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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

I can accept some of what is said on this article but from a technical perspective the internet (imho) offers much more opportunities to create and collaborate than any other time in the past.

I believe most of the shortcomings and abuse of the internet is a result of mass adoptation of the technology without correspnding legislature. Societies just haven't caught up with technology,even well seasoned technologists struggle to grasp the privacy implications and economic complexities at hand. There is also the psychological aspect where the mechanics of the internet are intangible and we have a hard time conceptualizing and grasping these complexities the same way we do tangible constructs. Imagine how complex a physical machine would be if it was as complex as a web browser,but we can see it and we can easily grasp the scale of the complexity and adjust our approach on how to use and secure it accordingly.

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> offers much more opportunities to create and collaborate than any other time in the past.

We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers, galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video chats, joomla, wikis etc etc in the year 2003. Not much has been added. Video is perhaps the only thing that we didnt have. A big deal but it s not everything. The main change was the format - mobile. The internet today feels less vibrant, less mysterious, with less corners to explore, and it's not because we 've exhausted it all. Even the news have become extremely repetitive, with every site posting the same stories slightly rephrsed. People keep parroting the same obsessive ideas over and over and over in their comments. Everything is memes, and that everything is actually a small number of ideas being produced every day, possibly countable in one hand. You have to dig hard into social forums to find a unique perspective, as the self-congratulating, selfimportant crowds seem to have crowded out everyone else.

Anecdotally, how many sites do you find yourselves browsing daily?

It’s because we’ve given over to aggregators. When we need to actually get something done, they’re useful. If you want to explore though, they’re less useful. You need wiki links and webrings and recommendations that aren’t driven by algorithm.

Yeah, the consolidation has been relentless.

I also share the sentiment that a lot of the "innovation" online these days is merely skin-deep, but I can't say whether it's just my perspective after being online for 20 years.

My take is that next step is to bring virtual back to reality again. We should have new media (social networks) associated with old media to do this, similar to the transition that music did but for news and virtual communities.

There's a lot of stuff that changed:

- Past: fewer people online, mostly curious and quirky ones; now: everyone's online

- Past: fewer creators; now: everyone's a creator with an FB/Instagram

- Past: doing stuff for fun; now: doing stuff for $$$ (maybe not all but definitely lots). Thousands of thousands of YouTubers. We're flooded with content every day.

- With so much content to consume, the desire for creation vanishes.

- I also feel like the societies getting more well-off kills the innovation. When I was a student I couldn't really afford many things, so I had to be creative to get around that. Now you just pay a few bucks to some internet giant and all your problems are solved.

- I feel like facebookization killed many online communities. What used to be an independent phpbb board with a logical structure, room for customization and some tools for admins to manage it, became an FB group that is impossible to navigate and manage sensibly, with posts ordered by an algorithm, and which spams me with notifications at the least convenient times.

- Other downside of power grab by FB: I hate when all my real-life friends get spammed by every little post on every shitty FB group I make. This totally killed the anonymity of the net and separation between various communities.

- Societal radicalization means there's more trolls and aggressive people than before, which makes me less keen to engage in discussions with strangers (apart from HN, one of few places that keeps the level).

- I used to read news on the internet to save time (among other reasons). Now with all the heavy ads-bloated, video-bloated, SEO-optimized gibberish content split in 15-pages slideshow, and clickbaity headlines, I think it might be actually more informative and time efficient to read and oldschool newspaper or watch evening news.

- Having said that, maybe it's just the old guard getting old, and having less time to explore -- getting busy with work, families etc.? On Reddit, there are lots of very weird subcommunities I'd never think of. My younger brother still plays Deluxe Ski Jump like it's early 2000s, and hangs out with the other guys who do the same.

> With so much content to consume, the desire for creation vanishes.

Those would seem to be contradictory statements. There must be desire for creation for there to so much content created.

