[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Jaded about the internet?
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Ask HN: Jaded about the internet?
Are you jaded about The Internet? I've been online 20 years now and
I feel like I've reached the pinnacle of what The Internet is about
and have in a way _reached the end of The Internet_. I 've seen
just about everything you could want, and participated in many
communities over the years, and I feel everything is just 'samey'
now and follows the same pattern. It's hard for anything on The
Internet to stand out and be unique (at least for me). YMMV on
this. Now with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an
abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all
the things, which is good to see, but I want to see all that
fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it. This is
the _shiny thing_ I look forward to on the web, but it 's still
early days. Other than that, the web seems kinda boring lately.
Are you jaded about the web too? I'd like to hear your thoughts!
Author : legrande
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-11-28 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| Nope, very hopeful, lot of stuff to do, we are still at the
| beginning of the Internet
| webmobdev wrote:
| Started getting disappointed as surveillance capitalism started
| taking roots and when the cartelization of internet began and
| BigTech started dividing it among themselves.
| loceng wrote:
| This version or evolution (or arguably devolution) of the
| internet is due to for-profit interest drivers leading to design
| decisions that aren't overall good for people. This was all
| accelerated by the VC industrial complex, along with the Ad
| industrial complex.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I try to collect and share weird, unique, or independent websites
| on https://stumblingon.com
|
| I believe that centralization of the web has killed off a lot of
| the weird uniqueness and made things more boring. I'm trying to
| find and share sites that aren't like that. I recently changed
| the site's layout and think it may be messed up on mobile, so
| sorry about that.
| throwaway55421 wrote:
| I'm jaded about the entire industry, it feels like we've invented
| everything genuinely useful and now we're just doing make work.
|
| I'm more bullish on technology in general and some of the
| software that can enable that (e.g. fusion research, CCS, self-
| driving cars).
|
| But general purpose computing? The open source scene and people
| tinkering is cool. The commercial side is just pointless, I can't
| think of anything _useful_ (as opposed to merely being addictive)
| in the last ten years.
|
| Whenever I speak to software developers in real life now I get
| the sense that they're just "not my people". No, I don't want to
| talk about social media VR, or advanced data mining, or facial
| recognition or whatever.
|
| Even the more mundane stuff is like... okay, so you work at
| Amazon. Cool, I like to shop on my high street, err... let's talk
| about something else then.
| makz wrote:
| It's the same for me, it feels like everything is boring,
| almost no new tech excites me and same feelings about talking
| to tech people, they are just regular people who happen to work
| in tech.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| what is CCs?
| Y_Y wrote:
| "Carbon capture and storage"
|
| It's either environmentalism or alien abductions.
| agumonkey wrote:
| There's a back wave onto physical processes (energy storage and
| the likes) rather than the information layer. Maybe the digital
| side is mostly solved (and/or wrong) and large enough to be
| able to absorb all real needs. Meanwhile we need better real
| world processes.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Completely share your view 100% so that makes 2 of us.
| mrweasel wrote:
| For both the internet, and the industry as a whole, I get jaded
| about how quickly we move on, without stopping to see if we
| really explored one "branch" to the extend it deserves.
|
| We have moved too quickly during the last 30 years, and we're
| still not providing better solutions to our users. Not by a lot
| at least. The IT industry is more focused on solving the
| problems that we've created for ourself, rather than providing
| better solution.
|
| I don't care about machine learning, data mining/science,
| social media, Kubernetes or scaling to 500 million users. Most
| problems can be solve easier and better with less. It's cool
| that we can do these things, but they get in the way of
| creating actual solution in most cases. Oracle makes hardware
| that allows you to run global businesses or infrastructure for
| small nations on a 2U server. People seem more interested in
| running a global marketing platform that will handle the scale
| of Black Friday, because god forbid that you couldn't tracking
| customers once a year.
|
| Could we please focus on making good solutions to actual
| problems? Utilize the resources we already have? Most days I
| feel like most of my tasks could be solved just as well using
| 20 year old Unix tools.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I feel exactly the same way.
|
| Feeling like the work I'm doing is at least somewhat important
| and/or useful is very important to me, and it's EXTREMELY
| difficult to find jobs in tech that aren't "make work" and just
| redoing something that's already been done, but in a slightly
| different way to try and trick some investors into giving you
| money for it. It's either that, crypto scams, or fintech.
