7 ms·
Which of those did the Internet benefit?
by brookst 1y ago
Which of those did the Internet benefit?
- lomase 1y agoIs AI at the same level of global instant comunication and gigabites of bandwidth?
- strombofulous 1y agoDoes it have to be for the analogy to work?
- anthem2025 1y ago[dead]
- lemonlearnings 1y agoProbably. The the internet was more clear cut. Moores law all the things. Governments investing in pipe etc. AI harder to tell. Will 2026 models kick 2025 ass or just be slightly better. Who knows.
- Retric 1y agoIs the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem. The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc. Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erode the net benefit.
- amscanne 1y agoAre you being objective or just romanticizing the past? Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever. I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume. If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
- glohbalrob 1y agoMedia is rich but not in proportion of the thousands of new creators doing very well. An extreme example is playboy vs only fans creators
- bobthepanda 1y agoshow business and things like it are famously pyramidal in shape. there are decades' worth of people who couldn't make it in previous generations in Los Angeles and New York. i think what is relatively new is the unaffordability crisis making it so doing such pursuits and not being that successful is no longer a way to make a living on its own.
- Retric 1y agoI was trying to be objective which is why I didn’t try to compare individual shows. Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality. The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from. Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.
- bobthepanda 1y agoIt's worth noting that due to advances in technology, it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time. The average "how to cook on a food network" show was, ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show with high production quality today. Obviously it's not the same because some things are less deliverable with smaller or one-person teams (Miss Piggy is not going to visit some Youtube show the way she visited Martha Stewart) but there are people making this content ranging from big shops like NYT Cooking to smaller outfits like Binging with Babish, Glen and Friends Cooking, etc. and there are even outfits like this dedicated to more niche topics like Tasting History or Emmymade.
- monero-xmr 1y agoUndeniably better off in every single way. Minimum is that the price of long distance phone calls is now zero, let alone video calls. Being able to speak to family and see them nonstop is incredible.
- goalieca 1y agoAnd yet, when we are with family and friends, we’re on the damn phone!
- ghaff 1y agoDo people actually visit family in-person at least less often? And to the degree they augment rare family in-person visits with a lot of phone calls and/or video calls. I can believe a lot of friend get togethers IRL have been replaced with video calls. There's a tradeoff. I have a group of older friends and we still get together in-person but Zoom calls are a nice adder. I'm in a few organizations where we also find Zoom a nice alternative to people schlepping somewhere for an hour meeting that mostly works as well online--and we still have a few physical get-togethers over the course of the year.
- amrocha 1y agoYoung people are forced to move to wherever job opportunities are due to how hyper optimized the economy has become, so I would say most people spend way less time with family than 30 years ago
- ghaff 1y agoIt's complicated and you can look at a lot of studies. People have always moved where opportunities existed--including across oceans pre-aircraft. Yes, when there were company towns, people moved less.
- Mistletoe 1y agoWhy are people much less happy then? https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...
- UncleOxidant 1y agoThe political instability that came with social media isn't great, either.
- 7952 1y agoI think in the near term social media can actually have a stabilising effect just because of how much it paralyzes people. It takes emotion and redirects it into something with little real world effect. Whilst most actual power is exercised offline. This sometimes breaks down and the crazy escapes from the internet and reeks havoc. But mostly the geriatrics are left alone to pull the levers of power in relative peace.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoAh yes. The popular ~14000 year stable period disrupted by social media.
- BirAdam 1y agoI question this narrative. While social media is certainly having a negative impact, most democratic societies have relatively short life spans historically speaking. There’s also a tendency for economies to falter, for irrationality to increase, for birth rates to drop, and so on. It would seem that the same trends (roughly) occur in every democracy as it starts to fail.
- brookst 1y agoYes. The meta problem is the trend toward “I dont’t like X, and I don’t like Y, therefore X is causing Y” thinking. It’s always been the reactionary’s argument: immigrants cause crime, inter-racial marriage causes poverty, etc, etc. The real collapse we’re seeing is the liberal / progressive adoption of these fallacies. Social media causes fascism (nevermind the absence of social media in previous collapses into fascism), etc. Many of the people rightfully dismayed by trends are unwittingly contributing to the changes they dislike. The correct answer to “I think social media leads to fascism” is not “let’s ban social media”. The correct answer is “let’s study the problem and see what science says”. Abandoning that is giving up.
- brookst 1y agoExpand the thinking to include impact on developing countries, the poor, minority groups who have few people like themselves in their local area, etc. I’ll grant that for comparatively wealthy, privileged people who were always going to have an easy time (which frankly include me), the internet has been a mixed bag. But for the kids growing up in comparatively poor countries, who can now access all of the world’s information, entertainment, and economy.. I think it’s a pretty clear win. I expect AI will be similar: perhaps not a huge boon to the best off, but a substantial improvement for most people in the world. Even if we can sit back and say “oh, but they also get misinformation and lower quality YouTube content”
- gyomu 1y agoWould you rather be a 22 year old starting in life in 2025 or 1995? Unless you pick one of the few countries that underwent a drastic change of regime in that time, the answer’s pretty clear to me.
- anonzzzies 1y ago1995 (and I was 22 in 1995)
- naijaboiler 1y agoIb the US, 1995 by far!!!
- jfyi 1y agoGiven my skillset at age 22? Yeah, I'll take 1995. I was old enough to grow up hearing how great the world was going to be if I learned computer programming just to enter the job force at the start of the dotcom bubble burst. 1995 would have been a major upgrade. Also, knocking that almost decade off my birthday would assure that I spent most of my adult life with the luxury of thinking that energy didn't have negative externalities that were being forced on later generations. We had Chomsky-esq "any major world power is kind of fascist if you think about it" instead of literal talk by politicians about putting people in camps if they don't like your diet or country of origin. TV was pretty bad I guess but music was great and I read more back then. There was a lot of huffing and puffing about gang violence. I grew up on the street the local gang named themselves after and it only marginally touched my life at all. Housing was dirt cheap, food was dirt cheap, gas was dirt cheap. There was undeveloped land everywhere around the city I live in and it gave a general sense of potential. What exactly was so bad about the 90's?
- StackRanker3000 1y agoYes, the US was in a particularly prosperous and exciting period compared to much of the rest of the world in 1995. If you’re, say, Chinese, chances are you find life in 2025 much more appealing Overall, life is better in 2025 for the vast majority of humans. Life expectancy, child mortality, health (despite the obesity epidemic, which is a result of an abundance that has eliminated hunger and food insecurity from large swathes of the globe), purchasing power, access to technology and entertainment, etc, etc… That some people in the US are feeling disillusioned because housing has become more unaffordable (partly because of regulations and technological advancements that have improved their quality and safety) and that they don’t have the same incredible economic trajectory as the preceding generations, especially since WWII, doesn’t negate that. A run like that can’t last forever, especially since it to a large extent depends on having a relative advantage over the rest of the world - at some point, they’ll start to catch up Much of the same dynamics apply to Europe, too