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Comment by adim86 | Hacker News Reader

I find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased communication, allowed people in New York to learn and communicate with people in Egypt. Share stories, cultures, solve problems. A person in Nigeria can teach themselves Hindu, just from pure curiosity and no budget. No publisher needs to approve a book to be published or where it will be sold. We can make phone calls for free at any point in the day. We have Wikipedia, which for free provides more information than any human can process in their lifetime. For everyone who has access to the internet, the bulk of the world knowledge has been democratized and made accessible and something went wrong? Do terrorists use the internet? sure! Has consumerism hijacked parts of the internet? Sure! but these things are only symptoms of how powerful this tool is. Should we try to control and fix these problems of course! But for someone who created something so powerful, I am a bit disappointed at the negative tone of this post on the 50th anniversary of the first message.

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It’s a particular point of view that obviously won’t find resonance in this HN audience. Were the author’s view to prevail, you would be out of a job. Vast majority of people here owe their livelihood either directly or indirectly to the democratization of the internet. But that doesn’t mean the author the author is naive. There are certainly (unvoiced) masses largely sympathetic to his point of view.

Take the example you mentioned- cars. The Magnificent Ambersons garnered 4 Oscar nominations debating that very topic - should the automobile have replaced horses, and is it a net positive? Even at that time when the benefits of cars were clear, the audience found the film very compelling.

Similarly, Robert Redford starred as a barnstormer in Great Waldo Pepper, which made a strong case against the Air Commerce Act, the sole reason we even have airplanes carrying passengers & goods in the air. Redford’s character is like Linus, feels airplanes are a hobby for having fun doing stunts. But the government spots the potential for a quick buck, shuts him down for good & soon airplane “industry” becomes a real thing, with mail carriers & passenger planes. Redford has a line in that film where the commerce regulator asks him to stop the stunts & just take a job as a airplane mailman - I’m not a fucking courier, I’m a pilot! William Goldman, who studied that period & wrote the film, felt it was his best work & should have gotten the Oscar.

I am sure a decade down the line you will see a film about scientists harking back to the days when the internet was a curious lab experiment, not the giant teats of FAANGs from which the majority of this audience sucks it’s daily fill of milk while blissfully hawking knickknacks for the masses they would rather do without. Nigerian teaching himself Hindi, indeed.

> Vast majority of people here owe their livelihood either directly or indirectly to the democratization of the internet.

Is it the democratization of the internet, or the commercialization? I think it's more the latter you're benefiting from.

Those who teach history, as they say, are doomed to teach history. GP and parent's message will be hugely controversial for any whos online peers can reject its message (for various reasons), but hopefully everyone can acknowledge that it requires quite more wealth and access to be able to interview at a FAANG i the first place, than is ideal for humanity. (I was born with, and enjoy, that same privilege, mind you.)

The Internet has done wonders to democratize the world (as elsewhere on this thread). It's brought people together that would never have found each other. That gay and sad teenager in Somalia who would have killed themselves decades earlier now has online peers. I am not sure that gay Somalia teen is not castigated among their peers for being gay, and even if they aren't, I'm not sure it's not due to the US's cultural export. What I'm sure we will see, a decade out, is the kind of unrestrained communication GP expressed without any sort of disclaimer. GP's comment is seen much more favorably when analyzed as coming from someone whos first and native language isn't English, and doesn't live under some of the demagogory that plagues some other Western Nations. Hopefully we can cleanup the mess we've made in the interim.

Small nitpick : Hindi not Hindu. The former is language which one can learn. The latter is, depending on how you ask, is a (group of) religion(s)/way of life.

On the other hand, let’s compare internet to nuclear fission. Clearly lot benefits can be drawn from the technology (assuming safety practices etc) but in our current world order it is primarily used as a deterrent.

So I don’t think OP is complaining unnecessarily. We must strive to ensure technology is used for beneficial purposes. And in that sense, the call to arms is justified.

I have been a science and technology enthusiast all of my life. I started running my own BBS over 30 years ago on a Commodore64. To say that I am passionate would be an understatement.

Alas, lately I am becoming a Luddite. Feature creep is the enemy. I don't want or need an 'info-tainment' screen in my vehicle. I refuse to join the Apple or Google walled gardens. The warnings from Science Fiction have been ignored, and we are wage-slaves to corporation-governments.

There is a better way to live. We must take back our power.