|
| It's gotten so bad in the past few years that I'm seriously
| considering a career change. I got into software development
| because it let me flex my creative muscles while also making
| money in a secure job. But at this point, the day-to-day is so
| painful for me that taking a serious pay cut might be worth it
| for my own sanity. After being in the field for around ten
| years, it gets pretty obvious where everything is headed and I
| just don't have the energy for it. I'm so tired of arguing
| about frameworks, build systems, how to plan and manage work,
| interpersonal relationships with people who are just entirely
| full of themselves and think they're doing the Lord's work by
| writing business-to-business software.
| cryptoz wrote:
| > but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive
| into it and leverage it.
|
| Why? Why wait for a while? Why is "leveraging" your goal for it?
| What does this even mean? 20 years ago were you waiting for
| things to get fleshed out online before you leverage it? Whatever
| that means.
|
| No I don't find the web dull. Been here 23 years, always found
| fascinating stuff. Yes it is different now but also we have aged.
|
| > Other than that, the web seems kinda boring lately.
|
| Sorry but I think it is you not the web here.
| devilduck wrote:
| The worst part of the internet is always the comments section
| t0bia_s wrote:
| I honestly think living offline would be next trend in few years.
| voldacar wrote:
| The internet used to be so wild, dangerous, unpredictable. At
| some point, it was defanged. Now everything is safe, sanitized,
| and governed. Everything has to be nice and inoffensive. Gone are
| the days when you might stumble across an ISIS beheading video on
| youtube. Even places like 4chan are heavily moderated now.
|
| As a source of information, the internet has decayed
| significantly too. Specialized knowledge seems to have moved from
| phpBB forums into private discords, which cannot be searched,
| indexed, or archived.
|
| Everything has become centralized. Remember when games (quake,
| csgo, minecraft, etc) gave you the server executable so you could
| run your own server under your control? That seems to have
| completely disappeared in the past ~5 years or so. And discord
| misleadingly calls chatrooms "servers" when in reality it's all
| one centralized mainframe.
|
| Websites now subvert the basic function of a computer as a tool
| for storing and manipulating bytes. To save a video on reddit I
| have to leave a comment with the name of a bot. To save a video
| on twitter I have to install a browser extension or use a third-
| party website.
|
| It just feels like the whole computing world is rotting and I
| don't know what to do about it. There's nowhere to go, unless you
| want to live in the past.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I think this is just a function of the internet expanding in
| functionality. Back when the internet was wild, dangerous and
| unpredictable, the internet itself was pretty small and
| insignificant. Now the internet has become the backbone, and
| for it to become a backbone it has to be safe and sanitized.
|
| Now if you want to find the wild, dangerous and unpredictable,
| you have to look to various parts of the internet. For all the
| hate that Web3 gets, it's really the new wild west of the
| internet, just like the internet itself was back when it first
| came out. Eventually Web3 will be tamped down by regulations
| and corporations and become a safe and sanitized place just
| like the rest of the "mainstream" internet. But for now I
| really cherish just how nuts that whole space is.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I blame Apple for a lot of this. When the iPhone got big, they
| kept it all closed off in a walled garden- you couldn't/still
| can't even look at the files on disk! Other businesses saw how
| locked down you could make something and still be successful
| and replicated it.
|
| Why let you easily download a video if that lets you post it
| elsewhere? They want to keep you on Reddit/Twitter for longer
| and longer so that they get more engagement from you and can
| show you ads.
|
| Minecraft is a great example of this, too. Why let you run your
| own server for you and your friends when you can pay Microsoft
| to host the server for you on their centralized server? Never
| mind that sometimes the data center gets too much traffic and
| your little server gets deprioritized and your ping skyrockets.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I am. But understandably so.
|
| Web is made by humans, there will be dreams, lies, fluff, wins,
| fails, rot. It's just another organs amongst organs.
|
| I also believe it was an extrapolation of the previous era (as
| you do) and that like all extrapolation.. it's partly wrong.
| Being able to talk to gazillions of people is not necessary a
| boon.
|
| In any case I'm more and more in the process of focusing on
| disconnected time. Reading, doing, learning and sharing.
| Especially with the potential climate change acceleration and
| societal quakes.