Not really

One thing is the desire to be there (the famous 15 minutes of popularity) another is the will to create

Most of the content is just playlists of content created elsewhere and aggregated by someone trying to make money out of it

> I feel like facebookization killed many online communities. What used to be an independent phpbb board with a logical structure, room for customization and some tools for admins to manage it, became an FB group that is impossible to navigate and manage sensibly, with posts ordered by an algorithm, and which spams me with notifications at the least convenient times.

To be honest, I think Reddit is to blame more for that. It killed so many specialized communities and forums.

You have to realize your experience is not everyone's experience. And nostalgia is a lie.

> We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers, galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video chats, joomla, wikis

Signal,whatsapp,ipfs,discord,slack,github,confluence,twitter,twitch,stackoverflow and so much more from a "techie" perspective. But have you considerer how much more accesible the internet has become? Forums were nice but you had to find the right one and once that site shuts you might lose all content and all the people you know there but for most people social media is better. IRC,icq,etc.. Were not very secure,they were not multi media friendly either. You heard of Viber? Super popular in non-western countries on-par with whatsapp. Skype you say? Zoom,webex,logmein and the like make video chat and desktop sharing a breeze. Learning things is so much better too: pluralsight,udemy,cybrary and MOOCs were not a thing in 2003. Free webhosting ,document editing,job hunting anf so much more (excluding things like uber,doordash,instacart that provide IRL services). But more than all that,there are so many more options for just about everything now.

The past always looks shinyand guess what,the internet is even more mysterious now for those who get curious enough!

I think like most you're only looking at the popular sites and apps. E.g.: peertube vs youtube or HN vs Reddit.

Daily I frequent 5-10 sites on a regular basis but I visit a lot more than that when finding external content on those sites,certainly a lot more than 10+ years ago.

Half the services you mention either

- require a phone and phone number to sign up

- lock you in

- will shut down next year unless someone buys them and bastardizes them to oblivion

- are services that replace services that were bought and bastardized (skype). they re bound to repeat the cycle

- arent as popular / dont work (ipfs vs torrents)

- lock content away from search engines

- are basically rehashes of the same idea with much heavier browser footprint for the sake of ... i dont know what really

- Are all platforms - they dont specialize, they force you inside an eternally septembered community . I Liked having separate accounts in separate forums - having many identities is a virtue - and good for privacy

- are Incremental updates. E2E encryption is the one thing that matters, for the rest, we had flash video converence in 2003, and it worked better than webrtc solutions today

- MOOCs are not a successful thing today either though. good that we have all that content, but it wasn't enabled by any of the aforementioned companies.

I m not sure i m convinced we have a fundamentally different - or better - internet today. Everythinig you mention is repackaging. (and we had job ads and lots of free webhosting too btw. You know neocities, they re even named out of nostalgia for geocities, craigslist is still a thing).

I don't think I can change your mind but functionally I have a much better expetience and in many cases a simpler experience than in the past. Lots of lessons were learned and continue to be learned. I mean,popularity aside forums,IRC,Skype (use it everyday!) and all the old tech is mostly still there. In many ways isn't less more? Would you prefer forums with millions of active users or IRC channels with 100K+ active users? I think the internet is big enough and diverse enough to satisfy most people. But the trendy and popular stuff isn't meant for people who like the older internet much like SMS wasn't meant for people who love pagers and email wasn't meant to satisfy people that like to write paper mail,so long as there are enough enthusiasts of a tech it will live on but the future will continue to look a lot less like the past. For me after not using IRC for quite a while I used Matrix and it looked so much and so little like IRC,I think it's a good example of how more internet users means more things that satisfy more groups. One size fits all doesn't scale.

> and all the old tech is mostly still there

Only as ghost towns

> ways isn't less more?

Err, no. Have you used facebook groups, the social groups that we are supposed to use today? Crippled intentionally, abysmally few options, impossible to discover. These are platforms for users who don't care about discourse, they want to come and shout, and shout often, to beat the algorithms. Yesterday's content is already lost. Compare that with even yahoo groups.

> prefer forums with millions

No! But that's what facebook is, what reddit is. Eternal september comes too soon

> for quite a while I used Matrix and

I wish matrix would catch on

> One size fits all doesn't scale.

