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Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, also as a teenager in the 90s I distinctly remember thinking that the internet was going to make everyone smarter. The world's information at our fingertips! It'll unlock a new golden age for the entire globe!

Oh, how naive...

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I always get sad when I think of the techno-optimism of the 90s and the early net. I think it actually was still present well into the 00s, which were a golden age in their own way (blogs, forums, communities). Then mainstream facebook hit like a ton of bricks..

Have people become less smart? I think more likely you’ve just been exposed to the reality than most people are not as smart as yourself.

I certainly think more people are aware of things they wouldn’t have otherwise been aware of. It’s become more difficult for governments to hide facts from their citizens, and that’s been good.

It’s been a mixed bag and I think we should be careful of judging the Internet by the behaviour of companies like Facebook.

We’re also learning. Ten years ago I can’t imagine anyone quitting social media due to concerns about privacy, manipulation, the undermining of democracy or the amoral behaviour of Facebook’s employees, but that happens a lot now. As PG said, it takes time for us to “develop antibodies” to these things.

No, I don't think I'm smarter. I think it's a mix of both things. There was a barrier to entry before, which was still significant pre-smartphone. This naturally selected the people that participated. In the early net, pretty much researchers, professor, university students. Naturally this had a selection effect. Like all utopias, it eventually ran into real people.

But secondly there's also the issue of social media mass manipulation, which MAKES (or strongly pushes) people to act like they do. This is completely separate to how "smart" the community is.

Facebook is AOL 2.0. AOL was equivalently vapid - and often just as toxic - in the 90s.

Yes, I remember joining KKK chatrooms on AOL as a kid and spamming them with "White Chowder! White Chowder!". Good times.

This. People are wearing rose colored glasses, but the scale has changed and the barriers to entry removed.

Hopefully FB goes the same way AOL instant messenger did.

2005 is where I place the beginning of the end

I should have seen it coming in 97 when I introduced an acquaintance to IRC or similar, expecting the same enlightenment I saw, and the first thing he did was start spamming channels with swears as a laugh.

Had exactly the same experience.

many of us place it a bit earlier. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

While I agree that was the end for Usenet. And it for told what would become of the wider internet. 2005 saw the creation of the modern social network and the start of the centralized services we have today. A move from 100's of niche forums and blogs to a few social networks. Which is where I place the beginning of the end of the wider internet

I wish all the internet was more like hackernews.

Going from the posts in this thread it seems like HN thinks "the internet" is all social media and ads. What you're wishing for is another type of misinformed opinion, one that you agree with.

If you’re forced to agree with something, might as well be hackernews IMO.

Just above your comment was a caricatural: “Is the internet I built bad? No, it must be other people who are stupid.” that made your comment take a colour very different from what you intended…

I have similar memories, in particular I remember thinking "well, people watch garbage on the TV because there's a relatively limited amount of channels, so you end up with dumb programmes that cater to the lowest common denominator. With the internet we'll all be able to find niche content that interests them and that'll be the end of that."

I guess I wasn't entirely wrong about having a lot more niche content, although in hindsight thinking that trash TV was a technological issue was very naive. If anything trash shows (be it on TV or the internet) are trashier than ever due to the increased competition.

The good stuff on TV today is far better than the best pre-internet TV.

(My parents wouldn't let me watch Green Acres, telling me it was trash. By the time I was an adult, it wasn't in syndication anymore. Eventually it shows up on Netflix, I watch it to see what I had missed. It's total trash. Didn't make it through a single episode. It's much the same for the rest, like My Favorite Martian, etc.)

There's an interesting talk about that by Jonathan Blow, using the common phrase 'The Medium is the Message'. The eventual topic is mobile game design but he starts off with TV and how commercial and other constraints influence show (and game) design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc

To be fair, there is a lot of information available at our fingertips nowadays, much more than anything we could get in the 90s.

Information back then was scattered, the tools to look for it (Altavista, Yahoo, Archie, Veronica, etc.) were rather weak in retrospect. Wikipedia didn't exist in the 90s, nor did GitHub, Thingiverse, and so on. A lot of things like online banking, stock brokerages, bill pay, video chatting, online gaming, and so on weren't as good as we have it now. None of that was accessible without being tethered to a phone or Ethernet jack.

