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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

> Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there.

That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying slightly improved versions of newsgroups (facebook), IRC (slack/discord), BBS (google)... I can't think of a new mode of communication invented in the last decades. One could say video, but live TV existed before. Scaling up is incremental. Right here, HN is barely different than newsgroups. If change had been non-incremental , we d be dismissing HN as something that only crazy people do (the equivalent of riding a horse to work)

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> One could say video, but live TV existed before.

Okay but, could anyone broadcast on TV? Could anyone have their own TV channel?

TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch... preceded by JustinTV, Vine, Periscope.

It's a different ballgame. There's whole new revenue streams, individual content creators are collectively making a ton of money . Consumers are directly (or nearly directly) compensating creators in many cases (e.g. Twitch) unlike before.

That is still just improvement on what's already available. Next level will be obvious when it is available. It could be VR or AR or something so radical we can't imagine it but it has to be like computer to typewriter improvement. It does everything old technology did but it also opens the door to a whole new level of development.

> That is still just improvement on what's already available.

This is the entire history of computing.

OTOH, talking on a screen is not really a novel invention. OTOH, while Tiktok,instagram etc make it easier for someone to begin a TV career (because that's what it is, we just use different words), and remove the middlemen, it's not really turned "everyone to a broadcaster", only a few manage to become popular and dominate the market. As video apps become more mainstream, fewer and fewer people will test the waters in it, as the dominant influencers keep raising the barrier to entry. Same thing happened with blogs which bifurcated (good writers became "blogojournalists", bad writers ended in the gutter of facebook). So yes, we have a "new TV", but that's not fundamentally different than ... TV . Same could go for podcasts, a rehash of radio / talk shows.

A lot of people did streaming on ShoutCast.

>Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress.

Any time I see a statement like this around here it never seems to include a suggestion. That's not to say there isn't something to be done, but when I think about my computer or phone there's no new idea I'm wishing they had.

>I can't think of a new mode of communication invented in the last decades.

Human communication is confined to the human senses. So again, what are we missing? What should be developed?

Usually novel ideas are not something we wished we had (like faster horses). Ground breaking ideas are technologies that are enabling new ecosystems, like the WWW, the iPhone, and probably in the future, VR. Even with mobile tech, we still have not exploited them to the max largely because they are overly dependent on the cloud, making simple things needlessly complicated (like transferring a file to a nearby computer).

> what are we missing? What should be developed?

We can only speculate, but despite all the tech thrown at it, our communication is still pretty mundane, serial dialogues. A technology like the internet could enable new modes of organizing information in which the output is more than the sum of the parts (like a spreadsheet for minds). Wikipedia did this, and open source software. Another is the ability to have direct payments without middlemen (what blockains do), that would enable a ton of new possibilities.

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