Ask HN: Jaded about the internet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Jaded about the internet?

80 pointslegrande109 comments

Are you jaded about The Internet? I've been online 20 years now and I feel like I've reached the pinnacle of what The Internet is about and have in a way reached the end of The Internet. I've seen just about everything you could want, and participated in many communities over the years, and I feel everything is just 'samey' now and follows the same pattern. It's hard for anything on The Internet to stand out and be unique (at least for me). YMMV on this.

Now with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all the things, which is good to see, but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it. This is the shiny thing I look forward to on the web, but it's still early days. Other than that, the web seems kinda boring lately.

Are you jaded about the web too? I'd like to hear your thoughts!

View on HN

It was exciting when I was a teenager but now I am a fifty year old lady who is just trying to use it to get paid for drawing stuff and I am really tired of fighting the social media corporations' constant decisions to de-emphasize posts with offsite links to places where I can get people to pay for my work. The thought of pivoting to making vertical videos because all the kids are on TikTok now feels incredibly exhausting, especially because I know it'll probably be replaced by yet another corporate-owned social site with its own bullshit in a year or two.

NFTs just seem to add an extra layer of bullshit where every transaction happens via a bunch of people wasting an absurd amount of energy to perform useless computation in hopes of being the one who wins the lottery for some cryptocurrency. Don't tell me your favorite crypto's moving off of PoW, it's wasting incredible amounts of energy right now and moving off of that relies on getting a consensus from people who are financially incentivized to stay on PoW.

(The most damning sentiment about NFTs I've seen is that there are two groups who are historically at the forefront of new ways to get paid on the internet: porn makers and furries. And neither of them is into NFTs.)

I have to disagree with you about Web3 (Cryptocurrencies, NFT's, Blockchains, that whole space), I think this is the next frontier of the internet and it's an incredibly exciting time. NFT's and Crypocurrencies are just one of the earliest implementations of this new technology.

The first implementation of NFT's is for artwork but that's just one implementation. When you step back and look at the actual technology, it's introduced a paradigm shift for how we think of objects on the internet. Before NFT's, everything on the internet was fungible, if it existed on the internet, you could copy it. Sure there are things like DRM, but that is just an abstraction on top of a fungible thing that tries to make that thing non-fungible.

I don't know where the technology will take us, or what it will look like in 20, 30 or 40 years, but when you think about the idea that everything up until now on the internet has been copyable and we are just starting to figure out how to actually give a digital thing ownership, that will change how we look at just about everything on the internet, from DRM to authentication and many other aspects. I think when I'm your age (mid 20's now), NFT's will be everywhere and "NFT Artwork" will be looked back on as the very first implementation of the technology, and likely with many jokes about how bad it all was.

I don’t think the vast majority of people care at all about “owning” a digital image or “verifying” it’s integrity.

Furries pay lots of money to have custom work done of their character. They don’t pay to “own” some random pre-existing art.

And basically everything that NFTs do, a database can do better.

Looks like OP's post is out of the homepage, so I can reply without downvote avalanche incoming.

I agree with your sentiment. It is probably the most exciting aspect of the internet, and digital ownership concept has a long and exciting road ahead.

I am also utterly baffled by how this sentiment is met on HN. Thoughtful responses are downvoted, cheap shots against this sentiment rise up. I no longer want to participate in discussions about anything crypto on HN, negativity is too strong.

And there is absolute irony that this is happening on a thread called "Jaded about the internet?".

I agree with both of you guys. It's clear to me that this sort of decentralization will prove to be revolutionary. People who immediately equate NFTs with JPEGs are idiots and don't get it. They won't get it until they're using them to buy and sell tickets to events, which is probably the next major use case.

>They won't get it until they're using them to buy and sell tickets to events

I'm not really pro or anti-NFT. But, I will say that people frequently champion them by stating potential future use cases. I think it's unfair to do that as a basis for claiming current detractors have it wrong.

Right now most enthusiasts are heavily promoting the primary use case as essentially digitized files (be it JPEG or whatever--but mainly art).

So, that's the current argument, as opposed to some future wherein they supplant x or do y.

I'm not saying that enthusiasts can't be idiots, too. But the naysayers arguing against strawmen enthusiasts is getting pretty annoying, and it's pretty clear most of those people don't even know the technical definition of an NFT. The parallels, here, with criticism of the early internet is so obvious.

>naysayers arguing against strawmen enthusiasts

I hear you, but not sure who the "strawmen enthusiasts" are. The plain case that's being made for the accessible value of NFTs right now revolves around ownership of digital assets, full-stop.

But, when detractors point out their critiques of this use case, some enthusiasts pivot to "well, that's not all an NFT can do or will ever be". It's kind of slippery, and seems to be the straw-manning here.

>it's pretty clear most of those people don't even know the technical definition of an NFT

It's fair enough to say that NFTs are in their infancy. But, enthusiasts are selling the current use case really, really hard. So, maybe they are undermining your arguments for the future use cases of NFTs more than anyone.

And, really, technical definitions of NFTs (or anything) don't matter WRT adoption. What matters is what's been actually implemented of real value. You can't really fault people for not buying into NFTs based on the present-state. But, if other valuable use cases come to fruition, they'll come running. Thing is, their behavior could be considered rational now and then.

Another thing that baffles me is the need to mention energy usage along with anything related to crypto. The complaint about energy usage is a normative claim that these technologies don’t deserve to use the energy they do, which is fine, but then it’s never backed up by an actual argument for why they don’t.