|
| ps: about web3, I just wrote a bit about how it might be useful
| to keep an eye on it
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370620
| chrisaycock wrote:
| This sounds more like a complaint about _human behavior_ than
| about the Internet. Why do people eat at chain restaurants and
| watch blockbuster movies? There 's certainly a cost aspect to it,
| as well as a simple lack of knowledge about what alternatives are
| available. But generally speaking, people want what other people
| want; well-run companies simply cater to a pre-existing demand.
|
| You can level the same complaints to wearing fast fashion,
| picking which city to live in, and even choosing a tech stack to
| implement on. The homogeneity you're dismissing is what most
| people want in the first place. Decentralization won't change any
| of that.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Unless the decentralized thing is a unique computer that
| creates a new kind of substrate for a new category of things:
| restaurants, movies, ____ <- dapps? I don't know. I am
| definitely not in this camp, but maybe.
| dbtc wrote:
| Art, movies, books, music, lectures, tutorials, interviews, news,
| weather forecast, maps, dictionaries, encyclopedias (whole
| libraries!) all literally at my fingertips.
|
| No I'm not bored. But it's just a tool, for me.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Exctly. No time to real life. This make people anxious.
| Internet is great tool for consuming ideas, movies,
| information... But to create new things you actually need to do
| something away from keyboard.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Three words: Industrial Dance Battle
|
| You're welcome.
| fossuser wrote:
| The new Web3 stuff has been the most exciting frontier since the
| bitcoin whitepaper in 2009. Urbit is super cool, ETH is really
| interesting. There's a ton of stuff happening in the space - like
| I imagine what 1999 probably felt like. Yeah there's hype and
| lots of bubbles + company failures, but there's real underlying
| technical innovation and success too. That's what makes it an
| exciting frontier of new stuff.
|
| There's a lot of fun stuff going on and the future looks bright.
|
| Hopefully the domination of centralized SaaS of the last decade
| will mostly be an anachronism of our time, and the original hope
| of a decentralized p2p web will happen after all. We were trapped
| in a local maximum of thin clients and accounts, but maybe this
| will be the way out.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 1999 didn't feel like that because there wasn't scam after
| scam. People were willingly and freely sharing knowledge back
| then. The early internet felt empowering and freeing. Web3
| feels scammy and a bunch of pump and dumpers.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think a lot of 90s web banner ads would disagree.
|
| The regular web was pretty scammy back then too and the spam
| problem is arguably what resulted in a lot of centralization
| (something urbit IDs fix).
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Bonzi Buddy might might have some thing to say about that
| smoldesu wrote:
| Alternatively, maybe the proliferation of consensus-based
| ownership will encourage people to build even more SaaS
| platforms to try and capitalize on an every growing,
| increasingly captive audience. It's hard to say, but I'll err
| on the side of capitalism doing the same thing it's done for
| the past 100 years.
| agumonkey wrote:
| For some reason I feel super bad every time I read someone
| throwing "decentralized". I think it's a naive fallacy that
| will break in twenty different pieces because the world is
| complex and there will always be a hidden hierarchy emerging
| from the original decentralized thing.
| fossuser wrote:
| That's one reason I think Urbit's implementation is cool. The
| network hierarchy is explicit, but the minimum required in
| order to to have the maximum decentralization possible that
| can actually work (automatic lookup of p2p ids, ability to
| update the network/smart contracts, ability for other nodes
| to fork if it was necessary, etc.).
| mrkramer wrote:
| I like Web 2.0. People on Reddit and HN are friendly and helpful
| and I enjoy interactive content platforms like YouTube and Twitch
| but I can agree most of the internet services feel the same.
|
| >Now with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an
| abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all
| the things, which is good to see, but I want to see all that
| fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it.
|
| People care about UX not technology. If Web3 has better utility
| and UX than Web 2.0 then people will switch to it.
| satysin wrote:
| I've been jaded about the internet since September 1993.
|
| Wake me up when September ends ;)
| User23 wrote:
| It's not an exaggeration to say that over the past three
| decades the intelligence of the average Internet user has
| dropped a solid two standard deviations, if not slightly more.
| It was an unavoidable side effect of going from a tool for
| research scientists and particularly motivated college students
| to one for the general public. In that sense, I suppose it's
| fair to call me jaded. I've watched the average quality of
| discourse plummet. That's one of the things that makes HN such
| a breath of fresh air. It reminds me very much of what the
| general Internet once was.
| gladinovax wrote:
| Diversity is our strength!
