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Comment by finnthehuman | Hacker News Reader

Winamp skins make me miss the fun of software circa 2000. The sun was bright and the possibility space wide open. A piece of software would come out, make huge strides in enabling a new use case effectively, leave the door open for people to make it theirs - and boy did they ever!

In the last 20 years how have software music players changed? The files come from a subscription service easier to use and with much better metadata than tracks from Napster ever did. That's awesome! Also the subscription dictates you use their hot turd of software, with dreary spartan UI and zero room for functional customization to be had. Welcome to the future, now learn to like it or get called a luddite.

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We've lost so much since the 90's and 00's.

Most people are using less configurable computers: phones.

We can't easily install the software we want on our devices (iPhone especially, but Android also to an extent). Add to that the fact that we have to go through a distribution channel that takes a 30% cut. It's gross af.

The social media platforms took over from websites. Nobody really bothers with personal websites or blogs anymore since the majority of the population get their news from social media. Why spend effort building for the long tail?

Forum communities are dead because of social media. Facebook pages and subreddits are not the same.

There's one search engine, and it has a pretty big moat. This search engine built a browser and is now trying to destroy ad blockers via extension capability removal and web bundles.

It's pretty obvious that Google is trying to kill the web. AMP, steering away from semantic web, etc. They want everything to be Chrome.

Firefox doesn't have as much user share because of aforementioned browser.

We invented some cool protocols along the way (blockchain), but also lost a few that were really great (bittorrent, DHT).

IRC is pretty dead. Now there's Slack and Discord. Riot is a pretty distant third.

Apps and websites got SUPER BLOATED.

A few things have improved, though: Git is pretty freaking sweet, and Rust is the language of the future.

It's like when Link wakes up in Ocarina of Time after retrieving the Master Sword. Except in our case, everything's suddenly shiny, but feels plastic and artificial. We've discovered we're now renting everything and craftsmanship has withered away to a world of composability and integration.

It's a simple story: billions and billions of dollars chased after capturing and exploiting the average human user. Each company it super simple to adopt their platform. To do so they had to destroy the competition and create a moat. These negative externalities coupled with high concentrations of users to platforms has left a wake of destruction.

The indie, free and open web got knee-kicked by the giants.

I mostly agree with you. It’s sad. The only thing I disagree is that iPhone, while closed, is really important piece equipment in your life. It’s got your walking gait, browsing history, photos, videos, notes, passwords, social media accounts, health records, bank info, geo location, driving habits, where I work and how I commute, where I jog, etc.

It’s ridiculously dense. This kind of a device didn’t exist in the year 2000. So, while 90’s tech would be awesome on the surface, I am glad Apple is in the driving seat to manage my phone’s security. App Store is amazing, shitty software that spies on you doesn’t make it through (chrome extensions anyone?). Treat 30% as a privacy fee. You’re glad there is a T2 security chip on your device. And you’re glad Apple pays $400k a year for several top notch security engineers that work there.

This cannot be achieved by a bunch of Winamp hooligans and open source crusaders.

Replace Apple with your fav phone manufacturer.

Everything else, I agree. The internet has become a pile of shit.

>It’s ridiculously dense. This kind of a device didn’t exist in the year 2000

Pocket PC's existed.

Did they have a camera? Gyro, magnetometer, accelerometer? Did it contain my call history? Did it know where I am?

Totally unfair comparison.

Some recent ones bundled a GPS unit, and they were not blent with smartphones until 2008? but they where good enough.

You talk as if before the iPhone we had -nothing-. And that's not true in any sense.

If the W3C had focus, we could have developed a cross-platform native application runtime that worked over HTTP. You could visit a website and a lightweight, sandboxed app could be downloaded. Google kind of did this with "Android Instant Apps".

It'd have all the same permissions and sandboxing guarantees that apps distributed over the stores do. The OS could even collect telemetry on the kind of requests these apps made to help quash bad actors.

It might have even prevented Javascript from growing into what it is today. We'd have a strong division between what is app and what is document. (I'm not bashing the Javascript/frontend folks! I just wish we'd had a dichotomy rather than stuff everything into HTML.)

I think WASM might stand a chance of doing some good here. It'd be nice if there was agreement between Apple and Google to build a cross-platform device SDK. They won't.

We need to defend HTML and our browsers from growing into the Frankenstein's monster Google is pushing for. If we lose that, we lose the war.