Additionally, this is a standard I don’t see applied to anything else that could be reasonably argued to be on the same level of “dumb” as anti-crypto people claim crypto is. Let’s see the same scrutiny of energy usage applied to every TikTok ever made. Let’s see it applied to the training of massive ML recommender systems that serve no purpose but to better target ads (this is one I have seen from some folks, but nowhere near as much as I’ve seen outrage over crypto energy usage). If someone says “well yeah, but at least those recommender systems have value, which crypto doesn’t!”, sorry, but value for whom? Certainly not users.

I’m disappointed that even on HN, there’s pushback against individual creators of digital content trying to capture some of the value they create. Individuals simply don’t have the resources to use the legal system to go after anonymous people online who steal their work, and they shouldn’t be expected to just give it away for free. So other solutions need to be tried, and NFTs are maybe one potential solution.

> I no longer want to participate in discussions about anything crypto on HN, negativity is too strong.

And this is how the negativity stays so strong on HN. I get it, I usually just say my opinion on crypto, accept it'll most likely be downvoted, and try not to engage in a back and forth too much, but it's tempting just to let things on here be and have those discussions elsewhere because it's relentless.

Which just makes me wonder what other tech trends people on HN are being intentionally obtuse about.

I don't even mind legit criticism (environmental concerns are worrying for example), it's people saying provably false crap like "it's only used for money laundering and crime" or "it's just the new beanie babies" one line dismissal of a $2 trillion dollar industry (and has a larger market cap than physical silver) that's annoying.

People have grown tired of crypto posts because we have been exposed to over a decade of marketing hype and still no concrete product or useful service has come out for the average person. Almost all of these crypto products die out after the hype, fail to deliver on their promises, or were outright scams.

I was personally interested in a bunch of them 5-7 years ago and feel burned when none of them have lived up to their promise and seem technologically impossible to fix.

The main winners of crypto hype have always been the ones selling something while the users get burned. I don't want to see any more crypto news until the focus shifts from making a quick profit to delivering useful services. All crypto news is focused on how you can get in now and profit later. NFTs are the latest part of this. I'd rather read an article on how the new postgres server lets you scale to more users or how UI research has helped accessibility.

> when you think about the idea that everything up until now on the internet has been copyable and we are just starting to figure out how to actually give a digital thing ownership, that will change how we look at just about everything on the internet

That everything has been copyable is the accident that keeps giving. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Digital scarcity, albeit through a novel mechanism, seems antithetical. Very confusing.

>That everything has been copyable is the accident that keeps giving. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

This must be the hacker culture version of hippies watching their children grow up to be Young Republicans and yuppies.

> Sure there are things like DRM, but that is just an abstraction on top of a fungible thing that tries to make that thing non-fungible.

I'm not being deliberately obtuse, here, but how is that any different from NFTs?

It's weird because I understand the tech, but not what makes this application compelling.

> we are just starting to figure out how to actually give a digital thing ownership

Isn't copyright already doing that? Certainly the movie and music industries have a strong sense of digital ownership without NFTs.

NFTs so provide an easy path to transfer ownership, but that does nothing to keep the material from being copied any more than copyright does.

What am I missing?

> I am really tired of fighting the social media corporations' constant decisions to de-emphasize posts with offsite links to places where I can get people to pay for my work.

I only just recently learned of this. Younger people are equally unexcited by that bullshit. I saw an artist, who's in her early 20s, always posting the link to her Twitch streams as reply to the Tweet where she'd announce that she's streaming. I asked her about it and she told me that links to other sites never make it into peoples' timelines. She and her boyfriend also write words like Patreon and commission in leetspeak to avoid any issues with those.

And you're absolutely right about NFTs. There is only hate for them among the furry artists that I follow (and there's a lot of them given that's all I'm on Twitter for). They hate the environmental impact. They hate the theft of artwork. They hate the scams. And they just think NFTs are overall pointless.

I'm so tired of seeing my friends tweet about their "p*treon" without even appending a link, it's such a horrible little hellworld detail. I don't bother with that but I sure have ended up with the habit of tweeting the art, then tweeting links to buy prints, support me on Patreon, and read more about how I did the piece on my blog, as a reply, in hopes that this will suppress the post less. I should probably try actually looking at Twitter's analytics to see this for sure but I find staring at that shit and trying to modify my behavior towards what Twitter likes to amplify to be pretty depressing and stressful.

You will probably be unsurprised to find that I am a furry artist. :)

The internet used to be so wild, dangerous, unpredictable. At some point, it was defanged. Now everything is safe, sanitized, and governed. Everything has to be nice and inoffensive. Gone are the days when you might stumble across an ISIS beheading video on youtube. Even places like 4chan are heavily moderated now.

As a source of information, the internet has decayed significantly too. Specialized knowledge seems to have moved from phpBB forums into private discords, which cannot be searched, indexed, or archived.

Everything has become centralized. Remember when games (quake, csgo, minecraft, etc) gave you the server executable so you could run your own server under your control? That seems to have completely disappeared in the past ~5 years or so. And discord misleadingly calls chatrooms "servers" when in reality it's all one centralized mainframe.

Websites now subvert the basic function of a computer as a tool for storing and manipulating bytes. To save a video on reddit I have to leave a comment with the name of a bot. To save a video on twitter I have to install a browser extension or use a third-party website.

It just feels like the whole computing world is rotting and I don't know what to do about it. There's nowhere to go, unless you want to live in the past.

