imo society also had a different view of these sorts of snake oil salesmen, so it was easier to fall into the collective hallucination. Remember when the movie "the social network" came out, the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero - there was a sort of righteousness, and people loved him. The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to? But now I think, in general, we've seen that most of these very special boys are actually quite shit.
The pervasiveness of algorithms is a symptom of the change that has happened. It shows how companies started to compete more and more for our attention and engagement.
Instead of making things better, tech companies use their engineering prowess to impose control over people and reduce end-users' agency.
(Corporations seeking monopoly is not a new story.)
That's not a tall order for a recommendation algorithm with a huge supply of training data. It wouldn't even need a 50% hit rate to make something really useful that I would definitely check once or twice a day and post or comment several times a week if even a third of my real life social circle used it.
An algorithm that presents me a feed of things I sometimes can't look away from even though I don't really want to see them is harmful, like an addictive drug.
I think examples like this (also see Bill Gates) were more inspiring because there was an idea that you could get at least some smaller scale of that kind of success with a modicum of talent, hard work, and luck. You would look around your high school class and there would be one or two "whiz kids" who everybody knew would go on to do great things. The role of computers was not widespread yet and there seemed countless possibilities for computers to make life better. Instead of writing numbers by hand into a ledger and adding on a mechanical calculator, you would use a spreadsheet type of thing.
I think what changed is the efficiency of the successes. Success means extraction at largest possible scale, such that there is no more room for one or two whiz kids from every single high school class. There is room for 1 whiz kid per generation; and chances are that guy will need to be a greedy asshole to make it to the top. And then the very nature of this extraction means, now that the productivity gains have plateaued, that resources are taken from the poor and given to the rich.
Sorry to be a downer, I'll see myself back to my bottle. :-D
Ethics didn't matter on an Apple ][. Well, not much. You could screw around, break stuff, "should" didn't come into it, you couldn't really touch the parts of the world that matter. Even people hacking phone lines and banks were small-time for the most part.
Zuckerberg wasn't particularly original in his thought process, there'd been many like him before, but I think Facebook was the pivotal moment. One, because it was for everyone (even more so than AOL), two, because it was personal in a way that previous social platforms (ICQ, Usenet, Compuserve) hadn't been, and three because by rigidly enforcing real-life identities as the norm, it collapsed the context between online and offline.
Ten years earlier, lonely-bored-horny-smart dudes would have joked about building an app to be vaguely creepy around hot girls they were too shy to talk to. Heck, that's basically the plot of Weird Science - by 1985, Hollywood knew that's what geeks were like, so we can guess the first time that conversation happened was about 1972.
Smart little boys breaking the rules on an Apple ][ are interesting and funny. When they end up running the world but haven't grown psychologically, it's downright terrifying.
Same goes for 25-year-old stoner douchebags making edgy shitposts on 4chan, and those same people when they're 55 and worth $400Bn. With power, responsibility. Grow the fuck up.
Or else what.
<reaches for expletive>
<checks handle>
Sigh, never mind.
Partly a function of timing of course. Stable, universal broadband connections arrived a couple of years before Facebook, and the iPhone a couple of years after.
Even as late as 2002, people _went_ online. I think the last time I used a modem must have been summer 2003 or so. By 2007, people _were_ online.
People with power tend to change. With being in power, their perspective on the world shifts, often for the worse.
Zuck originally wanted fully free speech, this is in fact what everyone wanted in that time. Then appeared the massive abuse in the unavoidable echo chambers. Zuck was hence forced to be the judge between good and bad speech/content, up to being in court. The filtering had to happen with advanced algorithms since fully manual was impossible to pull off. The funding happened by advertising, so the move to algorithms upping engagement was only logical.
Elon on the other hand went all the way from the nerd being bullied at the playground, via the acceleration of electrical transport, up to buying the world's biggest software playground and obtaining a large part of world's communication and transport hardware infrastructure. He's more convinced than ever of the power of capitalism, for the good and the bad.
Elon wasn't bullied. He was pushed down a flight of stairs by one kid after Elon made fun of that kid's father's suicide.
(I'm not taking credit. I was militantly pro free speech at the time, the anti-free-speech position was mostly held by Christian Conservatives and other fun-free types. Free speech was borderline _sexy_).
What I don't think Zuck or any of his peers realised was what they were connecting. Sure, connect all the bright young things on college campuses, and maybe their nice extended families, good things will happen.
I don't think he'd have done it if he knew just how much of the population was deplorable, deplorable-adjacent or highly susceptible to being turned that way.
And I don't recall ever seeing that discussed at the time. "But if we connect all the people... you realise we're connecting all the angry, ugly, bitter, nasty, broken ones too. And have you considered just how many of those there are?"
The first time I saw a fellow student post something utterly irrelevant (to our local group's real lives) rage bait thing into the then-new FB feed I knew we were in trouble. Surely, FB and Zuck must have had an idea what was going on.
Then I deleted my account and successfully ignored all of the generic, commercial asocial media fads that happened afterwards (at least to the degree they're directly ignorable). Feels nice to have it all pass me by.
Mixing online and real life in this uncontrolled manner and scale was a huge mistake for our collective moral and mental health.
And for the record: I don't blame him for everything that happened, but he certainly helped open the doors to a much more unpleasant VC-powered internet and we're struggling to reboot the cultural forces that made the time before it so great.
