Ask HN: The Internet is getting lame. What's next?
The internet used to be a really cool place full of wild ideas and weirdos.
Now its like a tidy, tightly policed suburban shopping mall.
Whats the next big thing?
Something has definitely changed though, the internet communities of the past used to be very VERY tight-knit.
There just wasn't that many of us, so you'd talk to people unlike you. I knew my bbs friends all by their first and last names, had photos of them, would talk to the better ones on the phone, they were some of my best friends despite them usually being completely different from myself.
These days, I don't know a single person on the internet, and I rarely interact with people on the internet who are different from me, so I never get into the depth of conversation I once did. That's something lost.
The internet used to be like a dive-bar in an ivy-league college town, full of geniuses and weirdo townies. These days it's more like the city of New York -- no one knows you, and no one cares to.
However there are still plenty of people congregating both anonymously (see 4chsn and other specialist forums) or pseudonymously (see HN, slashdot, reddit, many IRC channels and many other places), even in greater numbers than in the good old BBS/Usenet days.
It just feels they it's disappearing because it is the exception now instead of the rule but places to share (sometimes weird) interests where nobody knows you're a dog are plenty and varied.
Remember back when you'd join a new forum, and they'd have a Welcome Thread just for you, asking you about your interests, etc.? When's the last time you've received a real personalized welcome to a web community? I think it's been at least 15 years for me.
I'm not sure how many people on Hacker News actually remember that internet, most of the community here might be too young to even know what we're talking about.
Edit: Someone ought to make a Web 1.0 emulator, that is invite only. People can set up their own websites, etc. but there is a limited amount of people allowed to join. We can live in the old days FOREVER. XD
So, imagine a website like Reddit, where upon registration, you get assigned at random to a Reddit Company—a little shard of Reddit with its own posts and comments. Imagine further that you could give people an invitation link to allow them to move from their company to yours—again, permanently, though if you made friends in the original company they'd likely be willing to invite you back.
This would have a lot of the Web 1.0 feel, I think; the users would probably get to know one-another quite well, and those "welcome threads" would be perfectly common.
Interestingly, even though a given user's view of the website would only show items from their partition, you could still use statistical information collected from the entire user-base to do "wisdom of crowds" things, like ranking items. In a company-partitioned Reddit, each post's votes could be aggregated by URL across all Companies, with the Company itself then getting to decide to what degree they care about the tastes of the masses, versus the tastes of their (presumed) peers.
I also see the possibility for both immigration and some form of exclusion or shunning. There are further complications: the 90/9/1 rule, multiple personals, etc. But I find it interesting.
I think you're a bit older than me, I never really experienced the BBS-days for example. Nonetheless, I agree completely. I remember especially a gaming forum in my language that I used to hang out on for years, where I knew 80% of posters, knew who was the trolls and who was the pros and we'd meet up for pizza every now and then etcetera. I miss those days. I see the forum is still up, but at some point it was overrun with users and the old sense of some kind of fellowship died out.
Between about 2006 and 2012 I used to spend a ton of time in the Amiga community. It was an interesting mix of experiences, each of the different forums had their own feel and different core users, though there was a lot of cross-pollination between them, with discussions often a mix of underdog us-against-the-world wide-eyed optimism, nostalgia, caustic technical posturing and kitchen sink dramas. It was varied enough to keep my interest, but small enough to get to know the people involved (I recognise some people who post in HN who I knew from my Amiga days). I also learnt a bunch, first exposure to FPGAs was through Amiga developments, for example. If you're interested in classic computing I'm sure it'll still be relatively active, would start lurking at amigaworld.net and see where it takes you. I'm also sure you could find other similar communities if Amigas weren't your thing.
But not in the same way.
I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.
HN is kinda useless from a "developing friendships" point of view because it's topic hopping, not just open for daily rambling discussions. Reddit is even worse off because you can't have a meaningful community of 300 million people.
We've definitely lost something. I think it'll come back, but we have to engineer it—the past won't circle back on its own with the current barrage of centralized-only, for-private-profit only, fast-flux, buzzfeed-adhd-driven discussion platforms being shoved down our keyboards.
I still use IRC and don't have this problem at all. I've even been in the same IRC channels for nearly 5-6 years now. These random strangers from around the globe know more about me and my interests than my own family.