I blame Apple for a lot of this. When the iPhone got big, they kept it all closed off in a walled garden- you couldn't/still can't even look at the files on disk! Other businesses saw how locked down you could make something and still be successful and replicated it.

Why let you easily download a video if that lets you post it elsewhere? They want to keep you on Reddit/Twitter for longer and longer so that they get more engagement from you and can show you ads.

Minecraft is a great example of this, too. Why let you run your own server for you and your friends when you can pay Microsoft to host the server for you on their centralized server? Never mind that sometimes the data center gets too much traffic and your little server gets deprioritized and your ping skyrockets.

I think this is just a function of the internet expanding in functionality. Back when the internet was wild, dangerous and unpredictable, the internet itself was pretty small and insignificant. Now the internet has become the backbone, and for it to become a backbone it has to be safe and sanitized.

Now if you want to find the wild, dangerous and unpredictable, you have to look to various parts of the internet. For all the hate that Web3 gets, it's really the new wild west of the internet, just like the internet itself was back when it first came out. Eventually Web3 will be tamped down by regulations and corporations and become a safe and sanitized place just like the rest of the "mainstream" internet. But for now I really cherish just how nuts that whole space is.

> Gone are the days when you might stumble across an ISIS beheading video on youtube.

Good? Do you want kids to accidentally watch one of those videos?

No! Make sure no kids ever see anything bad. Incidentally, since the Internet can't truly age gate, this means no adults will either.

People in third world countries who want to show the rest of the world what's happening around them will have to be up to speed on what the right-wing conspiracist backwater of the week happens to be, since that's the place where any and all advertiser-unfriendly content will be concentrated. (Yay.)

I would rather that than the internet be sanitized and homogenized, yes.

ISIS beheadings highlight a part of the world that many don't know. I was in school when 9/11 happened, and there was this shock everywhere. People were thinking "Why is the world so evil?" Or some variation of "Why is Islam/Arabs so evil?" We spent years debating this kind of thing, on forums, poking at Islam, Arabs, US middle eastern policy, Israel, and so on.

Some reach the wrong conclusion, but many come out of that understanding the world much better. It also highlights different worldviews. My aunt told me people would do anything for money, but it was clear money wasn't the case here. Something ran much deeper than money and power.

I think the beheading videos give us a better sense of reality than say, Facebook or Twitter. I'd much rather my kids watch gore somewhere rather than read through politics on social media. There's the initial shock, but it's like the kids slamming the finger on the door. The injury is inevitable, but they learn from it.

Some day kids become adults.

It's not about wanting someone to see something arbitrarily cruel, but about knowing the raw truth about how the world works.

I’m replying to my own comment, because the responses to this all fall along the same line.

I’d argue that YouTube should NOT contain this material. It shouldn’t be outright banned, but there should be sites where you can let your kids watch educational videos and not worry about a beheading autoplaying. YouTube is so popular that I’d argue they fall into that category.

I see the argument (kids should see this! They have to grow up sometime!), and yes - they need to know evil exists in the world and that bad things happen. But allowing it to just pop up on YouTube without any outside context or guidance (e.g. -this is NOT normal, and it should be disturbing) along with processing death should be provided. Otherwise you could seriously screw kids up. So no - I don’t want the Wild West to exist on the entire internet.

> Gone are the days when you might stumble across an ISIS beheading video on youtube

The way this is worded makes it seem like you miss these videos... Is this really something you personally think is worth keeping on Youtube?

I do not desire to be beheaded. I do not derive pleasure from seeing others be beheaded. However, being beheaded is sometimes a part of the human experience. The world is a place that contains beheadings. It simply is.

The internet, in the absence of external manipulation, will tend to contain the whole world within it, including everything dark or unpleasant. I want the internet to be a force for authenticity and disintermediation. I want it to be wild and anarchic and beautiful and dangerous. If that means I see a beheading occasionally, so be it.

The trouble is any site hosting stuff like that isn’t neutral in these behaviours.

There is a strong argument that if the perpetrators didn’t have an audience for the beheadings then they wouldn’t perform them.

Some good points, though giving a platform for people to upload and view "beheading videos", is implicitly condoning it.

Should the the platform condone such things?... To me no they shouldn't condone some things, even if they are true.

The dark web is the indescriminant place that you're looking for that contains the dark unaltered truth's of the world...

I visited the "heavily moderated" 4chan you talk of a few days ago, and came across a post full of hundreds of comments stating "uncivilized ape" people like me should "kill themselves or be prepared for the consequences". When I see people complain about this stuff the most charitable interpretation is that you want this kind of "discourse" to become more acceptable for your consumption or dissemination. And this is far from a fringe opinion on that site.

I'm jaded about the entire industry, it feels like we've invented everything genuinely useful and now we're just doing make work.

I'm more bullish on technology in general and some of the software that can enable that (e.g. fusion research, CCS, self-driving cars).

But general purpose computing? The open source scene and people tinkering is cool. The commercial side is just pointless, I can't think of anything _useful_ (as opposed to merely being addictive) in the last ten years.

Whenever I speak to software developers in real life now I get the sense that they're just "not my people". No, I don't want to talk about social media VR, or advanced data mining, or facial recognition or whatever.

Even the more mundane stuff is like... okay, so you work at Amazon. Cool, I like to shop on my high street, err... let's talk about something else then.

There's a back wave onto physical processes (energy storage and the likes) rather than the information layer. Maybe the digital side is mostly solved (and/or wrong) and large enough to be able to absorb all real needs. Meanwhile we need better real world processes.

