Even after Altavista was clearly better than Yahoo for ad-hoc searches, I still used Yahoo a lot because their topic hierarchy was a really great way to sit down and learn about some topic and its sub-topics.
I was particularly keen on this while eating because you could browse the web with just the mouse very easily.
When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley.
I now feel like a guy who grew up during the 1950's when you tell kids, "Yeah, the internet wasn't always about Reddit and Porn kiddies."
The technology changes but we seem to keep reinventing the wheel every time the cart gets overcrowded.
Keeping the Internet as it was prior to 1991, when commercial access was first allowed, means keeping it a small, controlled entity with obvious choke points that make it trivial to censor or kill entirely. It largely prevents its use for social or political change other than the kinds of change its owners want to see. It would trivialize the Internet by relegating it to a tiny fraction of its current usefulness.
It's easy to idealize what we had. However, losing sight of what we have now, and what we could have, is actively harmful to the prospect of future moral growth.
Not necessarily. The holy grail is growth where culture is preserved, i.e. the rate of acquisition of new users is below the point where they overwhelm the culture.
New users acculturate over time and exposure, so you can roughly model it as "at any time, no more than x% of the users should be 'new'".
That's still exponential growth, so it needn't be elitest. In time, you'll still get to everyone who wants in.
Making it work tho, that's the rub :-)
The future people will have fun comparing and contrasting different reputation systems and online communities. Assuming enough information stays for them to study.
Usenet was archived by Deja, which got bought by Google. It's in a sorry state, but at least it's stil there.
Who's archiving Reddit, or HN, or 4chan, or all the rest?
I don't want to belittle the Arab Spring, but the NCBI database and Wikipedia have arguably had an even larger impact on society than social networking's capability for kickstarting revolution. It's just slower and less obvious.
The internet contributed to building support for the Arab Spring throughout the world but it was tyrannical regimes that were the root cause. Wikileaks is not new. We used to have a little thing called 'investigative journalism', a profession in which people would put their live's on the line to reveal scandals and uncover secrets they felt the world should have known.
Technology does not motivate moral growth. People motivate moral growth. Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world when they invaded Poland and set the course for World War II.
The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
We still do. And, historically, it never got us anything as important as cablegate.
> Technology does not motivate moral growth.
Technology enables moral growth by reducing the amount of morality-crushing cruelty we're exposed to on a daily basis and allowing our natural morality to flourish. It's easier to care about others when you haven't just lost your child to smallpox.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
> Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world
They were, at best, on a par with the rest of the Western World, and, frankly, mismanaging themselves into defeat due to the very nature of their society.
The idolization of the Nazis as being so efficient and so advanced is due to what some Western observers thought before the war, when Hitler was using basic Keynesian-style pump-priming in the form of military spending to get the country out of the Depression, mixed with a few largely worthless wonder-weapons, such as the V2 rockets and the early jets, which did nothing to win the war.
> The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
This is true but it misses my point: Everyone can have their little niche space, which is amazing if you're not an upper-middle-class heterosexual cissexual white male who would have niche spaces anyway.
Gays can have spaces where being gay isn't weird. Trans people can have spaces where being trans doesn't mean you get your head kicked in. That kind of social interaction was pretty well impossible before the Internet, especially in places like Iran or Alabama, where advertising that you are 'a certain way' could be an invitation to violence.
The Internet is both a network of linked networks and a community of linked communities; both aspects are vital to what it is and what it can become.
I just checked and the terms "google", "altavista", and "search engine" do not appear anywhere in the index. Also, no weird web2.0-style domain names.
Different times.
The sheer amount of information back then was nothing compared to what it was today, but it was so much easier to browse around. Something as trivial as a webring was a cement for a community rather than a pledge for traffic.
Despite the nostalgia, I do think that, overall, the WWW experience has mostly gotten better since then, if only for the amount of information and communication. However, the density of quality has rather shrunk...
By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
I wish I could go back in time to 1996... everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful, not to mention textual (because images took so long to download).
Back then it almost felt like we were in the heroic age of internet communities, to borrow a phrase used about a period of American inventors. It'll never be like that again, but there are more good things coming in the future.
Web pages were static, many were long-form, they tended to provide information, and link copiously to one another.
What they lacked was collaborative editing, though Ward Cunningham was already working on that at the time. Wikis postdated the Web only by a brief bit.