> shitty software that spies on you doesn’t make it through (chrome extensions anyone?). Treat 30% as a privacy fee.

https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x4E.html

Yes, funny thing though, you can watch a youtube how-to video for almost anything you want to accomplish.

Facebook groups are sitting on so much information which previously would have been accumulated in forums, unavailable and totally useless except to serve ads for the members of said groups.

Most of this is nonsense.

Most of what you're describing is simply an extension of Eternal September. "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just that newcomers don't care about them so much.

And that's okay.

Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? Their main use case is Instagram or TikTok. A ThinkPad makes no sense for them. But I can still buy one.

Social media platforms "took over" in the sense of having more eyeballs. But so what? Few if any of those eyeballs are really interested in the things that I'm interested in from websites, blogs, etc. Moreover, websites and blogs are still around, and just as populated as they ever were. It's just that there's a bigger population on social media sites.

There ARE multiple search engines. DuckDuckGo even has good policies. True, none of them may be as good as Google. But pretty much ALL of them are better than Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, and all of the old-school competitors who lost to Google.

The only thing on this list that's a halfway decent point is Firefox user share. Just to the extent that browser engine monoculture gives Google a lot of power. But as long as the engine is open source, and there's a possibility of more privacy-conscious players leveraging it (e.g. Brave, Vivaldi, etc), then I can live with that.

The "positive" bit about Rust being "the language of the future" gives me the impression that you're mostly mourning geek culture being delegated to a side subculture, instead of being the dominant culture of the Internet itself. To an extent, it is a bummer to no longer be at the forefront of the hype wave. But to be honest, now that I'm middle-aged I don't so much care about being at the forefront of the hype wave anyway. As long as I have my crufty greyboard corner in the Internet's basement, I'm happy. And that doesn't really seem to be going anywhere.

> Most of this is nonsense.

> Most of what you're describing is simply an extension of Eternal September. "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just that newcomers don't care about them so much.

You're missing my point. I don't care that the tech stack changed. I care that everything is locked down and inherently inflexible.

Everything has become a rental and we don't have autonomy in the choices.

Your comment literally begins with "We've lost so much".

"We" haven't. The websites and blogs and desktop applications that you're talking about still exist, as does the general computing hardware to work with it.

What's happened is that newer, more vapid content has emerged. Along with more locked-down hardware for working with that. Aimed at a totally different audience of non-technical people, that never would have been "us" anyway.

It's the argument of an old white guy, who's mad that immigrants have changed the neighborhood. Yeah, maybe so. But our favorite old restaurants are still there. The bridge club is still open, right next to the bingo hall. It's just that we're a subculture now, instead of the dominant scene.

> Your comment literally begins with "We've lost so much".

> "We" haven't.

Yes, we have.

Look at what's happened to Reddit in the last decade.

Companies with that much power over the signal can adjust what we see. Change the ratios to favor content that earns them money. It destroys open discourse.

Facebook, Google, and Apple are all doing this.

TikTok only lets beautiful people through! I like the app, but that's pretty fucked up.

The browser is becoming a monoculture.

AMP is taking precedence in the search order.

The web long tail is atrophying because there aren't eyes on it anymore.

I can't share apps I write with friends that use iPhone.

Stallman.

It's happening in industry too. Redis and Linux are now AWS.

You are seeing past me.

I am disagreeing with you.

You are using the term "we" to describe 1990's Internet denizens, and 2020's TikTok browsers, as being the same cultural entity. From that POV, "our" online experience has degraded.

I am saying that these are different groups altogether. That the latter has supplanted the former in terms of size and dominance. That all of the things I cared about in the 1990's are still alive and perfectly accessible to me today. That it may be somewhat sad to see the "Internet culture" of old become a subculture, as the casuals rolled in and took it mainstream, but that "we" still exist and are doing fine.

It doesn't matter what the populations of the users are! My partner uses TikTok, and I do by extension.

The only place demographics matter in this argument is how they affect where and how the money is being spent.

Incumbents are turning our field into a fiefdom to lock in eyeballs. Some of this is just unconscious natural evolution because of the gravity their decisions have, but some of it is quite deliberate.

Google shuttered Google Play Music because it doesn't have the numbers they want and they have another internal effort that duplicates the functionality. With one choice, they changed the music listening behavior of millions of people. YouTube Music sucks at discoverability and favors replays of the same music.