It’s the same for me, it feels like everything is boring, almost no new tech excites me and same feelings about talking to tech people, they are just regular people who happen to work in tech.

what is CCs?

"Carbon capture and storage"

It's either environmentalism or alien abductions.

For both the internet, and the industry as a whole, I get jaded about how quickly we move on, without stopping to see if we really explored one "branch" to the extend it deserves.

We have moved too quickly during the last 30 years, and we're still not providing better solutions to our users. Not by a lot at least. The IT industry is more focused on solving the problems that we've created for ourself, rather than providing better solution.

I don't care about machine learning, data mining/science, social media, Kubernetes or scaling to 500 million users. Most problems can be solve easier and better with less. It's cool that we can do these things, but they get in the way of creating actual solution in most cases. Oracle makes hardware that allows you to run global businesses or infrastructure for small nations on a 2U server. People seem more interested in running a global marketing platform that will handle the scale of Black Friday, because god forbid that you couldn't tracking customers once a year.

Could we please focus on making good solutions to actual problems? Utilize the resources we already have? Most days I feel like most of my tasks could be solved just as well using 20 year old Unix tools.

I feel exactly the same way.

Feeling like the work I'm doing is at least somewhat important and/or useful is very important to me, and it's EXTREMELY difficult to find jobs in tech that aren't "make work" and just redoing something that's already been done, but in a slightly different way to try and trick some investors into giving you money for it. It's either that, crypto scams, or fintech.

It's gotten so bad in the past few years that I'm seriously considering a career change. I got into software development because it let me flex my creative muscles while also making money in a secure job. But at this point, the day-to-day is so painful for me that taking a serious pay cut might be worth it for my own sanity. After being in the field for around ten years, it gets pretty obvious where everything is headed and I just don't have the energy for it. I'm so tired of arguing about frameworks, build systems, how to plan and manage work, interpersonal relationships with people who are just entirely full of themselves and think they're doing the Lord's work by writing business-to-business software.

Completely share your view 100% so that makes 2 of us.

The internet is infinitely interesting and I'm still as spellbound by it like I was 25 years ago. You just have to look beyond the FAANG websites. Most recently I have been having a lot of fun using AI image generators like https://neuralblender.com/ and grepping 4chan's /x/ archive for cool spooky stories and anecdotes. Did the same with Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28598590). I can give a lot more examples of how to find interesting content.. Let me know if anyone would like me to do a blog post on it.

please do!

Yes please, I lost this skill myself

I'd like to see the blog post and the stories you've collected from the HN archive!

This sounds more like a complaint about human behavior than about the Internet. Why do people eat at chain restaurants and watch blockbuster movies? There's certainly a cost aspect to it, as well as a simple lack of knowledge about what alternatives are available. But generally speaking, people want what other people want; well-run companies simply cater to a pre-existing demand.

You can level the same complaints to wearing fast fashion, picking which city to live in, and even choosing a tech stack to implement on. The homogeneity you're dismissing is what most people want in the first place. Decentralization won't change any of that.

Unless the decentralized thing is a unique computer that creates a new kind of substrate for a new category of things: restaurants, movies, ____ <- dapps? I don't know. I am definitely not in this camp, but maybe.

Yes. The decentralized web already existed. It was phpbb/vbulletin (or self hosted website) powered and had niche forums for all types of topics. You had an identity specific to that site, with each behaving as their own community with rules and norms. Not happy with a given forum? Go rent a server and start your own community. With Linode/DO and things like Softalicous, this is much cheaper and easier than it was back in the day, but everything consolidated into walled gardens meant to track and monetize everything while monopolizing your attention.

"Web 3" is just a cash grab under the guise of a "blockchain". As an analogy, crypto is a channel on IRC-- it is a topic, people love talking about it, but the underlying tech (IRC protocol, blockchain) isn't being fully utilized, and may never have a solid, widespread commercial application. Yes, governments have adopted some crypto, DAOs are a neat concept, but how many applications are so novel that blockchain is actually the best and/or only application of said tech?

For the "new web" concept, we have yet to see internet for the people, created and curated by people without monetization as their primary motive. Will Gen Z (or whoever come next) be tired of the walled gardens and try to reinvent what the old web was, or will they just be amused by the shadows on the wall of their caves?

> how many applications are so novel that blockchain is actually the best and/or only application of said tech?

Decentralized stock exchanges.

The internet is a network of nodes, none of which are secure. The addition of commerce to that network brought in a profit motive, which will always find new ways to exploit the insecurity of the nodes, the routes, and the end users, for profit.

Most people seem to think that computers, the nodes of the internet, can't ever be made secure. I believe they're wrong, but still have to wait a decade or so before the basic design defect in most operating systems is corrected.

Most computers "on" the internet aren't fully privileged nodes, but rather second class citizens with "access" to "content", instead of being a fully functional computing peer. I'm not sure if this will ever be corrected.

Humans are always going to fall for scams, but that's not specific to the internet, so we can ignore that in the judgement of the nature of the internet. It speeds, and widens, communications between people, when done properly.

I think things will get better in the next few decades, if we don't fall victim to our knowledge of physics (nuclear weapons) or biology (gain of function research).

[Edit/Append] It's extremely important that we don't lose free access to general purpose computing, if we want to maintain our freedoms in general. With general purpose computing, you can build a sneakernet, or your own internet.

It's possible that something like the "Internet" never happens again. By which I mean a somewhat distributed collaboration built on open protocols without a series of large entities (companies or countries) capturing the majority of the market value.

