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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

I have so many questions. If anyone can help me out, I'd appreciate it.

Has "the architecture of the web" really changed away from "peer to peer" towards - what - centralized or top-down? In what respect?

Is the existence of Netflix and Facebook a threat to 1990s style Geekdom? Don't these modes of approach exist side-by-side?

"the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment"

Setting "mass entertainment" aside for a moment, it seems to me there are larger industries catering to other needs than the 90s ever dreamed: scientific inquiry, literacy, accessibility, communication, environmental protection, disaster awareness and relief, poverty alleviation, among others have all risen because of the internet. Those, and mass entertainment too, have all been driven by the interests and focus of Geeks, as I see it.

Am I wrong? Did I misunderstand something?

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Nothing has changed technically. TCP/IP has consistently caused the centralization of power. The 90's Geeks didn't build the protocol, DARPA did (decades prior).

We wanted anyone to be be able to be a first-class citizen of the Net. But we ended up beholden to our Monopoly ISPs. TCP/IP only gives first-class status to ISPs, not to us. BGP doesn't scale if we all tried to have our own first-class routers.

Yes, things are getting better in all sorts of industries; a similar boom occurred with the wide-scale deployment of the 19th century Railroads. But things got better still with the deployment of automobile roads.

I propose we do the same with a globally scalable mesh network.

Right. Centralization is a physical fact of the Internet as we now know it.

AFAIK though, DARPA wanted a design that could survive nuclear war due to its' distributed nature. Has the Internet and in particular TCP/IP, been successful in that regard? It would appear not.

Totally agree. It's always super amusing to me when people argue that we need to get rid of e.g. Facebook because it's stifling creativity. The problem isn't Facebook, it's the fact that average people want to be (or feel they need to be, which sums to the same thing) on the biggest platform.

Facebook's existence isn't preventing other social networks from taking off, human nature is. Go start your own social network, I guarantee the Facebook police will not kick in your door and shut you down.

Nope they'll knock on your door with a fat check.

Seriously though the changes being proposed and enacted in the regulatory environment around social networks mean that there is a danger the real police will kick down your door if you run a moderately successful social network.

Nope, building stuff and learnign is more accessible then ever if that is you wish. It is also much much cheaper. You are nor special geek anymore for making nice looking Web and you don't count as techie for chatting with kids over IRC anymore - anyone does that now over facebook. That is not because geeks lost to suits, but because it is easy and masses know that.

The original "geek" hobbies are mainstream now.

Then again, I always found geeks vs suits immature and hypocritical. Suits are stupid cause they judge people by cloth, but we won't hire someone who listened parents advice and came in suit not knowing it is uncool. Totally.

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