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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Skeptic writer from Newsweek in 1995: "Why the Internet Will Fail" : https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-b...

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While I don't think it's completely relevant to this particular topic, here's a cleaner link to the original:

http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...

This article actually makes a lot of good points about the issues we're seeing today around "fake news", and the general uncivilized discourse that dominates the internet. He wasn't entirely wrong, but maybe underestimated how pervasive the web would get before we took a step back and saw the warts.

We all remember the internet skeptics, but forget how equally wrong the people who were predicting that the internet would lead us to a global utopia by the year 2000. Extreme positions are usually wrong.

It's hard to take comparisons of an internet-based technology to the internet itself seriously. Blockchain more comparable to something like Push [1]. Mostly overhyped, some good ideas that will survive and re-emerge years later, and massive amounts of malinvestment in technologies that didn't ultimately pan out. [2]

[1] https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/

[2] https://www.wired.com/2004/05/the-return-of-push/

Wow what is going on with that site. Really nasty scam ads redirecting me to a site trying to look like Facebook and rewriting browser history so I can’t back out.

If only the browser history were a blockchain, then it couldn’t be rewritten

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