Whether future developments are "better" or "worse" is immaterial. Things will unfold as they are.

Humans fundamentally make choices that reflect their values and biases. They can choose to: build, consume, get scammed, be vigilant, etc.

I am certain that it will be interesting to witness and participate in the new world. What a time to be alive.

> but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it.

Why? Why wait for a while? Why is "leveraging" your goal for it? What does this even mean? 20 years ago were you waiting for things to get fleshed out online before you leverage it? Whatever that means.

No I don't find the web dull. Been here 23 years, always found fascinating stuff. Yes it is different now but also we have aged.

> Other than that, the web seems kinda boring lately.

Sorry but I think it is you not the web here.

I'm jaded about the Internet.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence didn't last.

The web is no longer "surfed". The web is an escalator of sanitised material, surveilled and stateful.

On the plus side, the web is now used by billions of people to solve real problems. That's nice, but it's not a place of exploration for me anymore.

I can point to several communities which unfortunately died after they tried to mistakenly expand and embrace a wider audience.

Small forums worked because a lot of people soaked up the cost of running a little web page on a box that wasn't very expensive per year. A lot of them eventually, decided they didn't want to spend the money or time and hand off to a new maintainer.

The new maintainer looks to (reasonably) expand the community and embrace new technologies, e.g. live chat, video. This creates 10x the work at least and eventually they give up and pack it in.

Now, unfortunately the work to take over the community on it's current state is much larger than the original site and so it eventually dies without someone wanting to work a full time job without the pay...

I miss the optimistic lose communities of the 90s when I was growing up. Not to mention the communities on topics which are now no longer of interest to a wide audience. The amount of organic search needed to rediscover any new forums now is also unfortunately a new barrier to entry there never used to be :(

> I miss the optimistic lose communities of the 90s

You're just a product of your time - like me and everyone else

The 2010s have been dark. It's easy to see in mass media, which is a reflection of people self perceptions and interest: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheNewTens

>> For the first time in over 70 or 80 years, the political and economic climate has impacted the socio-cultural in an inescapable fashionnote , becoming more watered-down and risk-averse compared to the "alternative" trends of the late 90s and 2000s,

>> On the one hand, the early years of the decade were marked by escapist fare, such as Glee, the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, young adult-geared romantic dramas and "shiny reboots". However, sordid settings and cynical attitudes thrived in media, reflecting the turbulent sign of the times. Dystopian fiction (The Hunger Games, The Last of Us, Divergent) and horror films (The Purge) served as allegories for the growing social and economic divisions in American society. Dark cable dramas (Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad) took away the spotlight from broadcast network shows, and several franchises got acclaimed grim-and-gritty interpretations in the vein of The Dark Knight Trilogy.

No. I miss the communities and simple forums which have died typically for the reasons stated above.

I don't think this is "I remember the sky was brighter" or any other common misunderstandings. I follow some simple forums still and am aware yes, they are technically inferior and have issues and even getting https on some sites is effort due to the internet having evolved around old code.

Some do evolve and adapt, and saying "I prefer the way they were" would be closer to what you think I'm saying. The communities I miss have gone. There is no subreddit covering the same topics afaik and as such that probably means I should reach out and start to find these communities myself, but I miss the old forum interactions, hence why I follow other forums.

There are a few still out there who have survived the purge, but only because the people/person behind it have invested personal time/effort/money over the year out of their personal commitment

Gated Private Internets can probably flourish. Stuff like Urbit chatrooms.

quote but applied to something else like music:

Are you jaded about music? I've been listening to the radio for 20 years now and I feel like I've reached the pinnacle of what music is about and have in a way reached the end of music. I've listened to just about everything you could want, and went to many concerts over the years, and I feel everything is just 'samey' now and follows the same pattern. It's hard for new music to stand out and be unique (at least for me). YMMV on this.

I think this perspective is common and makes sense. Many of us feel it. I am not sure crypto/web3 is the solution. To bring web3/crypto into this analogy, is web3 a new way to decentralize record companies and put power into the "bands" rather than the corporations? If so, then it won't fix the problem. Centralization still finds great stuff and doesn't hinder creativitiy and bands from making music. It eventually finds them and helps change the landscape. However, if crypto is a new way to make music (app platform) with brand new instruments and new sounds.. then maybe it is the future that will take a long time. Artists are still in the basement trying to figure out how to operate these things and get them to make cool sounds

Great analogy. People often forget that the internet scene(s) (much like the music scene(s)) are a reflection of the people who participate in the tribe.

All tribes wax and wane: exciting, rebellious and pure in their early days, bureaucratic and suffocating in their later days -- often giving way to a new generation of tribes which cannibalizes the mindshare they once cannibalized from previous dinosaurs.

It's the circle of life, and technology accelerates but ultimately doesn't alter the very human incentives of the game. Perhaps that's my own being jaded speaking, though!

> I've been listening to the radio for 20 years now and I feel like I've reached the pinnacle of what music is about

If you listen to the radio yes. But it's also objectively different. Music up until the 90's was 99% played by humans who had spent years mastering their instruments. There was something more "alive" even in basic pop music. Now you can just press a button and get 3 minutes of a repeating drum pattern and/or bass line.

Granted there's a whole lot of complexity in making good pop music (or "machine music" in general), I'm not downplaying that, it's just very different to (in my mind) the more "personal" music (having to work creatively within the restrictions of the musicians/instruments as well as recording techniques) that came before the 90's.

For example jazz is still going strong and constantly coming up with new exciting artists and music.