In the old web, this didn't happen.

This is a small, unimportant anecdote. It's a drop in the sea of changes that are turning the internet to shit. There are hundreds of events and changes I can point to.

I'll cut to the chase:

Google, Apple, and Facebook need to be split up by the DOJ. Google shouldn't have a browser or any say in web standards, AMP should die, Apple shouldn't lock down iPhone, and Facebook should have extremely flexible data portability.

All of these companies should have their ad units stripped away and instead do bidding. There are too many negatives (spying, ads disguised as search results, etc) to having these in the same business units.

I haven't touched on it yet, but the Cableization of streaming is also something we need to address. It's a very close parallel to what's happened with the walled gardens.

At the heart of the issue is anticompetitive behavior and how it erodes the commons.

This has nothing to do with Gen-Z and everything to do with FAANG.

I get a lot of what you're saying, but I think you're conflating signal-to-noise with disappearance of the old weird web. It's still there, there's just a lot more other stuff out there too.

For the most part I agree with what you say about big tech and their dominance, but you don't have to use their products for the most part. The web standards are the big problem in that context.

Genuine question - why do you feel you have to use TikTok?

The problem is that these platforms have, in a very meaningful sense, taken the place of communications infrastructure. The bulk of us use Messenger or iMessage/FaceTime or some other over-the-top service for things we would have otherwise texted, or sent over email, or called someone about using a dialer, and that contributes to the vendor lock-in that they have. It's the new IRC, or AIM, but with an even wider capability gap and a userbase billions deep.

Even RCS doesn't solve this, because they're still a technically inferior spec - they don't support E2EE, and they still depend on phone numbers, with the terrible user experiences of arbitrary last-century identifiers and the phone companies you (generally) have to subscribe to to get them.

Until social media companies or their chat protocols are forced into some sort of interoperability - a thing we can do, under antitrust law - no amount of data portability will fix this. Because it's a consequence of their owning our networks, not just our content.

We’re definitely on the same page. I’ve been evangelising about interoperability for several years, meeting blank or glazed over stares the whole way. I’m definitely jaded.

StevePerkins has already done an excellent job trying to showing you why you're wrong.

I don't know why this is so hard for you to grasp. For people who liked the way things were in 1990 (or whenever) all that technology is still out there and in use (with a few minor and largely unimportant exceptions). It's even better than it used to be! You can get an RPi system for HOW MUCH! these days. Internet service is often good enough to host your own (small) server if you really want to do that. If you don't, there are dozens of excellent cheap hosting services. Everybody uses open source compilers. Linux is everywhere, opening stuff up (not all stuff, but a lot of stuff).

Now, do the majority of people who use "the internet" use any of this stuff, or even care about. They do not.

I would suggest that what you care about is precisely what Steve noted: Eternal September. You're unhappy that the vast majority of users of "the internet" don't care about the sorts of tools, platforms and culture that you do (and to a large extent, I do too).

But those platforms, tools and capabilities have not gone away. They are all out there, and in most ways are healthier than ever. They have not become a part of the majority experience of "the internet" (Android doesn't really count, though in a few small ways, it's notable). That might matter to you.

But it doesn't mean that the things you prefer are gone, or that "the internet" has been turned to shit. It means there's more than one "the internet" out there, and most people interact with a version of it that you don't like. You can rail against that if you like, but please don't claim that it has destroyed the other versions, because it hasn't.

You're both fixated on this "Eternal September" argument, which is a total mischaracterization of everything I've stated.

I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about companies behaving badly.

I want the entire world on the Internet. I want everyone creating more and consuming things that better fit their interests. I'm a creator! I want people using my stuff!

But at the same time I want our data and our tools to be open. I want portability and the ability to integrate how I want. We had some semblance of that, and now it's gone.

The web is eroding!

Mobile is locked down!

Our data is stuck in silos!

We're being tracked!

Diversity is gone!

Interoperability is gone!

These things happened.

The DOJ should break apart Google, Apple, and Facebook. They haven't been good stewards of the Internet.

I've gotten nearly a hundred upvotes in this comment thread, so I don't think I'm alone in this thinking.

And I don't mean to call either of you out. I just don't think you're seeing why I'm frustrated.

The internet grew and so did its capacity of making people money. In a world which cares a great deal about money, it makes sense the culture would slowly get shifted by industry to keep developers focused on what makes the money, which is apparently not skins.