The concept of a social graph was stolen lock, stock, and barrel from the Winklevoss twins.
Zuck's talent is unabashed brashness and chutzpah. He thinks the rules simply don't apply to him. He is not an original thinker, but rather very intellectually derivative. The fact that he grew up wealthy opened many doors for him, even despite the Winklevoss twins' sentiment that he comes from new money and is thus irremediably beneath them, and even worse in their WASPy blueblood minds, Jewish new money. ('How dare a Jew steal our idea!') Shady actors all around, with not an admirable figure amongst them.
The word/ genre is a protagonist as antihero. An antihero is nice in fiction, we sympathize with them to some degree over their flaws and challenges. The problem is that a billionaire very much has an outsized impact.
Shared libraries generally don't make money. HN has always been about startups and making products/services.
I predicted this would happen decades ago. Piracy was accepted in the tech community and became so widespread, it made it nearly impossible to make a living selling the software anymore, so businesses made their move when Internet speeds got faster and now make everything into a service (that can't be pirated).
I remember the popular prediction of software going service-based, probably delivered via a web browser or something like one in the late 1990s and being disturbed at the prospect of being unable to pirate things. How else was I going to get software as a broke teenager?
I used to be hyped about the Internet in particular and technology as a whole in the early to mid 2000s, before I started to work professionally as a developer.
Ever since this illusion was shattered. I understood that everyone was just interested in making money, lots of it and as quickly as possible. There was no concern of how good something would be for the world as whole, only a vague shrug on that of something was successful it was inherently good.
I don't feel better or worse for it. I know it's a job but someone's gotta do it.
Once people became aware of that, they began to strive for it. Far fewer people became content to live out a peaceful, upper middle class life.
Their hunger for more created a subculture of grinding and speculation. As the playing field grew feom office computers to everyone's phones, the old school capitalists dove in and catalyzed it all.
To the point where the wellbeing of our young, the environment, the jobs we created- none if it mattered anymore. The goal was to get perversely rich and dominate the subculture, dissolving the real culture with it.
Can we ever get back on track?
Ironically, this is was what I chased, and what I found. I never wanted to have a destructive amount of money, just enough to have a house and raise a family.
A lot of people in this industry just wanted to make money very quickly to retire early though. There is something unhealthy that comes with it, I think.
> Can we ever get back on track?
I am very pessimistic about it. Not without heavy government regulation, and it is a can of worms of its own.
We are never going back to the environment we had around the 90s and early 2000s. There was a naivety in the air back then, some healthy gleeful contrarianism. After the dot com bust, it was unclear for a while how many things could even be monetized. There was a pervasive desire to build things for the sake of it.
What we have now kinda sucks, and it is probably only gonna get worse.
People wanting to go back to a simpler, smaller internet -to this mythical prelapsarian era - are in my opinion just nostalgic about how things felt back then. But there is no going back, tragically.
Then again, it is difficult to see how an empire would fall when you are witnessing it at the height of its power, even if that height is on the eve of its downfall.
No one wanted to hire me, so I started writing software for organizations that help people, for free.
I feel that my software Makes A Difference. It doesn't make money, but it acts as a force multiplier, for people that help people.
Fortunately, I had invested wisely, and live humbly, so I can handle it.
The reason no one wants to hire me, is because I "aged out" of the tech industry.
At 55, I was "radioactive."
I would have been happy to put in at least ten more years, but c'est la vie...
I won’t go into detail, as that is sort of the way we work. We don’t really talk about our work at the level of press, radio, and film.
Otherwise, finding volunteer opportunities is usually fairly straightforward. Find a cause that personally motivates you, and look for organizations in that context.
The whole thing about “volunteer,” though, is that it is synonymous with “unpaid,” and that’s a dirty word, with this crowd.
Also, working with these types of orgs can be maddening.
When there’s no money to be made, ego becomes the currency, so status games abound.
And, when people don’t pay for something, they often treat it like crap.
That means that we have to find our own motivation, and have a thick skin. If we are doing something that we truly believe in, then it makes it worthwhile. If we aren’t motivated by the cause, it can be rather demoralizing.
In my case, I stay focused on the people that my work helps.
Ah. Get it, now.
Nope. Not that way, but cheers.
As a JavaScript developer the answer about 90% of the time is I would rather just write it myself. Exceptions include JellyFin, PiHole, Node.js, Mealie, Libre Office, and some other things. Those things are free, but I would buy I license if they weren't. These things are exceptions not because they are big, but because I am happy with the quality of product. They have not given me cause to find a replacement. There is so much software that I cannot say this for.
My personal relationship with phones/computers/tv has degraded in the past 20 years as well, its hard to feel good about building software when I am trying to cut computer/phone usage out of my own life.
Don't get me wrong, I also do work in the financial aspects of it and that'... Well, useless is too strong a word, but in the grand scheme of things it's frankly useless. There is so much ridiculous leglislation that can be digitized, some of it is stupid. Like how you can get various tax benefits if you split what you and I think of as a single solar farm into 100 smaller companies. How to game the various financial tariffs, how to figure out the optimal direction for solar cells based on market data. That sort of stuff. Then there is the reasonable parts, like how Italy has an agency which requires all money transactions to go through them as an anti-mafia thing (sorry I can't be more clear on that part I didn't make it). Over all though, it's fun to work with stuff that has a real world use.