I try to collect and share weird, unique, or independent websites on https://stumblingon.com

I believe that centralization of the web has killed off a lot of the weird uniqueness and made things more boring. I'm trying to find and share sites that aren't like that. I recently changed the site's layout and think it may be messed up on mobile, so sorry about that.

A large portion of the Internet, or perhaps just what Google search somehow ends up optimising towards, seems to fall into the category of celebrity gossip magazines.

I do remember that the more technical content, and all the tiny user created websites about someone's pet trivia, we're more easily found, back in the day. Perhaps it's just a problem of discovery.

I feel like we have experienced a second Eternal September with the rise of smartphones. I started using the internet in the late 90s (so after Eternal September), but even in my early days of being online it wasn't at all normal to spent lots of time on forums, chat rooms etc. Doing so made you a nerd/geek (not necessarily in a bad way). So the communities you encountered online, while less elitist than in the pre-Eternal September days, were still mostly drawn from a small, specific subset of society who shared common interests (and probably socio-economic backgrounds).

Nowadays the "online community" is not just the entire community, it is in fact larger and more diverse than any actual real-life community. It feels like a third age; the online population went from a handful of academics in US universities, to a larger (but still small, relatively speaking) group of like-minded individuals, to literally everyone.

The internet isn't dead, it's just different now. And sadly, maybe it's not really for us anymore.

Art, movies, books, music, lectures, tutorials, interviews, news, weather forecast, maps, dictionaries, encyclopedias (whole libraries!) all literally at my fingertips.

No I'm not bored. But it's just a tool, for me.

Exctly. No time to real life. This make people anxious. Internet is great tool for consuming ideas, movies, information... But to create new things you actually need to do something away from keyboard.

Being able to walk between AR/VR spaces like we walk between websites is going to be game changing.

Some sort of standardized metaverse protocol is absolutely the next layer that will put the current "internet" to shame.

Some time within the next two decades, most people will be wearing AR glasses and a metaverse will begin to take shape.

Metaverse likely won't obviate the need for traditional internet for some time, but we'll laugh at our arrogance in thinking that we experienced the peak of the internet at any point beforehand.

The ultimate abstraction is not hyperlinked text on a flat panel, but objects, places, and people in our physical reality. Eventually flat-panel internet and UX won't even be a thing.

No idea why this is getting downvoted. AR/VR in 2021 absolutely feels like an Apple II in the early 80s or the internet in the early 90s. I would be shocked if it isn't the next big thing.

HN is pretty reactionary towards AR/VR. I HNers are scared of the reality ahead of us, primarily due to adtech/Facebook concerns, but it doesn't change the fact that it will be reality.

Our modern two-dimensional flat-panel compute interfaces are ephemeral and will barely be a blink of an eye on the grand scale. Decades from now, we'll look at the iPhone and laptop like people look at hole-punch computers today. Because they really will be that cumbersome compared to peak AR/VR.

AR/VR still reminds me of the eternal "experience in 3D!" drive, with all sort of glasses for the whole family and friends. Was a curious novelty, sure, but essential and trend-defining? I'm quite more comfy perceiving the remote media in a 2D without any need for an enhanced illusion.

Anyone remembers the efforts at realistic skeuomorphism in UI?

Have you used a headset for a reasonable length of time? It's absolutely the future of human interface.

You might be comfortable with 2D, just like people before computers were comfortable not using computers. But 2D flatscreens will absolutely be left in the dust.

I remember both the Apple ][ in the early 80s and the internet in the early 90s, and AR/VR isn't anything close to that.

I'm still waiting to hear what this "metaverse" AR/VR peripheral device are going to be. I am going to assume some sort of glasses. Many don't understand that those who have crappy eye vision, AR/VR becomes very hard to use.

Having to buy third-party lenses that fit in front of Valve Index headset, works, but it's far from perfect. To have a pair of glasses which act as LCD displays, am I going to pay extra to have them crafted to my prescription?

The human eyes are great devices when you have perfect vision; to those with malfunctioning ones, everything is a crappy experience.

>Some sort of standardized metaverse protocol is absolutely the next layer that will put the current "internet" to shame.

Yeah, no... that was true until Facebook came along and decided they owned "the metaverse," and then the hype train suddenly and all but universally decided they did, before they even did anything.

Facebook is going to write the standard and the protocol and it probably won't be game changing in a way anyone likes.

Just because Facebook is writing the protocol does not mean that companies will eventually settle on some sort of standard.

A lot of private companies write protocols that eventually become standards.

I would only salvage Archive.org, Libgen and Scihub. Funny taht two out of three things worth something are by Russians dodging copyrights.

Wikipedia too please! I've spent oodles of time on it, more than any other website. Everyone knocks Wikipedia but if you look up technical concepts and check sources on contentious issues it's pretty amazing.

>with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all the things, which is good to see

Hate to disappoint, but decentralization won't happen at any real scale. The "sameiest" thing of all will be the manner by which the democratizing hope of technology is once again dashed as it's recaptured by capital (as with the Internet itself). It's already happening.

See: all of the VCs currently touting Web3, NFTs, etc as if they discovered it.

There will be a few new winners, but they will largely win through centralization, and will frequently have the support of incumbents/capital.

The new boss; same as the old boss.

I like Web 2.0. People on Reddit and HN are friendly and helpful and I enjoy interactive content platforms like YouTube and Twitch but I can agree most of the internet services feel the same.

>Now with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all the things, which is good to see, but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it.