|
| At least it sounded good on paper
| AlexanderDhoore wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| satysin wrote:
| I am glad my not-so-helpful post was not downvoted by those
| that didn't get the inside joke :)
|
| As a more earnest reply to OP I guess you could say I have
| been "jaded" about the internet/web since the late 2000s. The
| rise of social media I never particularly cared for. I
| enjoy[ed] a very small part of it but the negativity is quite
| draining and it is _far_ too easy to get sucked into a
| negative echo chamber than a positive one.
|
| With regards to blockchain and related technologies 'driving
| Web 3.0' I can't say I care all that much. I think some of it
| is great but a lot of the hyped parts, such as NFTs, are
| useless.
|
| Yes, yes I know there are _some_ sensible use cases for NFTs
| (such as concert tickets) but all this JPG NFT non-sense just
| makes it look like a bunch of adults getting excited over
| digital beanie babies.
|
| I guess you could say I do _miss_ the internet from the late
| 90s to the late 2000s. Perhaps it is just rose tinted
| memories of when I was a teenager but the rise of Napster
| then P2P then Bittorrent, then web video services, etc. along
| with high speed internet was truly amazing.
|
| The early years of Facebook was also pretty nice to
| reconnect/keep in touch with some people but I would say I
| 'grew out' of Facebook within about a year, maybe two. I
| realised I had lost touch with those people for a _reason_
| and even with Facebook, Twitter, etc. I lost touch again.
| [deleted]
| kaetemi wrote:
| A large portion of the Internet, or perhaps just what Google
| search somehow ends up optimising towards, seems to fall into the
| category of celebrity gossip magazines.
|
| I do remember that the more technical content, and all the tiny
| user created websites about someone's pet trivia, we're more
| easily found, back in the day. Perhaps it's just a problem of
| discovery.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _with Web3 /NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an
| abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all
| the things, which is good to see_
|
| Hate to disappoint, but decentralization won't happen at any real
| scale. The "sameiest" thing of all will be the manner by which
| the democratizing hope of technology is once again dashed as it's
| recaptured by capital (as with the Internet itself). It's already
| happening.
|
| See: all of the VCs currently touting Web3, NFTs, etc as if they
| discovered it.
|
| There will be a few new winners, but they will largely win
| through centralization, and will frequently have the support of
| incumbents/capital.
| fourstar wrote:
| The new boss; same as the old boss.
| pphysch wrote:
| If you want to keep vertically scaling the internet as an
| engaging virtual experience, Zuckerberg is your guy. Once the
| "Metaverse" launches in a meaningful sense, the masses will stop
| caring about cryptocurrencies/NFTs and start caring about
| whatever virtual goods and markets and experiences emerge on that
| platform.
|
| For me, the internet is getting more interesting because it is
| increasingly _materialized_. It is unbelievable that we can
| deploy a fleet of battery-powered flying robots, linked over 5G
| and sharing intelligence while pathing with superhuman precision.
|
| It's sad that in America, IoT/smart cities were more or less a
| temporary fad, probably having to do with cultural opposition to
| "surveillance" and low standards of governance. We've only
| scratched the surface with what's possible with it.
| postpawl wrote:
| Zuckerberg is going to track what your eyes are looking at so
| he can make sure you're paying attention to ads.
| pphysch wrote:
| At the very least.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| SnR is bad now, but has been since mid 90s and Eternal September
| feels like as good a time as any on the timeline. However, I'm
| sure more quality and novelty exists now than has ever existed,
| it's just harder to find.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| quote but applied to something else like music:
|
| Are you jaded about music? I've been listening to the radio for
| 20 years now and I feel like I've reached the pinnacle of what
| music is about and have in a way reached the end of music. I've
| listened to just about everything you could want, and went to
| many concerts over the years, and I feel everything is just
| 'samey' now and follows the same pattern. It's hard for new music
| to stand out and be unique (at least for me). YMMV on this.
|
| --
|
| I think this perspective is common and makes sense. Many of us
| feel it. I am not sure crypto/web3 is the solution. To bring
| web3/crypto into this analogy, is web3 a new way to decentralize
| record companies and put power into the "bands" rather than the
| corporations? If so, then it won't fix the problem.
| Centralization still finds great stuff and doesn't hinder
| creativitiy and bands from making music. It eventually finds them
| and helps change the landscape. However, if crypto is a new way
| to make music (app platform) with brand new instruments and new
| sounds.. then maybe it is the future that will take a long time.
