The reason the Internet sucks now | Hacker News Reader

The reason the Internet sucks now

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21 pointsgorwell17 comments

It's pretty funny that a post titled "The reason the Internet sucks now" points to the twitverse... 8-)

It is a rather good example of at least one aspect of the problem, isn't it?

Ads, and forced conversions.

The Internet used to be mostly hobbyists and 'true believer' types who ran human scale sites and web forums, who managed small communities of the like minded that anyone could view from the side and join or shy away from if they wanted.

Now everything is trying to be a walled garden that locks users and content inside, so both the content and the users are monetized. Mostly by the platforms that try to man in the middle the town square for lack of a good free community commons.

Before the Internet was for hobbyists, it was only for professionals working at companies and institutions hooked up to it.

The window of time between the World Wide Web coming into existence on the Internet, and that Web becoming widely commercialized, was only a handful of years.

I was already doing contract work in 1994 for a pay-per-click commercial website dispensing information about mining sites and stocks around the world. (What back end? I modified CERN httpd's logging routines to look up the page in a hash table of paid content, and log extra information about that. Then a log parsing program would import the data into a billing system.)

There is nothing wrong with the internet. It is operating as intended, completely out of control like it should be. Big corp has created an easy mode (which is criticised in tweets like this) but the all the interesting stuff is still there. And a lot more of it now too. You’ve always had to actively look for stuff instead of expecting it to come to you.

I hear people say this, but I'm not terribly convinced. At the very least, the interesting stuff is harder to find than ever before. It sure does seem like there's less of it than ever to me, but that might be because it's hiding better?

Maybe that's because the search engines come from the purveyors of the easy stuff, not the purveyors of the interesting stuff.

Interesting stuff is infinitely fragmented, also.

I like my interesting stuff, and other people's interesting stuff is ... uninteresting.

If the difficulty of finding interesting stuff is D, but I'm actually only interested in 0.1% of the interesting stuff, then the difficulty I perceive is 1000D.

Big corp also created tons of bandwidth to support easy mode (and video streaming), which the other stuff benefits from!

Except our gatekeeper to everything, Google, decides what we see and it’s not necessarily what we want to see.

The internet was Edenic as HTTP.

The advent of HTTPS was a fall from grace, as reality set in. Even if most people are nice enough, a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.

The Edenic experience can be reborn in a walled garden sort of way. But Eden cannot survive real anonymity.

The actual Eternal September challenge is to upconvert the newcomers into your better higher order more agentic societies. Raise up the newcomers.

The digital gardens of the early internet were bound to get paved over as it scaled from millions to billions of users. Being a consumer was easier and simpler, and frankly, far better connected via centralized social-network hub sites.

We can blame outside powers and forced that be. But the path through doesn't really hinge on that. Can we create a powerful culture that has its own will and liberty, that is interested & active in shaping it's way forward? The internet for a while was a magnet for seekers, for people interested in participating in these optimization loops. If we can create the conditions where people can see empowerment, where people can and do connect I'm new and interesting ways, if we make and show off malleable systems we tune and adjust and shape to ourselves, I still believe we can get back on a path of the internet being a way to amplify the better "man the toolmaker" instincts. Opening the door, letting folks peer under the hood & improve, via coding or via other higher order systems, that can culturate & improve people... That's how we respond to the long Eternal September crisis of the digital.

The internet is fine. It's the walled garden websites that runs on the internet that suck.

There is no "better" or "worse" internet. It's just a network.

Well, actually yes. "Better" is an improvement in any one or more these parameters without a degradation in the others: latency, bandwidth, dropped frames, price, uptime/availability, blocked ports.

Congrats. You win. Unless you are willing to accept the simple fact it's a network of people, made by people, for people, in which case... well.

In which case, the network is strictly better when there is an improvement in some of the people, without any regression in the quality of, or attrition of, the remaining people.

No, you win.

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