When does a tool become a weapon?

When it inflicts harm.

The internet has been weaponized.

I would like to agree with you, but I am not sure I understand how internet has been weaponized. Can you please elaborate on how the internet is/can harm?

-Election manipulation.

-SWATTING of competitive Gamers.

-Cyber bullying (not just limitied to those instances that end in suicide)

-The stalking and death-threats to Black Lives Matter organizers.

-China's "social credit score"

-The need for Hong Kong protestors to hide their identity.

I don't have time to post specific URL's to substantiate my claims, but I feel I've given broad enough categorizes to convey my meaning.

I've always liked to think of it this way:

The internet is a creation of the mind. Its impact is felt by the mind, and is capable of creating mental health problems in people. See the old Facebook story about how they manipulated people's feeds to provoke an emotion from them for an example.

The internet also enables mass communication. So you can massively communicate in such a way as to impact the mental health of a massive number of people. Most people who use the internet regularly are bombarded with this type of communication, mostly in the form of ads and sponsored content.

There are undoubtedly many parties who've realized they can use this to their own ends. By using the internet to actively impact the minds of other people using the internet, people have weaponized the internet.

>The internet has been weaponized.

Ugh... I can't believe that I'm saying this but... I agree with you, wholeheartedly.

I am about as nerdy as you can get and a huge tech enthusiast and I'm just starting to hate the internet outside of a few sites that I visit to stay "in the know". I feel like every day I'm learning less and less valuable information and more and more pop culture, meme-ified information just because it makes money. It feels like the entire scope of the internet shifted away from individuals creating cool things to huge companies advertising for whatever their latest money-maker is. Some of it is still enjoyable (e.g., Hot Ones, musicians, programmers) but it's all just slowly getting swallowed up.

Where do you visit? From the darknet to using translation software to read what is going on around the world the internet... to checking out random pastebins. There is a lot of interesting stuff...just not on facebook/twitter.

I didn't say that it wasn't interesting. There's plenty of "interesting" things on the internet but the overall experience for the average person is pretty bad. Take, for instance, the proliferation of sites that once embedded YouTube videos. Those sites are now all broken because DMCA requests have taken down those videos without replacing or redirecting them.

It seems like the only care being put into the internet is into monetizing and commercializing it.

I too have been in tech for well over 30 years. And I too have lost my enthusiasm. Why keep aiding and abetting corporations and creeping fascism? Working in tech now feels like I'm doing that.

How about the internet being used as a mass surveillance machine and the obliteration of producers in favor of consumers? That facet isn’t a drop in the bucket of internet usage. M

I think focusing what it could be used for and what it has been used for isn’t the right way to approach thinking about it. The internet is by and large used for consuming content from a handful of corporations (disclaimer: I have no source to back up this claim), and a lot of negative consequences follow from that.

>the obliteration of producers in favor of consumers

More consumers begets more producers. I would assert you have better odds of producing in a wide variety of areas.

No, it does not.

everyone is just following the most popular producers and the rest are basically irrelevant.

Just look at the follower counts and how it drops off on any of the popular sites such as YouTube, twitch, patreon etc

We got more consumers than ever, but they're all following the same people, centralizing it even more

That's not a problem with the Internet though, that's a problem with humanity!

Direct-to-consumer businesses have taken off due to the internet. It’s never been easier to start a sock company or glasses company etc. Historically you had to get in to the big box retailers to sell anything non-local but the internet has flipped that on its head. Even big platforms like eBay and Shopify (and even Amazon) are offering small businesses and individuals way more opportunities to sell than they would have had pre-internet.

Furthermore in a direct to consumer world, incumbency matters way less. People had fewer options pre-internet (whatever was at their local store) and now brands largely compete on quality (reviews/ratings) rather than pure placement and marketing.

And yet all your local retailers are closing down while Amazon gets bigger every year. It applies basically everywhere. while you're correct that its easy to get started on Amazon, it's just as easy to get marginalized there. There a tons of reports from sellers which got ruined by Amazon undercutting them after they've pioneered the market for example.

The internet enables centralization like never before as everyone all over the world uses the same services just like they're following the same people for entertainment.

Shopify is pretty big too these days outside of the amazon world.

The newer people who joined the internet late are on a handful of sites they see as safe. They came from the mobile phone era and they include grandma and your ex-school teacher. The people who were here before joined them because that's where the action was happening.