| Artists are still in the basement trying to figure out how to
| operate these things and get them to make cool sounds
| spurgu wrote:
| > I've been listening to the radio for 20 years now and I feel
| like I've reached the pinnacle of what music is about
|
| If you listen to the radio yes. But it's also objectively
| different. Music up until the 90's was 99% played by humans who
| had spent years mastering their instruments. There was
| something more "alive" even in basic pop music. Now you can
| just press a button and get 3 minutes of a repeating drum
| pattern and/or bass line.
|
| Granted there's a whole lot of complexity in making _good_ pop
| music (or "machine music" in general), I'm not downplaying
| that, it's just very different to (in my mind) the more
| "personal" music (having to work creatively within the
| restrictions of the musicians/instruments as well as recording
| techniques) that came before the 90's.
|
| For example jazz is still going strong and constantly coming up
| with new exciting artists and music.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Great analogy. People often forget that the internet scene(s)
| (much like the music scene(s)) are a reflection of the people
| who participate in the tribe.
|
| All tribes wax and wane: exciting, rebellious and pure in their
| early days, bureaucratic and suffocating in their later days --
| often giving way to a new generation of tribes which
| cannibalizes the mindshare they once cannibalized from previous
| dinosaurs.
|
| It's the circle of life, and technology accelerates but
| ultimately doesn't alter the very human incentives of the game.
| Perhaps that's my own being jaded speaking, though!
| newbamboo wrote:
| The international element is interesting. Chinese censorship
| shaping technology and our own domestic surveillance, the battle
| of platforms, ai and psychological manipulation. So much teeters
| on the brink. So much will change, soon. Not that I'm an
| optimist, but it's hard to call it boring when it's not nearly as
| static as op implies.
| xvector wrote:
| Being able to walk between AR/VR spaces like we walk between
| websites is going to be game changing.
|
| Some sort of standardized metaverse protocol is absolutely the
| next layer that will put the current "internet" to shame.
|
| Some time within the next two decades, most people will be
| wearing AR glasses and a metaverse will begin to take shape.
|
| Metaverse likely won't obviate the need for traditional internet
| for some time, but we'll laugh at our arrogance in thinking that
| we experienced the peak of the internet at any point beforehand.
|
| The ultimate abstraction is not hyperlinked text on a flat panel,
| but objects, places, and people in our _physical reality._
| Eventually flat-panel internet and UX won 't even be a thing.
| issa wrote:
| No idea why this is getting downvoted. AR/VR in 2021 absolutely
| feels like an Apple II in the early 80s or the internet in the
| early 90s. I would be shocked if it isn't the next big thing.
| xvector wrote:
| HN is pretty reactionary towards AR/VR. I HNers are scared of
| the reality ahead of us, primarily due to adtech/Facebook
| concerns, but it doesn't change the fact that it _will be_
| reality.
|
| Our modern two-dimensional flat-panel compute interfaces are
| ephemeral and will barely be a blink of an eye on the grand
| scale. Decades from now, we'll look at the iPhone and laptop
| like people look at hole-punch computers today. Because they
| really will be that cumbersome compared to peak AR/VR.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| AR/VR still reminds me of the eternal "experience in 3D!"
| drive, with all sort of glasses for the whole family and
| friends. Was a curious novelty, sure, but essential and
| trend-defining? I'm quite more comfy perceiving the remote
| media in a 2D without any need for an enhanced illusion.
|
| Anyone remembers the efforts at realistic skeuomorphism in
| UI?
| xvector wrote:
| Have you used a headset for a reasonable length of time?
| It's absolutely the future of human interface.
|
| You might be comfortable with 2D, just like people before
| computers were comfortable not using computers. But 2D
| flatscreens will absolutely be left in the dust.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I remember both the Apple ][ in the early 80s and the
| internet in the early 90s, and AR/VR isn't anything close to
| that.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I'm still waiting to hear what this "metaverse" AR/VR
| peripheral device are going to be. I am going to assume some
| sort of glasses. Many don't understand that those who have
| crappy eye vision, AR/VR becomes very hard to use.
|
| Having to buy third-party lenses that fit in front of Valve
| Index headset, works, but it's far from perfect. To have a
| pair of glasses which act as LCD displays, am I going to pay
| extra to have them crafted to my prescription?