I still do. Not even holdover communities; I joined a new community about a year ago, and another two years before that. These folks are cool, I like them, I've met a bunch of them in person whenever they come to town for PAX or whatever.
> Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.
That sounds like a friend-selection problem to me.
A much larger issue IMHO is the lack of any provision for private messaging (aside from email addresses in profiles).
Also, it was nice meeting you at jQSF :)
Not saying that you won't meet awesome people, but I think the demographic is a lot less diverse than most people like to think.
You live in a filter bubble. Start clicking like on things that challenge instead of gratify you. Upvote things that are different.
Get off HackerNews and go hang out at a sceptics' message board. Or go hang out at an artist's community. They exist. They don't care about tech and startups as much.
The internet is still out there. It's still interesting. It's still fun. But the big data/community silos are afraid of offending you because most people really really don't want to be challenged.
It's up to you. You have to go find the challenge. Just like always. Step out of your comfort zone.
The internet isn't boring because the internet has changed. The internet is boring because you got older and don't enjoy a good flamewar anymore. Or just don't have the time and energy to consistently challenge yourself with new ideas and communities.
It happened to me too. And it sucks.
If you care to do some exploring, there's plenty of communities out in the boonies but you would never know if you never went searching.
I would be interested in seeing some sort of mesh network become popular, completely separate from "The Internet", with completely different protocols and paradigms, that you could access and participate in, just by sticking an antenna on your roof, plugging in some kind of adapter, and running some software.
Or perhaps you could utilize existing Wifi hardware and run a completely different set of protocols on it.
If I had the inclination I'd build a QRP station and learn Morse. My days of burning fingers on a soldering iron and climbing up trees is gone now.
I find that enlightening discussions happen there with a surprisingly high frequency, even today.
> These days, I don't know a single person on the internet
The internet, especially a forum, is a really time-consuming and inefficient way to socialize. You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online.
When I was a teen stuck at home with the family and school, I had time for that back when the internet and games were an escape and a way to have some control over my social life. It's me that's changed, not the internet.
I wonder if the proxy interactions, things such as likes, karma and retweets, etc. have replaced the desire to get any approval from other people? Maybe we never really cared about the heartfelt appreciation from a person we didn't actually know, but it turned out the number of people we reached was always more interesting. You don't actually have to get to know or interact with other people; you can shout into the void and know someone else heard you from a couple numbers, and maybe we collectively decided that's all we really wanted.
edit: I suppose I'm using "we" as "people" in this comment, also I didn't consider how old danneu might actually be; Maybe younger is 5 years ago.
Yes, but that don't stop you from reaching out and saying "hi".
I am (mainly) a front-end developper, and I occasionally send emails to the developper of product or websites that I love and simply offer to help them out. I don't work for free, but what I am doing isn't working. It's sharing knowledge.
I would email "Hi there! I love your product! I noticed that your X isn't working correctly... did you try Y solution? I had the same problem a while back." Sometime, this email is ignored. Sometime, a developper end up reading it. Sometime, it's some guy who is passionate about his product but has no idea what code even is.
Yes, the internet is turning into a mall. That doesn't stop you from becoming friend with the managers of the store next to yours.
This article highlighted the existence of Urbit to me (and probably many more)... and I shouldn't probably talk about your startup, since this thread is arguing exactly against it. Just to say: you're doing good work – and I might meet you some time in Urbit's chat :D
https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
They're still out there. They don't advertise, for obvious reasons.
Others have given some good answers, but I think there is another factor: the way discussions are organized.
In a typical BBS, or on UseNet in days of old, a thread was linear, identified only by its subject line. Multiple people could stay with a thread for a relatively long time and have an extended discussion.
Today, most online forum software (HN, Reddit, etc.) displays threads as trees. Each reply begins a new subthread. As a result, a conversion involving more than 2 people will rarely be linear, and a reply 2 or 3 or 4 levels in will be read by almost no one.
But the solution is not to move back to linear threads. Those were abandoned for a good reason: they do not scale. Six active posters might be able to have a reasonable linear discussion. 100 cannot. Linear threads are also much easier for one poster to hijack. Among 6 people, there is a decent chance that none of them is a jerk. Among 100 people, the chance is pretty much zero. So the thread gets filled with troll posts. Conclusion: tree-shaped discussions, along with voting, are what prevents us from being drowned in troll posts & flamewars.
