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I'm at a tech conference this week and I was talking to some coders last night about how the internet has changed. Remember back when people would live-stream t
by DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I'm at a tech conference this week and I was talking to some coders last night about how the internet has changed. Remember back when people would live-stream their entire lives? Not necessarily to be a eyeball-grabber, but just because they wanted to live in the open. That lasted for a little while, but then people realized that by inviting ten thousand people into their lives, it wasn't just sharing -- it was something else entirely. People started making demands.
This is not the internet we were promised.
Back in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it. We would hook up our computers to each other, open up the pipes, and the free exchange of honest information would result in Good Things Happening (tm). We never were really told what all these good things would be. I suppose it meant more free people in the world, or rapid advancement of the sciences, or more folks becoming friends.
Instead it's countries building great firewalls, science publishers holding on to their data and using the legal system to enforce it -- and more little niches where like-minded people talk to each other in an echo room.
Web pages, which were just one way of many to go see printed content that somebody had stored, have turned into some weird kind of real-estate. Long gone from most toolkits are Gopher, Telnet, FTP, and the rest. Instead, everything is a web page. Long gone are people owning their own computers, which amazes me to no end. Instead, somehow in many cases we're ending up licensing our own stuff. Walled garden providers "help" us by deciding who can speak to whom. Everybody wants to "help" us now -- and it's all with trade-offs that most consumers fail to fully fathom.
I miss the old internet.
- brador 11y ago> Re: people streaming their lives in web 1.0 There's a documentary about that - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/
- 7952 11y agoThe internet has turned into a means of fufilling desire. This happened early for geeks (endless knowledge), and later for a lot of other niches. Not only does it replace existing mediums but creates whole new experiences. I am not sure if watching someone unwrap presents on Youtube is utopian exactly for me, but it is for some people. Different people have different desires.
- normloman 11y agoWho's desire does it fill? My rational system 2 brain? Or my impulsive system 1 brain. The reason you can't justify shitty content with "we're just giving you what you want" is because we really want something better, but if you give us shit that appeals to our impulses, you can make us act against our best interests. So we keep scrolling through the news feed at 2AM, thinking we should really go to bed, but failing to resist the feeling that some huge payoff lies just a few scrolls down.
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoYep, it's a race to the bottom. I seriously doubt if most folks thought about it they'd really want "7 ways to survive a zombie apocalypse. You won't believe #3" We are creating the digital equivalent of idle and pointless chatter, only a couple/few magnitudes more damaging than real idle chatter involving humans standing around.
- machiaweliczny 11y agoI agree with you. It's just stupid people having higher reach because whole system is based on democratic likes. The trend I'm personally seeing is that I have to spend more and more time going through bullshit posts to find something valuable. But it's not that there's less valuable content out here. There's more but it's get flooded with shitty one, because entry level is lower. I guess that's the reason behind rise of curated newsletters or tematic link agreggating sites(hn, reddit etc.)
- userbinator 11y agoBack in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it. I think the peak of this was when P2P filesharing took off, and everyone started sharing almost everything. Books, music, video, software, anything that could be digitised was uploaded and shared. It really felt like a massively distributed global library that anyone could access, for only the price of an Internet connection. Too bad most of it was killed off by antipiracy interests...
- SSLy 11y agoIt's still there, just not as easily accessible. bib, wcd, ptp and so on…