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Comment by markharris99 | Hacker News Reader

> I miss the inquiring, helpful Net of increasing yore. Enough other people do, too, that I haven't given up hope it may find a home somewhere.

Not sure how old you are, but I used to use 300 baud modems. I was pre-internet. I remember then 1997 on irc, then when the masses really woke up to the Internet around 1999-2001.

Anyway, people around that time really had hope for the internet.

Nowadays, well millennials just don't seem to have the same feeling. I figure they are in their bubbles happy to have whatever sandbox they are in keep the status quo and everything else, as long as their wants and needs are met, doesn't matter.

Give it a generation or two and we'll be just like Wall-E. Drones on basic income, with smartphones incorporated to our brains with all the corporations telling us how to live, work and think.

Seriously, this dystopia is not that far away. Just a few key ingredients for this to happen.

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I trace the death of the Web I loved to around 2007-2010. That's about when it seemed like it stopped getting better and started getting worse.

- Google seemed to give up the spam war and start just returning only major sites for the top of most results around that time.

- Youtube started to become a way to make money, which was the beginning of the end for it. Google advertising IIRC started to get big on it around that time, too.

- Facebook started to expand beyond college networks and the recently-graduated to grandma and grandpa.

- Google generally started to Be Evil in a real way, fairly consistently.

- Amazon started to get all crapped-up with 3rd party retailers and print-on-demand garbage infecting even their book results, making it worse overall.

The main difference now is that instead of sorting through some small-time spam and ad-junk material to find the good stuff, the whole damn thing, practically, is spam and ad-junk. Local news sites look like click farm ad spam sites from the early 2000s. Ads in google results. Wading through disguised and explicit advertising and self-promotion on Youtube to find anything good. "1 weird trick!" on once-respectable sites. "Buy my (shitty) ebook to learn my secrets!" everywhere. We didn't beat spam—it ate the Web. It is the Web. The weird-but-good still exists but is harder to find. The Web kinda sucks now, unless you like advertising.

I'm pessimistic about it ever getting better. Maybe some new frontier will follow it, and that'll be OK for 1-2 decades before it gets ruined, too.

>> We didn't beat spam—it ate the Web. It is the Web.

That hits the mark for me. It feels as though the entire web is one big advertisement for stuff you don't need. It's made people apathetic. They don't even see it though it enters their subconsciouses.

IM-ing (in its then form) with "Sleepy" in the Netherlands (me in the U.S.) in 1987. Locally in a development environment in oh, '82, '83.

Sneakernetting SEDIT from an employer, a state over to campus tech support, who welcomed it.

Due to my circumstances, I missed most of the BBS phenomenon. But I experienced plenty of "we're in this together" in other venues.

Early Google was magical. Quality, helpful pages and sites at the top of the results.

"Early" Web bulletin boards had "real", de facto (by the general capabilities and sophistication of the time), often helpful anonymity (including for "survivors" of various sorts), and focus all too often missing from today's milieu.

Now -- trying not to sound elitist, but rather just particular -- the noise and banality washes out the quality that was once much more evident and prominent.

The extant Net is lost to the general population and the organizations that seek to control it and exploit it. Fine, for what that is, I guess -- today's television.

But not what I want.

And, free and cooperative communication (even in and supporting lively but intelligent and informative dispute) I also find to be essential to a functioning society. And to those who really move that society forward -- technically and otherwise.

The increasingly gated, panopticon fiber and IP address internet is less and less suited to serving this.

We need other physical layers.

Also, they would provide some needed competition.

I was pre-internet

I was pre-web.

Nowadays, well millennials just don't seem to have the same feeling. I figure they are in their bubbles happy to have whatever sandbox they are in keep the status quo and everything else

Also, they think it's right and good that they bully, shout-down, and ban whatever they don't like. After all, it's the way of the online forums, and all that stuff is progressive and advanced, right?

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