4 ms·

I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place. My vision used to be more neutral, then around 2013

I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place. My vision used to be more neutral, then around 2013 it shifted to expecting companies to actively be hostile to me, specially regarding software. I do relate to seeing elders feeling a sense of bliss upon using WhatsApp to connect to relatives living far away, or friends/acquaintances they couldn't keep in touch with anymore (99% of the time due to age-related issues). But otherwise, if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control how I use that program, then they likely never had my best interest as a priority in the first place. Sometimes, using such programs is not a choice, or it comes with significant personal/financial cost for the users. But deriving something actionable from this reasoning is hard - policy makers are either to detached from technical details, are actively working against your interest due to corruption, or cannot agree on what the right direction is. I don't have a solution, besides giving some of my time and money to organizations who have consistently acted on the best interests of users, such as the Free Software Foundation, EFF, the Tor Project, etc.

pornel 2y ago
In 2013 Google Reader has been shut down, and Google defederated from XMPP. That has been the beginning of the end of "Web 2.0". Before that we were naively thinking all those APIs were free, and only the old enemy Microsoft wanted proprietary protocols and vendor lock-in.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  Nobody talks about why Google defederated GTalk. At first, Google was very idealistic in its mission, perhaps even doe-eyed in the manner expressed in the article: no defensive patent portfolio to match their level of innovation (until Apple went "thermonuclear" on Android, and started an internecine patent war); open GTalk XMPP federation (until Facebook extracted GTalk users' "social graph[1]" without giving any data back). No internal data controls so that employees could to innovate quickly, trusting they'd do the right thing (until an engineer harassed SF Bay Area teenagers he knew IRL using their Google data), and so on. No technology can win against the human condition. 1. At a time when the hype for social graphs was a little higher than it is for AI now, and Google viewed its battle with Facebook as existential.
jjav 2y ago
> I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place. I think it depends what the "old days" are for each generation. For me it is the early days of the Internet becoming widely available, late 80s to early 90s. Suddenly everyone I know has email, everyone is on usenet, I can talk (i.e. text chat) with anyone around the world. Which of course we can today. But back then there were no corporations involved (commercial use of the Internet was prohibited), so no marketing involved, it was all real people. And to me this is a key part: > if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control This wasn't a thing. All the communication protocols were open standard (RFCs), the implementations were open source. Every program I used (aside from the OS, which was the domain of proprietary software back then) was one I compiled myself and could modify or rewrite to taste. So it was just us, regular people, who owned and controlled how everything worked and the possibilities were unbounded and thus extremely exciting. Today mostly we're stuck using proprietary software/apps, or even worse, the "cloud" where the companies control everything. As much as I can, I still want to control my environment so I stick with open standards like email instead of proprietary chat apps, and I run Linux & FreeBSD, and I avoid phones like the plague since there is no way to own anything on a phone platform.

pornel 2y ago

In 2013 Google Reader has been shut down, and Google defederated from XMPP. That has been the beginning of the end of "Web 2.0". Before that we were naively thinking all those APIs were free, and only the old enemy Microsoft wanted proprietary protocols and vendor lock-in.

sangnoir 2y ago
Nobody talks about why Google defederated GTalk. At first, Google was very idealistic in its mission, perhaps even doe-eyed in the manner expressed in the article: no defensive patent portfolio to match their level of innovation (until Apple went "thermonuclear" on Android, and started an internecine patent war); open GTalk XMPP federation (until Facebook extracted GTalk users' "social graph[1]" without giving any data back). No internal data controls so that employees could to innovate quickly, trusting they'd do the right thing (until an engineer harassed SF Bay Area teenagers he knew IRL using their Google data), and so on. No technology can win against the human condition. 1. At a time when the hype for social graphs was a little higher than it is for AI now, and Google viewed its battle with Facebook as existential.

jjav 2y ago

> I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place. I think it depends what the "old days" are for each generation. For me it is the early days of the Internet becoming widely available, late 80s to early 90s. Suddenly everyone I know has email, everyone is on usenet, I can talk (i.e. text chat) with anyone around the world. Which of course we can today. But back then there were no corporations involved (commercial use of the Internet was prohibited), so no marketing involved, it was all real people. And to me this is a key part: > if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control This wasn't a thing. All the communication protocols were open standard (RFCs), the implementations were open source. Every program I used (aside from the OS, which was the domain of proprietary software back then) was one I compiled myself and could modify or rewrite to taste. So it was just us, regular people, who owned and controlled how everything worked and the possibilities were unbounded and thus extremely exciting. Today mostly we're stuck using proprietary software/apps, or even worse, the "cloud" where the companies control everything. As much as I can, I still want to control my environment so I stick with open standards like email instead of proprietary chat apps, and I run Linux & FreeBSD, and I avoid phones like the plague since there is no way to own anything on a phone platform.