An oral history of the 2010s | Hacker News Reader

An oral history of the 2010s

nytimes.com

35 pointsjohanam20 comments

What came is what was always coming. From about 2003 (post-dot-com bubble) until about 2013, it was an era of ‘do no evil’. Make the world a better place. An era of ‘we’re better than the previous generation’ and the democratizing effects of the internet and social media. It was given to us for ‘free’ with the mantra of ‘don’t worry about it, we’ll monetize later. Trust us.’ We bought into it and created massive platform monopolies.

What came was next was a bait and switch that resulted in cesspools of advertising, tracking, and a mess of curated content that promotes outrage and polarization because it keeps people on the page and clicking links. Content and journalism has been diluted and pushed to the gutter — quantity over quality. The noise is deafening.

"It was given to us for ‘free’ with the mantra of ‘don’t worry about it, we’ll monetize later. Trust us.’ "

"What came was next was a bait and switch that resulted in cesspools of advertising, tracking, and a mess of curated content that promotes outrage and polarization because it keeps people on the page and clicking links."

So was it really a bait and switch or part of the mantra it was given on we just didn't look that far ahead?

It's hard to remember this in hindsight. Most people didn't understand how the internet worked, and wouldn't have anticipated this.

The value proposition for publishers and for users was, and still is, a moving target. The beginning of ads in search results, in timelines, were promised to be ‘small, unobtrusive, text-based ads’ that didn’t take away from the organic results and content. But this began a race to the bottom. It was a slow burn — boiling the frog. What we have now is drastically different then the promises that we’re made a decade ago. That’s why I call it a bait and switch.

>What came was next was a bait and switch that resulted in cesspools of advertising, tracking, and a mess of curated content that promotes outrage and polarization because it keeps people on the page and clicking links. Content and journalism has been diluted and pushed to the gutter

Advertising and the surveillance infrastructure are just one part of it:

     - Theranos (zero due diligence, blatant fraud that flew in the face of science)
     - WeWork (foisting terrible finances onto the public)
     - Cult of Elon Musk (we like the companies, so we will excuse doxing journalists and critics, securities fraud, SWATing whistleblowers, building factories in China amidst a trade war)
     - Google's Project Maven
     - Uber/Waymo/Tesla using our roads as a test bed for automonomous driving and killing people.
     - Most facets of the "gig economy"
     - YouTube content catering to pedophiles

And on and on...

Here are some of the great things (IMO) from the Internet in this decade: https://href.cool/2010s

It would be cool to see a similar list of promising/essential software. I would personally list Julia, Elm and Redis, for instance. But I could see people putting Kubernetes or Mastodon. Breaker Browser, SSB, Webmentions are already on my list.

Go and Rust (even though Go technically appeared in 2009, but it reached 1.0 in the 2010s).

Open hardware also had a good going. Most visibly Raspberry Pi and all its clones, but also RISC-V for example. POWER was also open-sourced in this decade if I'm not mistaken.

Ahh, good points. I do have the ESP8266 in my list - I considered the RPi Zero, but I felt it was too difficult to get a hold of at its proper price.

This list makes me sad that I missed out on so many of these weird corners of the internet over the last 10 years, and fills me with a weird nostalgia for a time that may not have even existed.

I hope the 2020s bring more of this weird.

What a strange and bad way to "reflect" on the 2010s. This was not the decade that tech lost its way. It was the decade that more of mainstream media woke up to some of the issues with tech. NYTimes seems intent to prove they don't understand. Why else would you report rosy talking points from Thrun about self-driving without any countering viewpoints? Or include a long quote from the CEO of the company that developed Pokemon Go, without any talk of the issues surrounding the game?

I agree. Nobody cared that tech was collecting tons of data in the 00s, or that they had military contracts with some very questionable regimes. Then, traditional media realized that tech was their number one adversary. Tech was revealed as the number one threat to the media's ad revenue and premium content distribution. They were not the allies the publishers thought they were. And, with all this user data and cheap hosting, tech enabled niche groups to completely bypass traditional media in getting massive influence (some of these groups were really good, some of them were terrorist and/or nazi organizations).

Tech poses one of the most existential challenges to publishers, maybe ever. That's one of the reasons the media championed regulations on big tech in the final years of this decade; "So, you want to make money that used to be guaranteed for us big publishers? Enjoy being the editor in chief, bearing the brunt of the responsibility for what your users read. Don't expect the 'just an ad platform' argument to hold water, we found that out ourselves the hard way".

(Disclaimer; I'm a developer working for one of the Nordic countries largest publishers, so I sympathize a bit with the publisher's reasoning, even though I think eg. the upload filter laws passed in the EU and other stupid laws lobbied by big publishers is enough reason to be furious for years straight)

Yes we were. We just did not all have handheld computers and widespread social media 'addiction' in that decade. Here are quite a few articles detailing privacy and data protection from the prior decade.

https://iapp.org/news/a/2008-04-data-protection-and-outsourc... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/09/secur... https://www.geek.com/news/data-protection-authority-in-greec... https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html https://www.wired.com/2007/12/why-anonymous-data-sometimes-i... https://www.economist.com/international/2007/09/27/learning-...

Ironic that the site doesn't work unless you enable ads, since the entirety of the content past the first two paragraphs is in popovers.

Firefox. Reader mode.

Good, but doesn't show images. To actually get it to work on FF you need to disable Enhanced Tracking Protection.

Wonderful job by the NYT

I feel that as a technologist we need to better think out the long term ramifications of what we create. Be less apt to bring things to the public. Technology is great when used in a manner that helps everyone in society, however it can be Pandora and hard to shove in a box once it is out there. Sometimes things can damage a society with good intentions at heart only to backfire miserably.

Especially considering the loss of the "do no evil" mentality. Everything moved heavily over to IPO's where you have people buying chunks of tech companies who have no clue how any of this works, but they demand a return so we push things out without much thought about if it will have negative consequences. Witnessing the lack of moral ideals and the blatant grab for money entrench the tech community. I saw in the last decade a major rise in "Tech Bros" in the workforce. Honestly, I am looking at going back to school next year for Geography to work on maps. I am a bit burnt out by "tech" after this decade. (That or I am just getting a case of the "old." I still love tech, but don't want to work in the field anymore.)

Einstein on the atomic bomb,

“The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)” Albert Einstein

The decade tech lost its way, except TikTok

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/10/arts/TIK-TOK....

The decade tech destroyed our business model

Quote: "Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders, spent many hours scoping out what looked like the most difficult places to drive on the planet. It was Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles; it was Lombard Street; it was Market Street; it was all the bay bridges; it was through Tiburon and around Lake Tahoe. "

Hahahahahaha...yeah dudes, when you're done do bring that car onto Eastern Europe roads full of potholes, no marks and dirt. Ohh, and the corrupt cops that inhabits them by default. Then we'll see how good your self-driving car is.

Brianna Wu? Alex from Target?

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