Google decided to go with the masses and dumb down the results to only a handful.

Offtopic: The only day I tried a specific search with quotes in duckduckgo and google. Only duckduckgo had it. Makes me wonder what I've been missing using google.

Aggregating some 30 000 rss and atom feeds it became obvious to me what an echo chamber it is. It also becomes obvious how big media dictates the topics. The negative consequences are also obvious since big media has no intend to inform or educate you. For them it is all about the bottom line readership and revenue. shocking > informative. My endless thought experiment is: What is news? What should it be? Can we exclude some of the audience to involve some expertise in it? Should we provide real study material so that the reader may understand the context? Something constructive would be nice? Whatever the answer is, it isn't to just endlessly repeat and repost what newscorp wants us to talk about. It isn't our friend, it has no great plan for us to prosper.

I think he is afraid of the directionthe internet is taking. All the most important benefits we have gained from the internet will be undone if every nation and every isp censors and filters too much content. China is becoming a model for the rest of the world, and we are in danger of losing it all, or even worse; being manipulated into thinking we did not.

It's tough, the internet is so open that there are people out there that are having trouble separating hoaxes/fake news with the real news. The spread of these fake news are even way faster than the "old media".

You need to be a little bit tech literate in order to navigate the internet.

The epistemological crisis is really the worst thing the internet has brought us. When you have large segments of the population who believe in a completely different "truth" the future doesn't look bright at all.

It is a bit of the opposite. This guy is closer to arguing in favor of censorship, as opposed to against it.

He thinks freedom is too dangerous, because I'd all the bad things that people do with their freedom.

The Internet is not as bad as cars. That's harsh!

Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative.

The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took it more seriously and made some big system design changes, but we haven't. We can also make the Internet a better place, but there will always be issue with all massive systems.

Might be more accurate to say "contribute to cooking our planet" because if there were 0 cars, we'd still be cooking this planet, since all of transportation including planes, boats and cars is only 29% of total carbon emissions (US 2017 data)

Even in transportation, only 60% is due to light duty vehicle, the other 40% being trucks and planes mostly.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

> On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative.

Honestly there's no way this is true. How many people would die if they couldn't use an ambulance? How many people are surviving on goods shipped to them via trucks?

Of course things can be improved, but there's no way the automobile was a net negative on humanity.

What if the larger story of the industrialization enabled by that trucking warms the planet to the point that humanity goes extinct? Something to at least consider; unintended consequences are still consequences.

Humanity is not at risk of going extinct from global warming.

"There's no way". What a compelling argument.

There's "no way" that 60 million people would have died in the 20th century if there was no such thing as an ambulance. I'm positive we would have invented a workable replacement.

Shipment of food / water / medicine might.

"I'm positive we would have invented a workable replacement." is also not a compelling argument :)

It's actually rather absurd to suggest automobiles were a net negative. They are one of the greatest inventions in the history of humanity. It's like saying electricity is a net negative.

You could have ambulances without personal cars. But a huge amount of ambulance rides are due to car accidents.

Also, our shipping system is backboned by freight rail and ocean shipping, not trucks. In particular, the US has a really robust freight rail system for moving massive amounts of goods across the country.

> On balance, cars [...] has been a huge negative.

That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Cars have had a huge impact on mobility and availability of goods.

It's easy to just see the downsides since all those benefits can be taken for granted nowadays, especially when living in a city where cars are less important for personal use.

At the turn of the last century most people rode bikes - a healthier activity than riding in cars. Around the same time, most cities developed extensive electric trolley systems which were largely destroyed after the automobile took over. People were mobile prior to the automobile. Cities were developed by necessity to be human-scale in the pre-automobile era. After the automobile they were developed (in the US especially) for the automobile which meant that it was very difficult to get around without a car.

So your argument is that because cars have upsides, the downsides can't be greater? The downsides of making cars central are huge, and because of that large progressive cities are removing them. That doesn't sound like hyperbole, that sounds like the pendulum swinging the other way because on balance, they are negative.

The Internet effect cannot be measured.

Those hoaxes, those political ideas, those agendas, arab springs. You can't measure the fallout of that.

Arab springs that mostly went nowhere - or worse. There was a lot of hope for the middle east a mere 7 or 8 years ago. And now? It worked out for Tunisia, but it didn't turn out well for most other countries in the region.