It’s the filter on ideas of capitalism applied at scale and it’s not unique to the internet (eg Cookie-Cutter houses). It‘s interests are aligned with maximizing access though, but yeah, I get the frustration, we lose a lot in that process. Maybe we can think up something better...

>I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about companies behaving badly.

Your main claim was that the "old web" has been destroyed.

The web is not eroding. It has expanded dramatically, and now includes huge amounts of stuff that were not part of the (say) 1994-2000 version. It continues to contain large amounts of stuff that are directly connected to that earlier stuff, albeit in massively greater quantity and quality.

Mobile is locked down. Nothing to say about that. Mobile is not the web, it's just the platform that most people interact with the online world on. Nothing more (or less).

Data is not deterministically locked in silos, although many people take the easy path toward certain functionality (e.g. email) that has that result. But this still a choice.

Ditto for tracking, though arguably less of a choice. You can do a lot to stop it, but you shouldn't have to.

The software/IT/web world is massively more diverse than it was in 1995. The available material, the participants : way, way more diverse.

Interoperability was never there: we had the Unix wars, Unix vs. Windows, mac vs everyone else. We had Intel vs PowerPC (soon to be revisited as Intel vs ARM).

Unless you've been using GNU since 1986 (I have), your tools weren't open.

Google, Apple and Facebook are doing bad things. They have not destroyed the internet that you loved, they've made it harder to see.

No. The technology is not there anymore. Unless you consider “minor and unimportant” the network news (it’s barren today), ftp servers (they are unsupported by web browsers), gopher (unsupported too), or the muds (barren too).

> Stallman.

Not sure what to make of this. Is this a reference to his tarnished sainthood or that the modern web has largely ignored his sage advice? Or something else?

Sums up my thoughts in this perfectly. Thanks for writing.

I think he’s point was more about the walled gardens and monoculture. Everything was independent and variety was rife.

In fairness, this change hasn’t just happened with IT either. Cars have gotten harder to self-repair. Hardware has increasingly become disposable. Even the life of things like TVs have gotten shorter as they’ve become “smarter”. In general, consumers have gotten lazier and more motivated by pretty things rather than longevity. A trend businesses are very keen to encourage because it makes them more money.

It’s not all bad though. For example social networks and smart TVs have become a weird godsend during the lockdown. Would we have coped without them if we didn’t have them? Probably. But I’m still glad we had them.

I think you forgot MSFT being the super monoculture that hard blocked linux being installed on desktop machines with OEMS. IE6 being the scourge it was and pretty much the only option until firefox came out. How MSFT killed netscape & got an antitrust lawsuit over it. The entire encryption export fight & the clipper chip fight and so on. We look at the past with rose colored glasses.

I don't think people really looked at how long lasting their hardware was back then, it was more of a happy accident. We still 'disposed' of hardware with glee, more because of huge moore's law gains. I think a lot of people still use a lot of older hardware you're not aware of either. People use cars from the early 2000s still. People using cars from the 70s wasn't much of a thing in the 90s and american manufacturers were far less reliable.

I hadn’t forgotten about Internet Explorer. But in fairness, Linux wasn’t really quite ready as a primary OS until around the time kHTML and Gecko became good enough most of the time. Plus Opera was free from 2000 too. Before then Internet Explorer was actually the better browser, as painful as it is to write that. I did also occasionally use a browser I’d written myself too (because that was semi-possible with Web 1.0 standards).

I also used to use an IRC client I’d written myself.

The more annoying walled garden was Windows itself. The 80s and early 90s has such variety then Windows dominated. If there’s one thing that’s better today its that applications are now platform agnostic just so long as Blink/WebKit/Gecko runs on it. So Linux is as much a first class citizen as Windows and macOS.

Very good point. Even today, MSFT has such control over the hardware world, if you want to run Windows 7 on a Z490 mainboard, you're SOL. The latest mainboards force you to run the latest Windows 10. Fortunately, they all run your favorite OSS os'.

> Moreover, websites and blogs are still around, and just as populated as they ever were. It's just that there's a bigger population on social media sites.

This is absolutely true, but it's also true to say that they're very hard to find nowadays. You can in part blame the dominance of the major platforms, but I think the real culprit is probably SEO: it's very hard to out-SEO anybody with a marketing budget, or the kind of bottom feeders who are willing to spew out spun or other low-quality content that spams search results.

