The four ways that ex-internet idealists explain where it all went wrong

The tragedy of the commons is another explanation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons you have a common playground where some players start to spam the mailing list/newsgroup/discussion board for their own benefit, this destroys the commons as more spammers join in. Eventually you need moderators and centralisation, now the policeman tends to have an agenda of his own - and the common ground has been appropriated. Where is the new element in that? Self regulation works in small groups but it all breaks down when the group is larger than a village.

This reads like an article that got half-written before the author said, "fuck it" or ran out of time. The first half is excellent but it gets shaky with "The Hopeful", then falls apart in "The Revisionists" with what sounds like ad copy for a design agency. The worst part is the ending: there isn't one.

It's a shame because I feel like there's a whole article lurking in there somewhere, with some interesting ideas underpinning it.

I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs where the engine handled all but the content, and the barrier to entry of sharing personal details was lowered. Correspondingly, the depth of the material got more shallow, but the breadth of it got wider.

This transition was happening as commercial ventures first moved beyond sites that were mere billboards, individuals began reading news portals and opening webmail accounts, and communities like phpBB and vBulletin forums flourished as pseudonymous, do-it-yourself takes on newsgroups of old. Aggressive moderation typically kept the conversation in check.

There were corners of the web where moderation was shallow, and some of these places achieved notoriety for being cesspits of depravity, and eventually, hate. The depravity was authentic. But there was an air of privileged bravado about the hate, where its expression was used as a shibboleth to an in-group more so than an authentic expression of beliefs. If you were a true hater, finding other true haters was not a trivial task.

Early social networks were pseudonymous. It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online. Ten years of Facebook moved the Overton window quite a bit, and now there's a set of people who aren't afraid to bare their cards, or of doxxing and reprisal. And now, they too have tools to build online communities of their own and find like-minded people on the web rather than in person, regardless of the popularity and acceptance of the views they hold.

Meanwhile, e-commerce is now everywhere, and so is content and services that can be consumed with no upfront cost. Both of these are supplemented by adtech-like schemes that harvest and correlate user behavior. Despite real harm having occurred from these practices, jurisdictions have been slow to regulate them for many reasons: ineptitude, lobbying, corruption, and ineffectiveness in enforcing regulations in a global, dynamic, resilient system. Shady, underground actors and mainstream actors alike will continue these practices until widespread, debilitating user backlash, or widespread regulation puts and end to them. If they are regulated, only ruthless actors will engage in this behavior: trolls, stalkers, profiteers, and intelligence services.

Aza Raskin, a pioneer of infinite scrolling, also has regrets about the effect the design has on users. https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-44640959

As Chomsky put it, in the mid 90’s, the internet was handed over to private corporations for their own use, mostly commerce. It’s now even more in the hands of private power, with net neutrality being gone.

I mean, George Carlin said this best. Garbage in, garbage out. Maybe something else sucks around here...like the public.

Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. Today, it's been democratised enough to allow your racist aunt to ramble on Facebook about how Obama is actually an alien born on Pluto, sent to America to destroy Christianity. The remaining escapes on the Internet devoid of this are vanishing.

We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values, motivations, and competencies. The Internet has given too much to those who are not curious about the world or have a serious interest in improving it. Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.

This is fairly shallow. It doesn't really explain why surveillance and manipulation became the dominant business models of the Internet.

I think the culprit is "free." Everything has to be "free." As a result, some indirect means must be found to pay for it. The most convenient model is to turn it around and make the user the product. Use free services to attract users, then surveil and manipulate those users for paying customers -- advertisers, governments, intelligence agencies, think tanks, etc.

Both optimists and pessimists were right. The Internet is the most powerful tool we have to spread knowledge, but it's also the most powerful one to spread bullshit. If you hang around smart people you'll get positive effects from the internet, if you are an idiot or hang around idiots, you'll get crap. Author seems to be of the second kind.