Small nit - a person can learn Hindi (the language) or Hinduism (the religion) but not Hindu.

And there’s our smudgeness.

Is it smug? I didn’t know that. I have spent enough time in Hindu places that I think that’s good to know.

It's not clear to me how the correction of a cultural nature is being smug. The poster in question even admitted it was a "small nit", but it's still useful information for both the poster, and other readers.

This is a quote from the Office, which leads me to believe it's at least a little tongue in cheek.

ah ok, I misunderstood then.

agree. the inventor does not get to decide or choose how his invention is used

I would also agree the internet has been a huge net positive.

"net" positive!

> I would also agree the internet has been a huge net positive.

I thought that not terribly long ago. I have to admit, though, that with every passing day I become less sure that it's really a net positive.

Of course, it is. Put it this way, there is absolutely zero evidence that it’s not net positive.

those who downvoted me, I am curious what evidence you have that it's not net positive. I've never seen any such evidence, only a list of problems, which of course exist with any human endevour.

I didn't downvote you, but I don't know what you mean by "evidence it's not a net positive".

You determine whether something is a net positive or net negative by listing all of the negatives and positives and seeing how they balance out. With the internet, there are clearly both negatives and positives. The "evidence" either way is the full list of these factors.

Do they balance out in the positive or negative direction? The answer to that depends on how you weight the various factors, and I rather suspect that different people will weight the various factors differently. In other words, this is more a judgement call than some sort of hard objective truth regardless of whether you consider the net effect to be good or bad.

It's very natural for people to take good things for granted and focus on the negatives. Regardless of objective measurements.

Of course, sometime things areactually bad, so that's to to say you're wrong. Just a good bias to keep in mind.

Agreed, I think there was a point, when we could still benefit from the pre-existing social trust network, that it was a net positive. Now that the pre-internet trust network has deteriorated, and with no trust mechanism built into the internet, it is rapidly devolving toward a net negative for social stability.

I think relying on the internet to have a trust mechanism built in is a bit like relying on our road-builders to ensure our vehicles are safe.

While the average internet user will just trust the sites and apps they use, there's nothing stopping those who are able from designing/building/using/sharing technology which they can reasonably trust. The building blocks are there (crypto / networking libraries etc.).

When open source software gets outlawed, I'll be worried.

> a bit like relying on our road-builders to ensure our vehicles are safe

And yet there are lots of ways road-builders can design roads so that they're safer.

You mentioned cars, which is good comparison.

Obviously, cars are essential. But here is short a list of completely unnecessary issues brought on by greed and industry:

* The health and societal cost of leaded gasoline and the industry resistance to transitioning to unleaded.

* The Automobile industry purchase and subsequent removal of train and light rail tracks in the United States.

* The Automobile industry resistance to requiring airbags.

* The oil industry and it's war against global warming science.

There are many more, these are just the ones off the top of my head.

Point is, it isn't the technology but the industry around the technology that is the issue. Cars are useful and essential just like the internet. But right now, we have a situation akin to the early automobile industry.

I hope that, with this technology, we can get some privacy laws/worker rights/better standards before we have another half-century before anything gets done about the Big Bad Corporate takeover of the Internet.

He mentioned car, which is an awful comparison. Cars should never have been invented and they are the worst thing that happened to humanity. Just imagine how much money has been wasted into cars, and roads, when any other mean of transportation would have been more efficient.

Just imagine how much personal freedom cars have brought, especially to disenfranchised groups.

There's two sides to every coin and some sides have a lot deeper grooves than what can be seen at first glance.

Disenfranchised groups who nevertheless could afford to buy and maintain cars? I wouldn't say cars have no positive aspects, but they have been heavily marketed on the idea that they give you freedom (few car ads will show a traffic jam, it's always a gloriously open road...), but their cost, in terms of pollution, urban sprawl, and injuries is quite high.

I wouldn't know, I don't own a car because I don't need one. If it's possible to live without a car in a society where cars are everywhere, it's highly probable that if cars were never a thing, the infrastructure would allow you to have the same amount of personal freedom, without the downsides of cars.

But what do we do with all this horseshit?

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...

It is just one persons take. I would take it with a grain of salt. Arpa wanted a mobile network that would be operational in all countries prior to invasion. At it's inception, the internet was everything SRI ever meant it to be. Everything the internet has become is just a side effect of what was created. It follows the principal of "a person will do what a person can do".

