause it required a huge network pipe (aka on-premises). It died a quiet death.
  - samstave 3y ago
    Yeah, I recall those -- was that the invention of "zero desktop" nomenclature - even though a terminal to a mainframe/AS\400 was the same thing :-) (or a vax (never used a vax)
eternityforest 3y ago
I think the lesson is that stuff that just works is awesome, and it would be really cool if we had a platform with the expressiveness of raw HTML, with the ease of use of Tumblr, and the portability and backup-ability of GitHub. Most of the cool things about personal sites can be replicated without the needless toil of actually messing with hosting yourself. Even Markdown isn't enough. I want a site where we can view posts on a calendar, write things in full BBCode, view by tags or heirarchy (Or a hybrid, like #stories.romance), clone your stuff as a git repo and edit locally, etc.
dylan604 3y ago
Today it's tiktok. Prior it was Facebook. MySpace. GeoCities. Notice the trend? It was always something else. Future tomorrow, it won't be tiktok
paulcole 3y ago
Why is that an uncomfortable thought? Most people don’t want or need a personal website. I know I don’t — what the heck would I use it for?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dfc 3y ago

I don't think you saw those statistics in the last decade. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...

sillysaurusx 3y ago
It was actually a few months ago. They specifically took issue with the methodologies of broadband companies in measuring home internet usage speeds. When they conducted their own tests across residential America, they determined that most people were unable to connect to the internet at speeds that we’d consider broadband. As someone who was just in the hospital for nine weeks in an area where the cell towers didn’t seem to provide anything higher than 3mbit in downtown St Louis with a >2 second lag time, I can verify that at least some Americans in my corner of the world live in places where broadband is just not a thing. And most of America is rural America. I retweeted it at the time, but annoyingly it looks like twitter doesn't have a way to search for retweets older than 7 days. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Atheshawwn%20filter%3Anativeretweets&src=typed_query&f=top https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Atheshawwn%20filter%3Anat... Here's some stats showing that some ~27M households (almost a quarter) don't have home internet at all, and presumably just use their phones: https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-households-are-without-internet-connection/ https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-househo... Frustratingly, I can find the wolfram alpha statistics I was calculating at the time, but not the article itself that I got them from. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=162.8+million+divided+by+america%27s+population+age+9+to+80 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=162.8+million+divided+b... EDIT: Aha, 162.8 million was the magic number that started turning some some search results. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/technology/digital-divide-us-fcc-microsoft.html#:~:text=Over%20all%2C%20Microsoft%20concluded%20that,particularly%20stark%20in%20rural%20areas https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/technology/digital-divide.... The study was from 2018, so I wonder how it's changed in the past five years.
- vel0city 3y ago
  162.8 / 331.9 = 49% of the whole US population. That seems extremely different from loads of statistics which weren't tracking access but whether households actually had broadband at home. I'd like to see the actual proof of that and their real testing strategies instead of just taking Microsoft at their word on that one. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro... > Among all households in 2018, 92% had at least one type of computer and 85% had a broadband internet subscription. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer-internet-use.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer... > And most of America is rural America What? > Despite the increase in the urban population, urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population, down from 80.7% in 2010. > https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... As for those who just use their phones at home, if their phones do get above broadband speeds, would that not classify them as having home broadband?

vlan0 3y ago

I think your take hits the nail on the head. Most people have zero interest in running their own website.we live in a world where people have no clue how things work. They just want it to work and not have to understand how. People could change their own brakes and oil too. But how many folks want to? Not many. It doesn’t provide value to them. Just like a personal website wouldn’t provide value to them. Hence, like you said, social media pages are their “personal website”.

janalsncm 3y ago
The fact that most people don’t understand how things work is a testament to good design. You shouldn’t have to understand how a car works to use a car. You shouldn’t have to understand how a lightbulb works to switch on the lights. Abstraction allows us to build on prior technologies. It’s also a practical reality of living in a complex world. Someone using Excel isn’t thinking about how that app was programmed. Most computer programmers don’t have in-depth knowledge of how a CPU works. And they definitely don’t understand the chemistry of a transistor. The fact is we live in a world too complex to understand it all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
- _factor 3y ago
  It’s only a bad thing if we live on a world we can’t breathe on anymore because the air filter guy fell asleep.
nmz 3y ago
There's also environmental factors to consider in anything physical, sure, you changed your oil, but what do you do with the oil now? There's no electrical pollution in running a server.
- vlan0 3y ago
  If you live in the US. Auto parts stores take used oil. As do Walmarts with auto service centers. I’ve never had an issue.

samstave 3y ago

I've actually thought a bit about this over the years, and wrote a whitepaper in ~2002 on such... (sorry that file evaporated a decade+ ago) Whereby ; And this was prior to Cloud BTW (and I met with some goog eng friends in 2006 or so about it, but they said it would never be a thing: I wanted a cloud based desktop, with your personal encrytped access key being your phone, which you would dock, and then grab an instance of your desktop from the cloud... (a while later motorola tried to launch such a device...) Anyway, here is my current take: Every phone should be able to have a way to manage your own APIs such that your links to whatever media buckets you have/sub to - you can very easily just create little widgets that will pull your IGs, HNs, whatever and you can just slide the content-boxes around and organize a page very easily... Add a content-box (we attempted to build a site around this idea in ~2005 - no bueno - as mobile didnt exist as it does today) the content box will be [text, pics, audio, links, etc] and you can nest one on top of the other... So add an element - then drop it on top of another to have the link (think tooltip hover to whatever child box on parent) etc... Cloudflare the F out of it - and allow for black/whitelists of content within the profile of the user (never link to FB or Twixxxter, whatever) You get the gist.;

murphyslaw 3y ago
> I wanted a cloud based desktop, with your personal encrytped access key being your phone Sun used to have a desktop product similar to this, it worked with an authentication token like a company badge or whatever. You could go sit at any desk and login and you'd have your own desktop environment including audio. Of course the whole thing was proprietary and it was server side so you needed heavy servers. Also logging in remotely wasn't possible IIRC cause it required a huge network pipe (aka on-premises). It died a quiet death.
- samstave 3y ago
  Yeah, I recall those -- was that the invention of "zero desktop" nomenclature - even though a terminal to a mainframe/AS\400 was the same thing :-) (or a vax (never used a vax)

eternityforest 3y ago

I think the lesson is that stuff that just works is awesome, and it would be really cool if we had a platform with the expressiveness of raw HTML, with the ease of use of Tumblr, and the portability and backup-ability of GitHub. Most of the cool things about personal sites can be replicated without the needless toil of actually messing with hosting yourself. Even Markdown isn't enough. I want a site where we can view posts on a calendar, write things in full BBCode, view by tags or heirarchy (Or a hybrid, like #stories.romance), clone your stuff as a git repo and edit locally, etc.

dylan604 3y ago

Today it's tiktok. Prior it was Facebook. MySpace. GeoCities. Notice the trend? It was always something else. Future tomorrow, it won't be tiktok

paulcole 3y ago

Why is that an uncomfortable thought? Most people don’t want or need a personal website. I know I don’t — what the heck would I use it for?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]