"Even boosters now seem to implicitly accept the assumption (accurate or not) that the internet is the root of multiple woes, from increasing political polarization to the mass diffusion of misinformation."

I certainly don't accept that the Internet is the root of increasing political polarization. It's nothing new. Ever heard of the Nika Riots? Polarization is a story as old as time, Internet or no Internet.

On the other hand, top-down culture is breaking down on account of the Internet. How many people watch the CBS Evening News anymore? There was, in the minds of American "thought leaders", a sort of cultural consensus. It doesn't exist anymore, never mind that it was probably always more myth than reality. The facade is being shattered, and a lot of folks are running scared, blaming the newest technology for their woes.

There are ways out of the crises we face, but neither blaming the Internet for our problems nor treating it as a panacea is one of them.

People get the leaders they deserve, they are only a reflection of the population in general. No wonder it all went downhill when that collective came online. And yet in that process things have changed for the better. The old guard has to fight to preserve their hold on the narrative. Technology is the great equaliser and really the only thing that changes externalities apart from resources and nature in general. Externalities lead, then humanity follow. Culture and finally politics adapt, the rest is just rationalisation. I doubt this will change short of genetically altering ourselves. So if you want to improve the world, forget politics. I remain hopefully because today even just one person can write a piece of software and change the world

New, disruptive technologies "want" to change society. The problem is people assumed that would happen automatically. What happened instead is that the establishment insisted on keeping society the way it is, and managed to shoehorn the new technologies into the old social molds.

Example: File sharing. This would easily make it possible to give everybody access to all media for free. But artists (and entertainment industry workers) need to be fed, and we apparently don't know how to do this without turning music and videos into a commodity.

I would rather try to solve the general problem: How to feed somebody whose labor is not required by society. But the obvious solutions to this would be unconditional basic income, or communism, or something else people don't like. Instead we invent DRM and pretend digitalization didn't happen.

Another example is cryptocurrency. Instead of bringing upon the anarchocapitalist utopia/apocalypse, it just got regulated to hell in record time.

We (as "hackers" / "tech people") should not blindly believe that disruptive technology will bring upon social change by itself. Instead, people should address the hard social and political problems directly. Don't ask what's the next Uber, Bitcoin, Internet, but rather what's the next Democracy, Capitalism, Enlightenment, ...

As long as websites are funded based on eyeballs, this will continue.

We need to move to a model of micropayments, where I can pay a few cents easily (and automatically) to visit a site or read an article. The total amount could be aggregated monthly, like Patreon does.

Remember Geocities? Friendster? MySpace? Facebook is just another point in the curve. And we’ll get there. Don’t panic.

The optimists are still right. These are all just growing pains while everyone competes to find the right formula.

I wish the author pointed the spotlight at an increasing bloat of the general Internet traffic.

Comparing to Internet early days we now have communication pipes of gigantic bandwidth... yet somehow they get overrun, ISPs still peddle more bandwidth for more coins.

Ratio of usable content to aux (scripting, ads, cosmetics) just keeps dropping. The pages are not only byte heavy, they now CPU heavy (due to scripting, SSL etc).

In retrospect, I'd rather wonder wheather the current __implementation__ of Internet is the right one. Perhaps now one could envision an alternative implementation, leaner, more secure (or less reliant on that), more analog/human?

After all the base purpose for Internet was to connect computers, now it's used to connect people lives.

The article seems to narrow the scope of problem with Internet to its effects on social dynamics. All means of communications held at some point the manipulative powers over the socium (TV, newspapers etc.). New means will have them too. So nothing to regret here.

Meanwhile, as technology Internet provided goods of wider access to knowledge, should one needed it. Indeed, it also promoted the freedom of speech too, should anyone needed to be heard!

It's just inevitable that Internet got saturated just as well, such that signal-to-noise is below quality threshold. Same as your cable channels, or bookstores back in the gone century.

So now people need either to devise a better selectivity or invent and use a new clear channel. All of current 'social messngers' are effectively trying to offer a clear channel.