Exactly . We have one size for everything today: platforms for billions. But it's a bad fit for niche, weird communities.

>Signal,whatsapp,ipfs,discord,slack,github,confluence,twitter,twitch,stackoverflow

none of this is a creative tool

they are all just iterations of the same idea: streaming content

the last creative tool was, sadly, flash

sadly because it could have been the beginning of an era of open content creation platforms, but it was its end

> But have you considerer how much more accesible the internet has become?

much less

my mom could have browsed the internet 20 years ago, today she can't

she doesn't know how to signup, she doesn't even know what "login with facebook" means

> You heard of Viber? Super popular in non-western countries on-par with whatsapp. Skype you say? Zoom,webex,logmein

Iterations of the same idea.

Nothing new.

> The past always looks shinyand guess what,the internet is even more mysterious now for those who get curious enough!

It is really not.

There is just more content of lower overall quality.

> pluralsight,udemy,cybrary and MOOCs

NNTP and IRC worked well enough and they were free

21 years ago, in 1998, there was a software called Microsoft FrontPage 98. You started it, visually made a website with elements shared over all pages, and pressed a button to publish a static page.

There's nothing like this today that is simple, financially accessible, and works out of the box. (With maybe the exception of Mobirise, but it has too much free-to-play vibe.)

A little while ago there was an entry here: "Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21242857 and reminded me of Swishmax ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWiSH_Max ), a tool I used around 2003. It was a breeze to use, to create animations. I'm unaware of anything like this today.

In 2005, DC communities shared any content and had vibrant chat communities. Blog didn't immediately meant WordPress, but Pingbacks and RSS worked across them, so websites were able to talk to other websites.

In 2008, Skype worked. File sharing over Skype worked, because it was able to use the local network and went p2p over LAN. Video and sound always worked.

We're nearly in 2020 now, and video conferencing still sucks.

Nostalgia is only a lie of you don't have proof. I still have the installer for most of these programs.

Yeah, let me repeat the observation that those things are passing through a phase of hyperoptimization with money being the only goal, that I post every time some discussion like this appears.

Internet content is not even the worst case of hyperoptimization around, nor by far the most concerning. There's something to say about how companies measure and treat their employees. But yes, it's a problem, and very hard to solve.

I don't even understand what is causing it. We aren't in some sudden crisis where we need to optimize everything, and in the end it goes even against its own goal so it's not rational anyway. Yet, it's everywhere.

Yeah the consolidation is the biggest component I've noticed. I find myself only going to a handful of websites on a regular basis

> Not much has been added.

Apart from "smart" phones, which had tremendous repercussions for your otherwise remarkable list.

I did mention the mobile format. Which is responsible largely for the dumbed-dowb, featureless, memoryless internet I experience

> Anecdotally, how many sites do you find yourselves browsing daily?

That's an interesting question. If you had asked how often do you use the web my answer would be all day, every day with multiple simultaneous connections.

But browsing? One or two places mostly out of habit and even the frequency of that is declining.

Way back when pretty much every ISP offered some homepage space with your connections (also email addresses and usually newsgroup access). Loads of people put one up, and it wasn't brimming over with JS, tracking, and calls out to a dozen services. Nope, it was distinctly amateur in feel but you got a wild eclectic mix of pages about hobbies, history and interests. Often hooked to a webring of other sites in the same niche. Then for those without ISP space, came Geocities. Same sort of things except animated starfields and rotating icons were so much more popular.

Mostly those have been replaced by FB groups, reddit and other feed based aggregators so that it's interesting for a few hours, then lost (almost) without trace. It relies on you being active enough to see it when it was posted. Even blogs are fading, unless sales focused tied to your company... There's more code out there on github, but that's just one aspect of creation.

I see almost infinitely less lasting creation, with a few remaining islands, but an awful lot more rhetoric and pontificating. Which used to be mostly the easily avoided preserve of some of the newsgroups. :)

> There's more code out there on github, but that's just one aspect of creation.

1,000 free, open-source blogging platforms on github, but we all just post on Facebook.

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