Ask HN: Why did this idea of Internet Time not work?
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Its time unit (1 beat := 1000th of a (mean solar) day) doesn't have any nice relation to the units of time with which people are already very familiar (seconds, minutes, hours).
From infancy, seconds, minutes and hours are ingrained in our minds. 60 is also a beautiful number, being divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30. Given a time, like 10:42AM, a person can conjure feelings, instincts and memories about that time. Using a system based on 1000 "beats" would make time measurement meaningless for a very long time.
Outside of the Internet, most "normal" people communicate predominately with people in their own area and timezone, making the benefit of no timezones moot.
You have clearly never met an American machinist. ;)
It forces people to give up familiar concepts of hours, minutes, and seconds, for no good reason.
It forces people in some locations to get used to the date changing during daylight hours (big change if you are used to the date changing at midnight, after or just before you go to bed).
That question is well answered by Justin Rye's FAQ about Esperanto:
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
The short answer is that Esperanto is much harder to learn than Esperantists claim it is, and thus it has never had many speakers, and thus it provides lousy return on investment for learning it. The total number of all Esperanto speakers in the whole wide world (at any given level of proficiency you care to define) is less than the number of new speakers added by English or Chinese in a single year. There will always be much better return on investment of time, money, and effort to learning any of the top dozen or so natural languages than to learning Esperanto. And that's why Esperanto is the language for which tomorrow never comes as to it being widely used as an auxiliary international language.
Studying Esperanto is a fine hobby, and one I have engaged in, but it is a poor solution to the practical problem of communicating with more people who don't know your native language. I say this as a person who has learned multiple languages from multiple language families.
"Of COURSE!"
99.9 people out of 100 would look at what you just wrote with a blank stare.
This didn't work because there's no way to sell it to 99.9% of people. It might be more elegant and simpler mathematically, but you're fighting against centuries of inertia for little to no gain to the very people that would need to adopt this to make it work.
I can't believe we're even talking about this :)
If things were the same worldwide then I'd have no idea if it's the middle of the night in the place I'm trying to call unless I've already memorized it. With time zones I can just look at a world clock.
Asking for 100g of strawberry bon-bons, rather than "a quarter of strawberry bon-bons" just makes you sound like an idiot IMHO. Also obviously milk is by the pint.
As far as I know though the case against selling food by imperial measures was dropped by the EU.
I agree it's a mess that needs sorting out. Leave people to use what they want to use.
Just like the fact you can happily discuss units of measurement with someone from a foreign land.
If an entire country uses a particular unit of measurement, leave them alone to continue using it in peace.
Me, I'm still holding out for this:
2. Establishment.
Dethroning a company, which has marketing, and products, and such is one thing. But to dethrone a concept requires a great big change, cataclysmic in some ways. Ignoring the first point, Internet time could have succeeded if it only reached critical mass.
Imagine if Twitter decided that starting today they only showed message times in Internet time. Would that be enough for people to quit twitter? Possibly. But would they lose that many people? It's really more about the here and now, so people shrug, call it eccentricity, and the geeks go about educating people trying to make them understand the merits of the new time system.
If it and Twitter hung on, more and more people would come to understand it. This is the first hurdle now behind us.
Many of us Americans understand the metric system, but the government still uses miles, feet, lbs, gallons, etc. So the people then have to begin calling for the social change, and dealing with those who didn't want the change. This is the second major hurdle. Even if a loud and vocal group advocated the change, it would require a great deal of reason to enact the change.
Consider all the clocks that would need replacing. The epic sweeping changes to the clock and watch industry. They would fight tooth and nail to avoid such change. The costs would be astronomical. Sure they'd see a surge in sales from those who adopted the new system, but I doubt they would see much profit after the change to marketing, production, etc.