There's a bitter irony in realising that, back in the day, I used to bemoan the first page of search results being cluttered with "junk" from GeoCities or wherever, when I was looking for "real", "authoritative" information, whereas now I'd be much more welcoming of that kind of content appearing on page 1 of the search results.

And maybe that gets to the truth of it: good, interesting, worthwhile content has always been pretty hard to find online. You had to work for it 20 years ago, and you still have to work for it now.

I was deeping through the old web recently. Sites either had really small pictures or full sized pictures scaled down. You just don't see more than 1024px sized quality anymore. Browsing photothumbs instead of scrolling is so much quicker and offers more depth. We did lose a lot.

We gained more people with shallower content. Being able to lookup and find a picture of most people is an advantage. But losing flickr quality and album length means instead of a photoset you get a highlight photo with mayhe four combined.

Maintaining old sites were always an issue. Costs / site changes brought down good sites/pages so deadlinks were a huge problem. The waybackmachine could bring a site back but they rarely deep indexed or saved media so you mostly got a page full of 'x's.

Someone on here could easily build a better search engine indexing older websites and bring life back to those sites.

But be warned you've changed. Waiting a week or two or months between replies was common. Having tiny text on mobile is the norm so get ready to scroll. There was a lot of shallow content with some real gems. Patience is required.

Indeed, and there are already search engines like https://wiby.me/ and https://millionshort.com/, which offer more direct access to content off the beaten track.

As someone who sympathizes with the parent, I think it's mostly a lament for a lost favorite hangout. What happened to the internet, for me, feels like when a local restaurant gets featured on diners drive ins and dives and suddenly you can't just walk in and sit down, if you get a table it's too loud and crowded to enjoy, they can't function on just the usual staff so they hire a bunch of asshole hipster waiters that ignore you, and the food quality wavers. The internet got popular. The people who remember it before it was ubiquitous miss what it was and are disappointed by what it became.

The nuance and poetry of this comparison to a favorite local diner is a refreshing breath of air and conjured up a very similar sensation in thinking about what the web is now compared to the one we had.

Thank you.

Here you go : https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/

> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad?

Because it used to be that you could start as a browser/gamer and transition to becoming a creator/tinkerer without having to change devices.

You can become a creator using the software available in the walled gardens, but only a certain kind - a content producer for the almighty ad engine.

The general purpose computer has not disappeared, but it’s no longer the first or default exposure to computing for young people. The phone or tablet is a plateau which will trap many who might move beyond it due to simple economics - it’s hard to justify yet another device if the phone or tablet can do everything that you need it to at the moment.

> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad? Their main use case is Instagram or TikTok. A ThinkPad makes no sense for them. But I can still buy one.

The point is that the structure of the contemporary internet has caused their use case to be what you stated it is. What used to be a plethora of possibilities is now a small number of tailored experiences, and this is directly because of the heavy centralization of the internet.

You commented about OP's mention of rust but I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on DHT. The internet could entirely be supported by p2p infrastructure and maintain all the aforementioned properties, yet the predominant connotation of p2p is piracy. This is a more nuanced discussion than you give it credit for.

I find the current day internet beats the Winamp era in entertainment, learning, open source, travel, job hunting, hobbies, shopping, art and games. They all have more content, better and more accessible.

In the beginning, when the internet was roamed by students and tech guys, there was much enthusiasm for the possibilities, which unfortunately didn't pan out as expected when much of the rest of the world joined in. But that doesn't mean we can't find better options today than before.

> "We" haven't really lost any of these things. It's just that newcomers don't care about them so much.

the switch to software as a service has reduced the ability as well as need for people to fix bugs in software and to in a sense even operate their own software. This is a loss. I used to teach intro CS classes at my uni and over the last few years even beginner CS students didn't know how to install an OS or do rudimentary networking stuff, skills people picked up in ca 2000 just by toying around with their desktop systems.

The entire thesis is faulty to begin with, people not caring doesn't mean that loss of skills isn't bad. We're also in a continuous decline of physical skills. People may not care that they can't swim, they do care though when they're drowning. (a statistic that sadly has been going up)

People don't care about their software being locked down because they don't even know what open software is like. If you're so coddled you don't get to experiment you don't care because you're stunted in development, not because the skills are not valuable.

Part of the reason for students being unable to install an os or get a network to work is because CS degrees now equal a lot of money, and the people that tinkered with computers all through childhood often lose their places to the kids that spent their time studying how to get into a good university, instead of studying how to do things with computers.

