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Comment by clpm4j | Hacker News Reader

"I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it."

The internet is still vast. People just choose to congregate and use the same handful of apps. People are choosing not to go out and find it. Most people are also choosing not to go out and create it. It's a people problem, not a tech problem, in my opinion.

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Personally I just hate the transition from "the catalog" to "the feed". No matter what information source you're looking at it's just an endless scrolling list of content or links to content, all of it implicitly ephemeral. I miss going to a site and clicking on a category of thing and then getting everything of that type presented to me in a visually appealing way. If I wanted, say, reviews of digital media players I would get a grid of nice thumbnails, and if I wanted to only look at, say, Sony products that was one click. Now you have to make bricks without straw by using a tag system that doesn't return results in any particular order and may or may not include everything.

> People just choose to congregate and use the same handful of apps.

And this has always been true, even in "the days when the internet was vast" according to the author. Back when AOL was the largest internet provider, most AOL subscribers thought AOL was "the Internet", just as many Facebook users now seem to believe that Facebook is "the Internet". The AOL subscribers had no idea that they could go anywhere on the Internet, not just to the places that AOL pointed them. (I was on CompuServe in those days, not AOL, and CompuServe users seemed to be at least somewhat more savvy on average--and CompuServe wasn't as insistent on being a gatekeeper as AOL was.)

It’s absolutely not true that it’s a “people problem” not a “tech problem”.

Tech companies have deployed many billions of dollars, and the smartest minds in the world to ensure that their little fiefdoms are the ones that become the internet.

First, they deploy psychology and tap into basic human behavior knowledge, to ensure people are addicted to their platform and spend most of their time there instead of anywhere else.

Further, companies like Apple originally made it difficult for an open source, or a hobbyist to create an app that can be distributed on iPhones, first by instituting their $100 dev account requirement, and then building an insanely Kafkaesque approval process.

Then there’s the bait and switches. Google went ahead and bought Blogger/Blogspot when it got popular and then stopped investing in it beyond making it easier to insert Adsense. Then Google destroyed the non-Twitter sharing ecosystem by bringing the majority of the RSS ecosystem to Google Reader, and killing it basically overnight.

Apple used to provide simple personal website publishing with their iWeb products, which they pulled.

Then there were the non investment and destruction of Flash, which had become a huge source of internet creativity with no equivalent alternative. Apple famously killed Flash, and probably for good reasons considering Adobe was focused simply on extracting money from it, but Apple didn’t bother creating any authoring tools that made it possible for random middle school kids to create cool stuff with.

Facebook originally presented its pages as something that would be openly accessible to the internet. But once people created a bunch of them started requiring logins.

We rightfully criticize MS for their embrace, extend and extinguish strategy that they’ve deployed against so many of their competitors. The reality, however, is that even “better” companies like Apple, Google, have done the same thing, except they’ve done it to the Open web, and because the open web doesn’t have billions of marketing and lobbying dollars to complain, we didn’t even realize that was happening.

It doesn’t help when search engines only want to show the most SEO optimized trash available though.

The issue is that there is a lot of literal trash in form of autogenerated content from bots to search through. You need a ranking of some kind if you want to find anything of relevance which will always be subject to exploitation by others. I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then.

I think this is basically it.

The problem is that any automated discovery mechanism is quickly ruined by automated spam/ads created to exploit it.

So the most reliable discovery mechanisms are still small communities of real people. But because they're good - they attract more and more people until the quality reverts to the mean, and it's mostly just junk/spam/ads again.

Social media companies are extremely prone to cancer - if you will. A large part of long they survive is in how good they are at fighting off the junk created by their own users.

In a way - the internet (or at least the DNS system) is just the top level social media company that made absolutely no attempt to fight the cancer. It's value died a long time ago, and it's mostly a wasteland of junk now.

> I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then.

It was a problem back then, but we had multiple search engines instead of just Google.

If you optimized for Google, you almost certainly de-optimized for the others. Once Google became the defacto monopoly, websites didn't have to worry about this anymore.

What people need is a search engine that they can tune to themselves. Unfortunately, the net is really big now, and it's not clear how you can index it in a cost-effective manner.

In the early web (circa 2000 and earlier), search engines were awful so most people used human-curated directories (Yahoo, DMOZ), web rings or links pages to find new web sites to visit. The web rings were organized groups of web sites that linked to each other in a circular fashion and it was normal for every web site to have a links page that linked to similar sites much like you'd still see on a college professor's personal site. I'm familiar with this because I heavily used the web of that era as a pre-teen.

Since search engines are now flooded with automatically generated trash, the solution is probably a return to the old ways this problem was solved before Google.

One complication is that mainstream tech spends billions precisely to prevent them from doing that.

I agree it's a people problem - but in the other direction. If you don't use Facebook or aren't part of some groups, if you don't have a bunch of Instagram friends, if you don't use YouTube, If you don't have TikTok installed; whatever your reason for that is your own business, but if you're complaining that people aren't creating content, or that there's no content, and then purposefully ignoring where the people are and where the content is, I think that's on you.

I think it’s not so binary. Defaults and friction matter, so the design of platforms shapes the content in fundamental ways where it may be hard to imagine the alternatives.

Is it really though? I would imagine most people don’t have websites full of information anymore because they’ve also consolidated into a few small websites.

In the same way that people "choose" one of two political parties, sure.

Hide the alternatives, and it becomes a monopoly problem, not a people problem. I'll burn some imaginary internet points and go further; it's an American problem.

The kind of behaviour that's making this possible is easy in poorly regulated capitalism. We have capitalism in Europe too, but there are sensible guide-rails. That's not socialism, it's just common sense.

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