What has changed is the arrival of platforms that started optimizing for engagement, impressions, views, clicks, targeting, and eyeballs, because all of that can be monetized.

The people who would be glued to the boob tube now are glued to social media, and instead of getting content fed from Rupert Murdoch and other media barons, it comes from whomever does a better job of paying for ad impressions, gaming social media, and creating clickbait content to get their viewpoint heard.

I agree, yet I miss platforms like Geocities, where, with no intention of harm, you could create an anonymous site and just write about your hobby.

That's no longer possible nowadays.

The website counter was the like-button of those days.

There's still Neocities [0], and you can make things that look straight from the 90s [1][2] or upload things that look more modern.

[0] https://neocities.org/ [1] https://gifypet.neocities.org [2] https://neocities.org/browse

What is stopping you?

Having to choose where to host it, what blog engine to use, write your own static site builder or go with something prebuilt, which analytics solution, what to name the site, how to SEO optimize your content, picking keywords, using keywords, how to create a newsletter, how to moderate comments and filter spam, what CDN to use, how to build a responsive design for mobile, put a GDPR disclaimer, write a privacy policy, how to display tasteful ads, where to display social media sharing icons, which affiliate campaign provider to go with, gzip or br encoding, jpeg or webp images, what url structure to use, what meta tags, how to title a page, test the rendering in different browsers, picking a font, finding a fast font provider, polyfills, minimize JS file size, picking stock images for articles, promoting your blog post on HN, gaming HN to get some upvotes, coming up with things to write about... fuck this.

Such a strawman. Getting Geocities scale traffic is easier than ever - it's just a much lower proportion of total internet usage. Raw HTML still works, just like it did on Geocities.

As for advertising... well, if you're going to start making money then expect to brush against regulations. At the very least, you may interest the taxman.

You don't have to do most of those things if you just care about writing and creating a hobby site, which geocities was used for.

I think this is actually a little unfair. The internet has actually done all the things we hoped it would do. It has just also done some other things that we didn't anticipate. I'm still hopeful that these are basically just growing pains of novel technology and media, and as our relationship to it matures, we'll develop better patterns around it.

Maybe not naive... The internet hasn't created any new behavior, at most it has amplified a few existing human tendencies.

Not all of them bad ones. I suspect once we've finished adjusting to the new digital reality it will have, on balance, made us smarter.

If giving more people access to more information and a place in the cultural conversation doesn't improve things then the human race was doomed anyway.

I used to think that, but I don't think it's going to happen unless we criminalize some level of human impulse hacking.

At their base, social media platforms specifically engineer their desired behavior, powered by obscene amounts of money and technical effort, but largely independent of their users' own preexisting wants and needs.

Facebook et al. are the 21st century equivalent of a <blink> tag.

This is exactly the premise of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. Basically the internet has created an explosion of information, but it's become increasingly harder to actually find the right information. So the general premise that "we should be smarter because we have the world's info at our fingertips" is counterbalanced by "there's equally, if not more, disinformation we need to wade through to get to that info"

I don't think it's hard to find the right information. It's right up front. It's just very easy to walk past the right information in favor of attractive lies. Most of the time people aren't ignorant of the truth. They just dismiss it as a conspiracy.

Oh really? Example - just google "COVID hospitalization rates". You'll find hundreds of different sites/sources all varying degrees of accuracy. This is mentally taxing.

Because it's too simplified of a question. That's highly dependent on things like age, sex, and pre-existing conditions. Population wide numbers are in turn dependent on population structure and in turn who gets it.

You see similar problems in places like /r/covid19 on reddit where people argue about IFR with few accepting the meaninglessness of the question.

Complexity is hard, but I don't think the world is better if we oversimplify things.

Because the question is hard, and there are so many answers, you can twist those answers and that data to support pretty much any viewpoint, and ultimately this is the problem with having too much data at our fingertips.

It’s a complex subject. On the one hand you have someone normally healthy who contracts covid, tests positive, and goes in for breathing difficulties. On the other hand you have someone who has tested positive but gets in a car crash.

We used to pay people to take the raw facts and distil useful information. It was called journalism.

Clickbait and conspiracy pays more than actual journalism though.

