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This is how I see it too. People are simply going to move towards the path of least resistance. Setting up a Wordpress blog is a lot tougher than just opening u

This is how I see it too. People are simply going to move towards the path of least resistance. Setting up a Wordpress blog is a lot tougher than just opening up an account on tumblr or Youtube or whatever. Paying $10 a month is just going to be easier than hunting through albums at the local record store run by snooty staff. Using a GUI is just going to be easier for non-technical people than using a command line, etc. We invented things like the internet, mostly/partly, to increase our ease in life. Its funny when people don't realize that what was the status quo in their 20s was built on the same principles of ease. Now that they're older they can't connect with what the young people are doing today, yet not too long age they were the 'confusing' young people. The larger issue here is why are we letting people who are aging act like curmudgeons and secondly, why do we give in so readily to nostalgia pieces? As someone in his late thirties, I make a special effort to stay nimble and not fall into the "it was better in my day" nonsense. Why do we tolerate this? We should be shaming it. Yet, here we are with this ridiculous nostalgia piece at the top of HN. I wish I could live long enough to read the "life was better before robots did our work for us" nostalgia pieces from the great-grandkids of today's millennials. They'll never know what its like to have a back-breaking manual labor job or a mind-numbing corporate job.

honestcoyote 11y ago
>The larger issue here is why are we letting people who are aging act like curmudgeons and secondly, why do we give in so readily to nostalgia pieces? We do so because change isn't always good. This is one of the most frustrating things about working in the tech sector: the erroneous assumption that all change is good and anyone who disagrees is an "aging curmudgeon". No, we shouldn't be shaming it. Any change or new system that's worth anything will be able to stand up to questioning. And any change, even the very good ones, will possibly have unpleasant side effects. It's really ok to discuss these things. In this particular case, it's good to discuss whether or not diversity of content will suffer when a small number of sites are the gatekeepers. It may be that the centralization of the web will provide better discoverability and visibility to a wide variety of authors. Or it may be that the content is increasingly homogenized and the number of voices are reduced. And it may be that the few all-powerful gatekeepers are more vulnerable to pressure from outside forces who want to censor certain content. Or perhaps not. Why would you be so concerned about having such a discussion?

honestcoyote 11y ago

>The larger issue here is why are we letting people who are aging act like curmudgeons and secondly, why do we give in so readily to nostalgia pieces? We do so because change isn't always good. This is one of the most frustrating things about working in the tech sector: the erroneous assumption that all change is good and anyone who disagrees is an "aging curmudgeon". No, we shouldn't be shaming it. Any change or new system that's worth anything will be able to stand up to questioning. And any change, even the very good ones, will possibly have unpleasant side effects. It's really ok to discuss these things. In this particular case, it's good to discuss whether or not diversity of content will suffer when a small number of sites are the gatekeepers. It may be that the centralization of the web will provide better discoverability and visibility to a wide variety of authors. Or it may be that the content is increasingly homogenized and the number of voices are reduced. And it may be that the few all-powerful gatekeepers are more vulnerable to pressure from outside forces who want to censor certain content. Or perhaps not. Why would you be so concerned about having such a discussion?