So, what is the solution? I don't know. It's an interesting problem to consider.
Although you're right, it is interesting to consider the way the structure of a site shapes its community. Imageboards and PHPBB style forums are linear, and derailing threads on those is practically an art form.
Partly because there's no OOTB way to follow up on a thread, especially if it's not one you're participating in. I had to write a user script [1] to highlight new comments and collapse threads without new comments, to make it _possible_ to follow discussions beyond the initial read.
[1] https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey/blob/master/hncommentt...
Same goes for mailinglists. Posts get sorted in threads.
Yes, using the "References:" and/or "In-Reply-To:" headers. Later clients tended to do this, I think.
> ... to get the benefits.
Yes, and the drawbacks: in-depth discussions involving multiple people were harder to come by.
In any case, in both Usenet -- late in the game -- and many mailing lists, there are relatively few participants, so scaling is not really an issue.
It's still a bit expensive at the moment though, as it requires smartphones with a decent front camera and fast connectivity, but early results are encouraging.
Up until the early 00s, I used to hang out at a coffee/cigarette bar where I knew just about every single person who walked through the door, and people would sit there for hours and hours talking to strangers about very interesting stuff, while drinking insane amounts of coffee and chain smoking.
If those sorts of places still exist, I have no idea where they are.
I used to get breakfast every Thursday with a one legged motorcycle courier (still have no idea how that worked) who fought in the gulf war, an HSBC executive and a fishmonger. I miss that.
I have kids now and other parents are horrible people.
Once we get to this point the weirdos will find some service to call their own and it's less likely that everyone else will care about those groups.
Basically, I see the internet getting busier on a technical level (amount of information/packets flowing around) but quieter in a social sense.
http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsN...
If you want to read more about ipns, its discussed in section 3.7 of the paper[1]. Do note that a few things have changed since the paper was last updated, so its not the source of truth right now.
[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/papers/raw/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-...
Still, I'm super excited every time I hear people talking about it.
a) part of groups that have now grown up and merged into the collective internet and diluted
b) need to find new groups that interest you
For my part, there's huge thriving communities of like-minded nerds all over the place, you just have to look outside of popular places.
Pouet, atariage, msx.org, nectarine radio, tons of messageboards, hell; my local neighborhood messageboard is full of crazy internet weirdos of my type.
HN and some very narrow reddits are kind of cliche, but they work also.
I keep saying it here, but there's absolutely nothing to stop old-style internet communities from springing up again, except that the draw of megasites like reddit and facebook seem to steal all the mindshare. Heck, even IRC is still around. Heck telnet BBSs are still around http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html
Just set up the community you want, run it your way, don't compromise and run it like a hobbyist should. The advertise it on other like-minded places (heck, setup a web-ring!) and you're off!
Also: sharing stuff with people who would like to learn is still a cool thing to do. Perhaps you should mentor some people and then collaborate on your own weird ideas?
[1] https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/ [2] http://makerfaire.com/map/
For meeting an eclectic mix of fascinating oddballs, on the cheap, nothing beats an astronomy or geology club. They are great social-status-levellers. Executives, dropouts and just plain odd folk all chatting together.with
The phone network has been around for over a century in some form now, and has remained as open as it always has. Just how I see it, anyway.
I'm pretty sure this was one of the selling points of hangouts to begin with.
The switching equipment itself also has some pretty interesting conference related features. There's a line of equipment called the DMS-100 that's pretty popular for wireline stuff. It has a function where it'll pretend a conference bridge is a ringing number when it's empty. When someone else gets on, it'll play a short burst of ringtone to indicate it, and conference together quite a few people. AT&T runs one of these in the bay area; 415-274-0001.
It's a mess out there.
You can sample it at: https://canonofman.meteor.com
It's not launching until Monday, but follow @canonofman on Twitter or sign up on the site and I'll let you know when it's live.
I'm not sure anything can replicate the feel of the early internet because it's inextricably linked to the entire cultural context in which it was born, not to mention the physical limitations that the entire world had been used to but were newly lifted by the internet.
However in regards to the suburban shopping mall feel, I think the answer there is movements like IndieWeb, and the general spirit of open source which is stronger than ever. There's no rolling back the clock on the commercialization of the internet, and the indie stuff can't really match the aesthetics, but then again when enough people get bored punk kills disco.