It is the same as the DoD making interstate highways to allow troops to move across the country quickly. Everything else that sprung up along those routes was just a byproduct of the interstate highways. The good, the bad and everything in between.

And yet, can you blame him for the negative tone? I'm sure he and his collaborators back then had much higher hopes. And indeed, until the mid-late 90s it seemed like we were getting that open internet. The internet has fostered an epistemological crisis that has recently led to the rise of tyrants in the US and elsewhere. I'd be disappointed too.

The US has a narcissistic jerk for a president, but he's not a tyrant.

Wanting to be something does not automatically make you that thing.

My impression is that the original author's views were crafted to celebrate prior work, and provide a platform for the new work to come. with a healthy dollop of self promotion.

I think you’re right. If it didn’t “go wrong” it would have stagnated and not been very useful.

Kinda like the minitel. It didn’t “go wrong” but it also went nowhere.

>Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents

I don't think that's a fair or apt analogy at all since, in most places around the world, there's still several barriers to entry for using a car - you have to be licensed, you have to be financially able, and you have to live somewhere where it's a benefit to have access to one.

I think the central complaint is not that the internet has been democratized but, conversely, that, much like the United States and several other nations, it's become commercialized rather than democratized which is exactly the opposite of what was the hope for the internet.

I think a more apt summary of the article is that, at the beginning, there was a barrier of entry to the internet that meant that the content was mostly educational, technical, informed, and a bit altruistic. The goal was to propagate knowledge. Now, literally anyone can put their thoughts online, no matter how banal, without any technical skill, education, or barriers and commercial entities have far more capability than the average person to control the flow of information. DMCA requests on YouTube can be abused by huge corporations to protect their profits but individual users have no such ability. This leads to a platform that, unlike its initial intent, is full of low-quality, low-effort information with the exception of content that is meant for sale and consumption.

Unchecked capitalism may have ruined the internet but, hopefully, not past the point of return.

It’s more like inventing the bicycle and then having it evolve into a car, where your initial idea was for a safe, economical, sustainable way to get from on point to another. Instead we paved over all the sidewalks with freeways to make room insanely large vehicles that crash into each other and kill everyone involved. Sure, they get from one point to another faster and help you transport things larger than you imagined and further than you imagined... but that’s not why you designed the bicycle.

Bicycles didn’t evolve into cars, horses and stagecoaches did.

That's still not a valid argument.

You're minimizing the amazing benefits created by near instantaneous transportation (or communication, in the case of the internet). How many lives were saved because ambulances exist?

It's easy to cherry pick the pros and cons of any invention, but at the end of the day any attempt to do so is inherently biased.

Society continues to evolve with nearly every economic and welfare indicator scoring better than 10, 50, 100 years ago. On average, inventions like automobiles and global communications must be contributing to this net positive societal gain. There's nothing glaringly bad about the internet or automobiles. Even if the internet is used for bad things at times, it's also created a shitload of good. Regardless, it is but a means to an end. People would do go on to do good or bad things even if the internet didn't exist, so we can't blame this one invention for the actions of humans.

It’s not an argument, and it is valid. It’s just not the argument you’re trying to make.

You know we truly live in amazing times when our society can support a large class of people so far removed from the need to produce and transport physical goods that they can imagine a scenario in which the ability to do so using machines rather than armies of peasants, slaves, and pack animals is some kind of perversion.

Huh I didn't realize freight trains were armies of peasants, slaves, and pack animals.

>A person in Nigeria can teach themselves Hindu, just from pure curiosity and no budget

Again, these are poor examples. It's not terribly easy to learn a language for free using just the internet. Everything is freemium and it's only getting worse. It's arguably easier to go to your local library and use their resources.

Many people have this idea that some things would be impossible if not for the internet, but that definitely isn't the case.

I've been using the internet to learn a language for a month now, and have had far more success then I had in multiple years of high school language classes.

Between tools that provide Spaced Repetition learning, to websites that are basically textbooks, to youtube videos both meant to teach and others that are native media, and finally people who curate all these materials, this is way better.

Most of which are funded by showing you ads for things you don't need or selling your personal information.

And regular people would consider that a net gain.

Not one of the inventors of the internet. Whether it's money now or money down the road though perverse buying habits, you're still paying for it. It's not free.

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