And yet there are more compsci than ever, and the field is more diverse.

Why does it matter they haven't installed an OS before? Technology advances and the average use case changes too. At some point CS majors stopped knowing what punchards were for.

No field is for one specific group. All these complaints come off as trying to lament the inevitable.

Compensation and diversity are both up, so however you slice it why not mention that too?

> And yet there are more compsci than ever

this isn't even true.

Number of computer science graduates fell, and has stagnated since the mid aughts. The field is also one of the least diverse, and the reason compensation is up is because there's a shortage of labour, that's how supply and demand works, and it's why so many foreign CS students and tech workers migrate to the US, because the need for tech talent vastly outstrips the number of qualified workers.

None of this is inevitable, decline in technical excellence is a preventable choice, both on a cultural and policy level. This however is only doable if kids, from a young age, have the liberty and power to experiment with the tools they are given, rather than destroying their technical literacy by spoon-feeding them locked down tech and services.

> Why would I be upset that that some teen or 20-something, who primarily uses the internet to post and browse selfies on social media, does so from a phone rather than a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad?

I care about this.

It’s the same reason I care about consoles versus pc’s. If all a young person has is a console, it’s difficult for them to realize they can change things, instead of just being a consumer.

I’m finding it difficult to put into words, but just this week I had to buy my three young children some kind of computer for school. The school suggested chromebooks because they were easy yet I just couldn’t bring myself to get them and got some refurbished macbooks instead.

The reason, I guess, is that I want my children to understand technology and to be able to hack it to suit their ends. I don’t want a media consumption device, I want them to have computers.

Literally the only reason that I can do the things I can do today is because when I was young, I had access to an 8-bit computer that I could easily write code on, even though I mostly just played games on it. If I’d had a console instead, my life would have been much poorer.

I feel you.

Come to Urbit. It's not ready yet, but the hope was not lost.

>It's pretty obvious that Google is trying to kill the web.

Won't it mean then that Google kills it self ?

You can still use all of those things, so what have you lost?

Torrents died? When?

I've done a lot of thinking about this, and I think much of the nostalgia for that era is actually rooted in limitations and the way that they made certain things exciting.

Owning a new album was exciting, because previously you couldn't listen to that album.

Getting a new mp3 player whose storage was suddenly measured in gigabytes was exciting, because previously you couldn't carry around that much music.

Getting a new phone was exciting, because it probably had a camera, or internet access, or the ability to edit files, or some other fundamentally new feature that your previous device couldn't do.

Spending a Saturday curating your music collection and updating metadata was exciting, because that couldn't be done for you automatically.

Each stage where some barrier was overcome - be it a small, personal barrier or a large, technological barrier - came with this intoxicating sense of progress and improvement and possibility. If you assembled the solution yourself from existing products - software or hardware - it was all the more potent of a feeling.

These days everything just works, amazingly well. That's a testament to progress, but it's also incredibly boring. There's little left in consumer tech to solve, by consumers or by companies. You have one miraculous device that does everything you could possibly want in your digital life, and does it really well, out of the box. It has as much bandwidth as you're likely to use, you can stream enough media to fill a thousand lifetimes for less than twenty dollars a month, it can shoot photographer-quality photos and orchestrate your smart home and play console-quality video games and run a fully-features office suite.

Progress is what gadget-lovers like us miss. Tragically, the the very act of indulging it erases opportunities for it.

Brilliant insightful analysis. Thank you.

It's the journey we find exciting - the difference from A to B.

I remember the intoxicating experience of using Spotify for the first time in October 2008, using IP address account tricks to access it from outside the UK. This was despite being a winamp- (or actually foobar2000)-loving music pirate.

Now, I don't think of it at all. I've arrived at destination B. What now? Well, there's desktop Linux on phones. That's fun and new, if you care about freedom, things being in the hands of the user, tinkering, and customisation. I'd go there, it needs some help.

Great insight. I wonder where are limitations today?

AI is still quite limited but improving at a decent pace. Look forward to more intelligent game AIs and possible auto-pilot on cars, and stuff that might seem far-fetched today.

I still find Spotify's admittedly garbage electron app better than any other player I've ever used because I get (almost) all the music I could ever want at my fingertips without having to browse any third party website, find the files, buy/pirate them, load them in the right location with the right tags etc...