So, just like real life? Not helpful at all.
The Internet was an introvert's dream. Then the popular extroverted high school kids took over our entire Internet media and platforms. We've lost empires to the people who were destined to rule the world anyway. Turns out it's easier to rule introverts online than to rule real life populations who can fight back.
You don't need something to replace the internet for that, just a sub space where people can't have their writings/ideas/creations tied to their real identity.
1. The Intercloud. Clouds of clouds of clouds. Containers and virtualization play a part in this, but much is left to be done in building out less-opinionated stacks, which become deployment targets.
2. Pay-to-deploy what used to be SaaS software onto various deployment targets on the Intercloud based on trust levels. Enables the MSaaS (managed SaaS) software model. Enables 'house hosting' private data.
3. Blockchain contracts applied to MSaaS'd APIs to enable routing of data to other MSaaS'd APIs based on privacy policies. Also applies to payments for #2 and target validation via #1.
EDIT: And for the record I didn't downvote you, I'm not even allowed :/
To clarify my original post a bit, I would say that the Internet is infrastructure, and that changes in that infrastructure give way to changes in the way it is used for all sorts of things. Once a good amount of decentralization with infrastructure happens, we're going to see really interesting use-cases popping up. Robot vacuums with cryptowallets to keep themselves updated, for example.
> siri: FidoNet is a worldwide computer network. It uses a store-and-forward system to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network...
> me: so it's sorta like what I said earlier?
> siri: i don't understand
> me: that's ok, nobody else does either.
I suggest you try communities that are built around hard-to-understand technologies.
There are definitely interesting discussions among scientists, for example, but they 're mostly reserved for face-to-face meetings in conferences.
Perhaps the best answer is to build the next big thing yourself.
That's a good thing. The world is an infinitely better place now that any idiot can get onto the internet, and does. A few nerds and greybeards losing their sense of cultural superiority is a price worth paying.
Given that there are over a billion people accessing the internet now, there are vastly more savvy and weird people on it than ever before, but it's understandable if that makes it feel less hip to be a part of.
I never meant to say that it was a bad thing. OTOH, I think savviness (meant to be elite-level expertise) is a constantly moving goalpost, which means that at any time there is a fixed number of savvy people (which roughly translates to a fixed number of weird people as well). It used to be that they were easy to find on the internet, but nowadays because of the huge crowds they are impossible to find.
I think both have very high merit, and can't really be compared. It's not a 'good thing' that we've transitioned from one to the other, it's just a change that the old guard has to deal with.
Even setting that aside - there are billions of people online, and (quick google) almost a billion websites. That's not a culture, that's a continent. You can't encompass something like that in so simple a narrative.
Mesh should have been a thing by now. Better late than never. (I hope.)
The excessive overcommercialization is pretty annoying though. There's only so much content marketing spam I can take ... Gonna have to go back to reading books soon.
It's alpha but check it out brah
On the subway.
On the bus.
At college campuses.
At bars.
At night clubs.
...
This is what happens when we relegate all of our discovery to community aggregators like Reddit and HN, or social media sites like Facebook and Twitter that are, at the end of the day, there to sell you ads.
I was never into MySpace, and before Facebook came along I remember MY FRIENDS telling me about this funny video called "Leeroy Jenkins."
It's a cool/potentially useful concept, but definitely not the next internet.
Of course, another trend here which really pushes things away from the anonymity/community is that the rise of Social profiles being tied to true identity has become a common denominator across a lot of the content sources on the net. Mobile access has also pushed us toward sole points of access to many of those communities. Sure, you can still log into many sites with a username and password from any old computer, but as more and more sites become personalized it becomes inconvenient to manage the multiplicity of web presences on a phone without resorting to using apps that are permanently logged in and tied to your single point of access.
Finally, the burden of defeating spambots has become nearly impossible without some strong anti-spam membership requirements. defeating spam has become a huge driver for anti-anonymity. The problem is, that even if you defeat bots, the giant number of people participating in discussions virtually guarantees that someone will post something in need of moderation under a pseudonym. A friend of mine at the NYT said they had to implant special filters to moderate the amazing amount of hate speech that would end up as non-sequitur comments on nearly every article. They are not alone in that experience.
