Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

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I know this seems completely naive (and it probably is), but the internet was awesome before the endless summer. What's the main difference between then and now? It seems to me that we've spent a lot of time making the internet accessible to the masses and now we're complaining that the masses are controlling the shape of the internet.

It might go beyond the ethos of HN, but I honestly wonder how much we should consider arguments like, "Normal people won't be able to use it" and "You won't be able to build a business on that because only a tiny fraction of people would want to use it". I often think about PGP/GPG (and especially web of trust) that way. I know it's useful to me and I know that the people I want to use it with are more than capable. But they decline.

RSS is an even better example. Why are we not building RSS tools? Why are we not building a brand around blog posts, FAQs, etc that contain RSS? Why is it not the "secret password" that opens the gate to the "good content that's not being gamed for the masses"?

> endless summer

Do you mean the eternal September [0]? Going back to the Internet being only for governments and universities is a bad idea, a bad thing to want.

I think the complaint at the moment is not the that masses are controlling the shape of the Internet but that a few corporations are both directly shaping it and, intentionally or not, shaping the masses.

RSS could maybe make a comeback. Podcasts are RSS and are more popular than ever. Subscribing to YouTube channels, following people on Twitter, these are actions people understand and do, it could be extended, "hey, why not use this thing that lets you subscribe and follow your favorite stuff not on individual web sites but everywhere?" The problem is, it makes it harder to make money off those eyeballs than to keep them in your walled garden.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

There's a tendency for too much money to ruin things. I agree that excluding all non-government and non-university participants from the Internet would be a bad thing. But there were some wonderful qualities to the Internet in the days before mass commercialization, and it's not a bad thing to want those qualities back.

Yes I do. I'm old enough to remember it and also old enough to forget what it's called :-)

I would love to see some tools for decentralized mass moderation of RSS feeds.

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