The price to pay for this convenience is DRM and player lock-in (and all possible usage data being siphoned by said player). It is unfortunate, but as a user it's a price I'm willing to pay, even if reluctantly.

Yeah, and albums suddenly disappearing because the licenses ran out. Or, even worst: Albums being incomplete because certains track "aren't available".

I don't know. I use Spotify as a radio replacement, but albums I like I try to buy as FLAC files. If they are lost, it's my own fault.

As long as the music files are still available for purchase, then I’m fine with the situation as is.

Until they aren't. Convenience, DRM and collective inertia may well lead to disappearance of media delivered in open formats. Not tomorrow, not next year, but in 10 years? I am not so sure, unless a dedicated minority keeps pushing for it. But then, what happens when will come of age the generation that grew considering normal to only stream and buy a temporary license for media and books?

what DRM? rip and pirate until you have everything you need

Its possible to create 3rd party spotify clients by using the librespot library and there exists alternatives but I havent seen any that could replace the official application.

The only caveat is librespot only works with premium accounts.

Speaking about fun. The reason why there is no Winamp 4: Who the hell wants to see a Winamp 4 Skin

Yes it is an official reason https://web.archive.org/web/20131219003849/http://www.winamp...

I imagine that 90's software was like late 1800's Western United States... pioneers going west and just doing whatever the fuck they wanted, now you need a permit to replace your window in San Francisco.

That world still exists if you'll just get off your phone. Not only does it still exist, but the Linux version of it is better (and wilder, in the important) ways than anything from the 90s.

It’s very different. Sure I can still use Winamp but it’s not like my friends and I are exchanging skins. The market is now an enthusiast’s one.

Your friends who were exchanging winamp skins? Total enthusiasts. You didn't notice it because compared to the hardcore nerds who had been online for 15 years before you, you felt like regular people. Fast forward, and it turns out otherwise.

At the risk of sounding like a "get off my lawn" guy as well, computing just isn't fun anymore.

Have you toyed with instagram masks and other AR projects lately? Fun moves around, and what's been hot and new 20 years ago is not anymore.

There are still fun things to do, but platforms like Instagram are repellent to me. I'm toying with compilers and interpreters, which have been around for a long time. What's not "fun" is just how the nature of computing has changed, things have been conglomerated into platforms and a lot of the cool grassroots stuff is either dead or just not as visible.

Not sure if you remember Sonique. It was, I think, the first app (or at least MP3 player) that had non-rectangular shapes for it's skins:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)

I loved Sonique, but winamps consistent updates ended up winning me over. One huge love in the winamp side was when Tripx was released and made crazy visuals to go along with the music.

Oh for sure, I think Winamp just had staying power, and the various skins and visual plugins were awesome.

I totally miss that time period, it was just a great time to be into technology.

Oh wow. I totally forgot about Sonique. I guess after Winamp I blocked it out. It actually reminds me a bit of my first Rio Player.

Oh my god, I haven't thought about Sonique in decades!

There's a Gap Dream song called College Music which goes: Too many soft machines / No relation to the world / Unnecessary wall / ... / It makes me sick sometimes.

These are literally all the lyrics I could find, but maybe my Google fu is weak: https://www.spin.com/2016/06/gap-dream-college-music-stream-...

Luddites were against not receiving a piece of the larger pie, not against technology or progress.

https://qz.com/968692/luddites-have-been-getting-a-bad-rap-f...

Not to mention the insane licensing laws governing what music I can listen to. For example, I can’t listen to any Muse tracks on Spotify in India.

Back then you had a different software for each media type. Browsing Download.com, Tucows and Snap Files to find new cool stuff was a thing I did. Most of my friends did Windows/software customization with Litestep, skins, wallpapers and what not. shakes fist at sky

I use pianobar, driven by key bindings in my window manager. It's conceptually something I easily could have had 20 years ago, but I didn't.

>> In the last 20 years how have software music players changed?

For me? Not so much. I still have my music on Mp3s. The new stuff still plays as is did back then. Mp3 players never went away. I still occasionally use my old RCA Lyra but there is actually a healthy market for new models. My car still has an FM radio, but now I can plug a USB full of mp3s into it too. That isn't bad. Bluetooth and streaming has yet to become mandatory.

I use MusicBee to listen to my di.fm subscription - the futures not bad

That was awesome , thank you

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