People care about UX not technology. If Web3 has better utility and UX than Web 2.0 then people will switch to it.

I'm always interested in other alternate Internets. If you're feeling over the existing web there's always Gemini or DAT to conjure up those warm fuzzies of the early net.

- https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ - https://beakerbrowser.com/

I'm nearing 50. I remember first seeing the internet in '95 when I was able to read the Tour de France daily recaps instead of having to wait two-weeks for velonews to be printed.

I'm far from jaded about the internet, in fact, I'm very excited about what this next stage will bring.

Are you familiar with the S curve of innovation? (https://www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/organisati...)

It seems like you almost know that when Web3 gets figured out, you'll get excited again. You don't have to be excited about what is happening every day. If you want to get excited jump in and figure out what you'd like to see Web3 do, and build it (I'm assuming you're an engineer).

The new Web3 stuff has been the most exciting frontier since the bitcoin whitepaper in 2009. Urbit is super cool, ETH is really interesting. There's a ton of stuff happening in the space - like I imagine what 1999 probably felt like. Yeah there's hype and lots of bubbles + company failures, but there's real underlying technical innovation and success too. That's what makes it an exciting frontier of new stuff.

There's a lot of fun stuff going on and the future looks bright.

Hopefully the domination of centralized SaaS of the last decade will mostly be an anachronism of our time, and the original hope of a decentralized p2p web will happen after all. We were trapped in a local maximum of thin clients and accounts, but maybe this will be the way out.

1999 didn't feel like that because there wasn't scam after scam. People were willingly and freely sharing knowledge back then. The early internet felt empowering and freeing. Web3 feels scammy and a bunch of pump and dumpers.

I think a lot of 90s web banner ads would disagree.

The regular web was pretty scammy back then too and the spam problem is arguably what resulted in a lot of centralization (something urbit IDs fix).

Bonzi Buddy might might have some thing to say about that

Alternatively, maybe the proliferation of consensus-based ownership will encourage people to build even more SaaS platforms to try and capitalize on an every growing, increasingly captive audience. It's hard to say, but I'll err on the side of capitalism doing the same thing it's done for the past 100 years.

For some reason I feel super bad every time I read someone throwing "decentralized". I think it's a naive fallacy that will break in twenty different pieces because the world is complex and there will always be a hidden hierarchy emerging from the original decentralized thing.

That's one reason I think Urbit's implementation is cool. The network hierarchy is explicit, but the minimum required in order to to have the maximum decentralization possible that can actually work (automatic lookup of p2p ids, ability to update the network/smart contracts, ability for other nodes to fork if it was necessary, etc.).

I also feel like the illusion of variety has been broken for me. I feel like it’s always the same kind of person who you find on any forum regardless of the topic — a power user who is on the spectrum and socially awkward and not very smart in certain areas of life. I used to come across a comment and wonder what kind of person wrote it but now I feel like I kind of know who wrote it and the internet has become a lot less mystical and useful since. The parts of the internet where non-spectrum people hang out have all the same problems of exclusion that the real world has for me. It’s all pointing to the fact that the internet hasn’t really changed anything fundamental like we were all led to believe by the hype.

I am. But understandably so.

Web is made by humans, there will be dreams, lies, fluff, wins, fails, rot. It's just another organs amongst organs.

I also believe it was an extrapolation of the previous era (as you do) and that like all extrapolation.. it's partly wrong. Being able to talk to gazillions of people is not necessary a boon.

In any case I'm more and more in the process of focusing on disconnected time. Reading, doing, learning and sharing. Especially with the potential climate change acceleration and societal quakes.

ps: about web3, I just wrote a bit about how it might be useful to keep an eye on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370620

Not jaded, but then, I was never that excited by it, either.

It's a tool. A substrate. An infrastructure.

All of these things go through a "The sky's the limit!" excitement, when they are first introduced. Electricity, TV, and even nuclear fission, were greeted in a similar manner.

I'm glad it's here. I use it all the time, but I don't feel disappointed that it turned to shit, because I never expected it to be anything more.

http://hmpg.net

https://www.internetisshit.org

I honestly think living offline would be next trend in few years.

Yeah I agree, or at least mostly offline and just going online when absolutely necessary to get something done.

I thought the Internet would be the great equalizer and bring humanity's knowledge an cohesion to an higher level, and in some way it did with great collaborative platform like Wikipedia, GitHub, etc, but social media and the intense polarization it brings is creating a huge social rift that I am incertain that it will end well.

The international element is interesting. Chinese censorship shaping technology and our own domestic surveillance, the battle of platforms, ai and psychological manipulation. So much teeters on the brink. So much will change, soon. Not that I’m an optimist, but it’s hard to call it boring when it’s not nearly as static as op implies.

If you’ve only been online for 20 years then you missed the best of it. Nothing truly new has been invented on the internet after 2000. By then I think we had www, email, irc, geocities, aol, search engines, e-commerce, napster, etc.

Everything that came after is just a reverberation.

This version or evolution (or arguably devolution) of the internet is due to for-profit interest drivers leading to design decisions that aren't overall good for people. This was all accelerated by the VC industrial complex, along with the Ad industrial complex.

SnR is bad now, but has been since mid 90s and Eternal September feels like as good a time as any on the timeline. However, I’m sure more quality and novelty exists now than has ever existed, it’s just harder to find.

“web3” is a marketing lie designed to sell suckers on 21st century tulip mania.

all the things are decentralized already.. facebook is not the internet, it's just a website, you're free to put one up too, just install a webserver program on your computer and forwawrd port 80 on your router to your computers ip address, and you're literally a part of it!

