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Comment by IC4RUS | Hacker News Reader

" AFAIK, the web is mostly used to 1) browse memes and 2) get informed on new things to be outraged about."

Well that's an argument from ignorance if I ever heard one. Much of anything I've ever learned is from the internet ( e.g. Wikipedia, books, oddly specific youtube vidoes on car repair), and I'd have a much harder time in my career without the amount of material on Math/CS online. One can literally find top level educational material for free, whether from sources like MIT opencourseware or the many textbooks freely available. I'm sure other people have found great uses for the web too.

I suspect you're caught in a bit of a bubble.

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I do this too. I learned pretty much every valuable skill I have using resources freely available online.

In my experience, this is pretty uncommon though. I know only a few people that use the web this way, and a lot who browse the front page of reddit, watch whatever videos show up in their FB feed or on the front page of YouTube, etc.

The resources are there, but are they used enough to make my statement regarding what the web is mostly used for invalid? I don't know.

For the month of September 2018, OCW reported 1.09M unique visitors [1]. In their 2017 annual report, Facebook reported 2.13B monthly active users [2]. I suspect the comparisons between coursers, edx, udemy, etc and reddit, Twitter, memes, etc would be similar, and three orders of magnitude seems sufficient to say "most."

If you think your web use is typical, perhaps it is you in the bubble.

[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/about/site-statistics/monthly-reports/MI... [2]: http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/c826def3...

Yeah, I concede that it's greatly surpassed in terms of volume. And that bubble probably wasn't the correct term.

However, my comment was more arguing against what you said with the context in a previous comment:

"What's so great about the web, that makes you say it is one of mankind's greatest inventions?"

-I don't believe that an invention being used largely for unhelpful uses makes the (still large) amount of benefit any smaller. So, even if educational use is dwarfed by facebook, it's is still a wonderful tool for many.

That's a reasonable perspective.

I disagree, however, because my opinion is that the trillions of hours spent are not simply unhelpful (i.e. neutral) but actually damaging. My calculation is therefore that the net impact of the web is maybe negative, because the positives are swamped by the greater volume of negatives.

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