Its not so bad, all in all, but the internet is a big place now. Some part of my thinks that when communities are small, they self-manage much more easily since there is a kind of group-accountability. On the broader internet, this isn't true anymore. on large public websites, it isn't true. But thats why we self-organize into smaller communities like Hacker News. As they get bigger, the rules necessarily become more strict because the feeling of accountability for the community's well-being on an individual basis goes down. </rationalization>
Some of the service providers of the services that run on top of the Internet may or may not be lame, but that's a content issue, not an Internet issue. :)
Some paid providers: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usenet+providers
Once you have an account, wherever you get it, you can usually access usenet via their browser interface, or with many email clients (like Thunderbird), or with specific usenet clients.
I used to be on a variety of comp.lang.* groups, but I haven't accessed usenet for years. I hear it's still more than useful for technical and other interests.
It's so easy to find stuff these days, if we could instill the idea of discovery and actually exploring the internet again, I would dig that.
tightly policed private boutiques
People will start talking to strangers in big cities, instead of just looking at their phones. People will have conversations again. The phone will listen, and suggest information at various points, evidence for your arguments, statistics to back you up, come backs, jokes.
Strangers will actually meet other strangers in real life, first, unmediated by any online vetting. There will be some app to enhance this process and that app won't violate or distort the inescapable risk and reward of actually saying "Hi" to someone you've never previously met. The next big thing is rich annotations of the things we do and places we go.
Having sex? Your phone / wearable will suggest some useful music, idea or other helpful info.
Visiting some new area? You'll get intelligence about interesting gatherings, art openings, deals, parties, happening right now nearby.
At the supermarket, gazing at the cold items, which to buy? You'll get purchase suggestions and recipe ideas to inform your choice.
The next big thing is people aren't "going to" the internet. It will come to them.
People will get back to living normally, just normal lives enhanced with relevant timely information.
The internet will become less overt and more covert. After a brief period of being a visible tangible thing in the world, it will recede back into the periphery, ever present, like a collective subconscious. It will be re-absorbed by the world it emerged from, enhancing that world.
The actual "library index" internet ( and its interaction "searching" ) will become rapidly less and less important once the critical mass of software, algorithms, and wearable tech brings us this new golden age. The quiet internet. The silent internet. The internet of nothing.
Like Seinfeld -- a show about nothing. The internet will be an internet about nothing. That's what it has been best for anyway, pictures of cats, trivia, distraction. Now it will be absorbed back into the culture it emerged from, subtly modulating the rhythms of daily life that it was used for anyway.
The shouting internet, news, headlines, adverts, games, apps. The feed. The Consumer. All that will fade away, like the fading of a roaring train. Like the peace that returns to a quiet glade once the busload of snapping gabbling tourists has departed. We'll all get less gawkish and more introspective. Our interactions less "selfie and me me me" and more "you and me, here, now". And all these companies, with their fetishisms of "big company" are going to become, or be presented to us, as a whole lot smaller. The original idea of villages, and geocities, and usenet, and turn of the century blogs, and lots of tiny stuff, disconnected stuff, will come back. Zuckerberg will eat his words, it won't be about "connecting the world", it will be about "connecting a community", one community at a time. They'll spin it as a "return to their roots, after all, they started as a Harvard social network", and yet we'll all, old enough, will know that it's just spin. Google won't be distributing "all the world's information", it will be making sense of information in "your world." Company names will increasingly become less bombastic and more like single letter diminutives, the way hipsters sign their emails "j". Hackers will be obsessed with doing things that don't scale. No, really don't scale. Ever. Everyone's ambitions will become a lot smaller, or will seem to.
We'll increasingly live in even more populated cities, and after a brief gaudy explosive renaissance of "ALL THE THINGS RIGHT NOW" we'll value our personal, quiet, disconnected, small world lives more and more, subtly enhanced. We'll delight in the tiny things, the meaningless, trivial interactions. Gen Z will look ancient with its selfie obsession, and prescient with its incognito mode and ephemera.
The internet of nothing is coming. And not yet.
People, cool people, will actually say "my internet." Internet will lose its "the".
An internet of all the small things is the next big thing.
Joking aside, I am seriously mindblown by this comment. Can't upvote it enough and gotta read it a couple more times for sure.