I think the error is in mistaking knowledge for wisdom. Knowledge is a powerful tool, but without the wisdom to productively apply it, can be used for great destruction.

These days I see a lot of smarts without knowledge.

Do you not remember the wretched hive of scum and villainy that was Usenet?

Oh man, that was the best. It was large enough to have basically every interest. All while still having the basic functionality of reading and replying to text. Your "feed" was chronological messages, rather than a psychologist-engineered addiction engine.

So... Reddit?

you seemed to have missed the part where they said 'rather than a psychologist-engineered addiction engine'

What does reddit do based on psychology?

I do, but usenet's reach, as compared to current social media outlets, was minuscule. The broader world wasn't aware of it, nor did it care.

Arguably, it became that after the Eternal September in 1993, when the hoi polloi joined in via AOL.

Alt.wealey.crusher.die.die.die was an early example of cyberbullying. That group, and the people using the internet, used their power to really harm Wil Wheaton, and that was well before eternal September

For many of us, exactly that happened. I treasure the internet. My theory is that it just amplified the reality of who humanity really is, at our core. Part wonder, part beast.

The internet did and was sharing a wealth of knowledge and changed the world. Personally I saw a large change in both the online community and it's nature when FB, Google and other online conglomerates became more concerned about stock investors interests, Snowden revelations, and the 2016 election. Online communities changed as well as commerce. The internet can still be a beacon of learning and knowledge however, in my opinion initial motivations which brought it's golden age were not based on commerce. Now they are. The culture of the internet has changed. We lost the "initial internet culture", and since this change, it's nature has also changed along with it's initial purpose. We can bring it back only if we choose to do so.

It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed.

We are in a "eternal September". It will pass (not literally eternal)

I would not go back. It is brilliant

>It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed

I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is, and in addition it's meshed with the bugs in our code (confirmation bias springs to mind) to allow disinformation to spread, and people to seek sources that confirm their beliefs rather than actually inform them of the truth.

The Internet is a tool that requires effort to use and derive value from.

Unfortunately, advertising companies built low-effort dopamine funnels on top and plugged everyone up. This has amplified the more basal animal instincts humans come pre-wired with. Outrage, lust, want, and envy are being micro-stimulated in all of us, constantly, all for the objective function optimization of engagement and ad revenue. Attention has been hijacked, fears have been stoked, and people have been made to hate each other.

We've evolved as individuals and devolved as a whole.

>I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is

the now-informed go and inform the uninformed, affecting everybody in a slow and gradual manner -- regardless of the individuals participation.

One didn't have to read in order to be affected by the advent of the printing press.

I've never bothered to research it, but I've always wondered if there were groups that saw the printing press as evil.

In the same way that some thought about radio, TV and now the internet.

In any case any issues with digital media giants aren't the result of the internet, but rather late stage capitalism.

> I've never bothered to research it, but I've always wondered if there were groups that saw the printing press as evil.

You can safely bet money on that.

It's oft forgotten how much more uncertainty we lived with in the pre-internet era. Once you've gotten used to the memex it's hard to imagine life without one.

I was reminiscing the other day about the Encyclopedia Britannica set we bought when I was a child. Probably within the last 10 years dictionaries were sold.

A few years later, Microsoft Encarta [0] was available on CD.

And a decade later, that was gone itself because of the internet.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta

Sometimes at work over lunch we have debates or arguments that could easily be solved with a quick google but it's just more fun to let it run its course.

To be fair, we've been alive at this point twice that long... kind of hard to blame 15 year old me for poorly predicting events more than 15 years out. ;-)

Yup, go figure, it made everyone dumber and more paranoid, just like TV. Who would have guessed, ads, tracking, nazis, thought police.

Yup it really felt like a stepping stone to a better place. Maybe it still is, just it has some slipper moss growing on it.

The reality is that it did. Do you distinctly forget having to go to a library to do research for a book report? Only getting the slice of news offered locally?

The internet is amazing!

Easy to forget when we're wired for extraordinary to feel ordinary in time.

I clearly remember sitting in front of the computer, web browser open, saying to myself "I better enjoy this beautiful technology now, before advertising and capitalism take over it." I imagined advertising everywhere. Sadly, I wasn't wrong.

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