Started getting disappointed as surveillance capitalism started taking roots and when the cartelization of internet began and BigTech started dividing it among themselves.

Nope, very hopeful, lot of stuff to do, we are still at the beginning of the Internet

I've been jaded about the internet since September 1993.

Wake me up when September ends ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I am glad my not-so-helpful post was not downvoted by those that didn't get the inside joke :)

As a more earnest reply to OP I guess you could say I have been "jaded" about the internet/web since the late 2000s. The rise of social media I never particularly cared for. I enjoy[ed] a very small part of it but the negativity is quite draining and it is far too easy to get sucked into a negative echo chamber than a positive one.

With regards to blockchain and related technologies 'driving Web 3.0' I can't say I care all that much. I think some of it is great but a lot of the hyped parts, such as NFTs, are useless.

Yes, yes I know there are some sensible use cases for NFTs (such as concert tickets) but all this JPG NFT non-sense just makes it look like a bunch of adults getting excited over digital beanie babies.

I guess you could say I do miss the internet from the late 90s to the late 2000s. Perhaps it is just rose tinted memories of when I was a teenager but the rise of Napster then P2P then Bittorrent, then web video services, etc. along with high speed internet was truly amazing.

The early years of Facebook was also pretty nice to reconnect/keep in touch with some people but I would say I 'grew out' of Facebook within about a year, maybe two. I realised I had lost touch with those people for a reason and even with Facebook, Twitter, etc. I lost touch again.

It's not an exaggeration to say that over the past three decades the intelligence of the average Internet user has dropped a solid two standard deviations, if not slightly more. It was an unavoidable side effect of going from a tool for research scientists and particularly motivated college students to one for the general public. In that sense, I suppose it's fair to call me jaded. I've watched the average quality of discourse plummet. That's one of the things that makes HN such a breath of fresh air. It reminds me very much of what the general Internet once was.

Three words: Industrial Dance Battle

You're welcome.

90% of the web is broken/slow/glitchy/inaccessible. It’s an absolute scandal. Shame on you managers and devs.

I don't think we've reached the pinnacle just yet. If anything, I feel like we've only scratched the surface. But I can see a transition on the horizon and I'm not fully sure what that would be. I feel like it's yet another case of Charles H. Duell's famous "Everything that can be invented has been invented" quote from the late 19-th century. I basically grew up on the internet, starting from when I was six in 1994. And in those 27 years the internet has changed multiple times and each time I heard people saying "this is it, this is as good as it will ever get". The semantics of the word "good" aside, they were always proven wrong. The internet created an economy that is almost independent from the real world. Starting from the early emails, the first online payments, then it was web 2.0, bandwidth caught up to the demand, then it was the whole smartphone-social network-streaming services pack. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but AI never picked up and was almost killed off by an artificially blown out hype from marketing side. Just try and remember what the HN frontpage used to look like 4-5 years ago - a good 30% of all posts were AI related. At this point in time there could be weeks without anything on the subject. Don't get me wrong, it's an incredibly interesting field with a lot of potential but I don't think it is/will be the next big thing. The cryptocurrency thing really caught me off guard to be honest and I would have never imagined that it would be such a big deal. If anything I was willing to bet more on AI than crypto but here we are. As far as NFT I'm incredibly skeptical and I can't see this going anywhere. I'm equally skeptical about metaverses - that sounds plain stupid if you ask me.

Two things I'm keeping my eyes open for however:

1. IoT. Much beyond your wifi enabled light bulbs crap. Low power microcontrollers and sensors are dirt cheap and are opening a whole new world. Also 3d printing has come a long way and is very easily accessible to most people. Prototyping and developing small, low powered devices has never been this accessible. Just to give you an idea, this[1] entire section of my shelf in my office has probably set me back less than 200 euros and there's 3 times more stuff which has gone into different projects already from those 200 euros. The one thing missing are standards for communication and interfacing with those devices because as we stand right now, it's more or less every man for himself. IoT is a gold mine not just for smart homes but for manufacturing, distribution and infrastructure - the amounts of things that can be built is insane.

2. It is related to the first point and I might be a bit biased here/geeking out but... Space. This is something I've been investing a lot of time in lately and have been researching/thinking about prototypes. I was absolutely blown away by how accessible it is to launch your own micro satellite into the thermosphere. As it turns out, you could do that for less than a five figure. Of course you'd need to go through an absolute nightmare of paperwork, regulations, licenses and whatnot but... The number of companies that are working in that field is incredibly small. Shameless plug in here - if anyone is interested in giving me a hand on a (mostly) open source project in that area, do contact me(email in profile).

[1] https://i.imgur.com/XRRmpwd.jpg

If you want to keep vertically scaling the internet as an engaging virtual experience, Zuckerberg is your guy. Once the "Metaverse" launches in a meaningful sense, the masses will stop caring about cryptocurrencies/NFTs and start caring about whatever virtual goods and markets and experiences emerge on that platform.

For me, the internet is getting more interesting because it is increasingly materialized. It is unbelievable that we can deploy a fleet of battery-powered flying robots, linked over 5G and sharing intelligence while pathing with superhuman precision.

It's sad that in America, IoT/smart cities were more or less a temporary fad, probably having to do with cultural opposition to "surveillance" and low standards of governance. We've only scratched the surface with what's possible with it.

Zuckerberg is going to track what your eyes are looking at so he can make sure you’re paying attention to ads.

At the very least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com