|
| The human eyes are great devices when you have perfect
| vision; to those with malfunctioning ones, everything is a
| crappy experience.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| "web3" is a marketing lie designed to sell suckers on 21st
| century tulip mania.
| rubyfan wrote:
| If you've only been online for 20 years then you missed the best
| of it. Nothing truly new has been invented on the internet after
| 2000. By then I think we had www, email, irc, geocities, aol,
| search engines, e-commerce, napster, etc.
|
| Everything that came after is just a reverberation.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I don't think we've reached the pinnacle just yet. If anything, I
| feel like we've only scratched the surface. But I can see a
| transition on the horizon and I'm not fully sure what that would
| be. I feel like it's yet another case of Charles H. Duell's
| famous "Everything that can be invented has been invented" quote
| from the late 19-th century. I basically grew up on the internet,
| starting from when I was six in 1994. And in those 27 years the
| internet has changed multiple times and each time I heard people
| saying "this is it, this is as good as it will ever get". The
| semantics of the word "good" aside, they were always proven
| wrong. The internet created an economy that is almost independent
| from the real world. Starting from the early emails, the first
| online payments, then it was web 2.0, bandwidth caught up to the
| demand, then it was the whole smartphone-social network-streaming
| services pack. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but AI never picked
| up and was almost killed off by an artificially blown out hype
| from marketing side. Just try and remember what the HN frontpage
| used to look like 4-5 years ago - a good 30% of all posts were AI
| related. At this point in time there could be weeks without
| anything on the subject. Don't get me wrong, it's an incredibly
| interesting field with a lot of potential but I don't think it
| is/will be the next big thing. The cryptocurrency thing really
| caught me off guard to be honest and I would have never imagined
| that it would be such a big deal. If anything I was willing to
| bet more on AI than crypto but here we are. As far as NFT I'm
| incredibly skeptical and I can't see this going anywhere. I'm
| equally skeptical about metaverses - that sounds plain stupid if
| you ask me.
|
| Two things I'm keeping my eyes open for however:
|
| 1. IoT. Much beyond your wifi enabled light bulbs crap. Low power
| microcontrollers and sensors are dirt cheap and are opening a
| whole new world. Also 3d printing has come a long way and is very
| easily accessible to most people. Prototyping and developing
| small, low powered devices has never been this accessible. Just
| to give you an idea, this[1] entire section of my shelf in my
| office has probably set me back less than 200 euros and there's 3
| times more stuff which has gone into different projects already
| from those 200 euros. The one thing missing are standards for
| communication and interfacing with those devices because as we
| stand right now, it's more or less every man for himself. IoT is
| a gold mine not just for smart homes but for manufacturing,
| distribution and infrastructure - the amounts of things that can
| be built is insane.
|
| 2. It is related to the first point and I might be a bit biased
| here/geeking out but... Space. This is something I've been
| investing a lot of time in lately and have been
| researching/thinking about prototypes. I was absolutely blown
| away by how accessible it is to launch your own micro satellite
| into the thermosphere. As it turns out, you could do that for
| less than a five figure. Of course you'd need to go through an
| absolute nightmare of paperwork, regulations, licenses and
| whatnot but... The number of companies that are working in that
| field is incredibly small. Shameless plug in here - if anyone is
| interested in giving me a hand on a (mostly) open source project
| in that area, do contact me(email in profile).
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/XRRmpwd.jpg
| vgeek wrote:
| Yes. The decentralized web already existed. It was
| phpbb/vbulletin (or self hosted website) powered and had niche
| forums for all types of topics. You had an identity specific to
| that site, with each behaving as their own community with rules
| and norms. Not happy with a given forum? Go rent a server and
| start your own community. With Linode/DO and things like
| Softalicous, this is much cheaper and easier than it was back in
| the day, but everything consolidated into walled gardens meant to
| track and monetize everything while monopolizing your attention.
|
| "Web 3" is just a cash grab under the guise of a "blockchain". As
| an analogy, crypto is a channel on IRC-- it is a topic, people
| love talking about it, but the underlying tech (IRC protocol,
| blockchain) isn't being fully utilized, and may never have a
| solid, widespread _commercial_ application. Yes, governments have
| adopted some crypto, DAOs are a neat concept, but how many
| applications are so novel that blockchain is actually the best
| and /or only application of said tech?
|
| For the "new web" concept, we have yet to see internet for the
| people, created and curated by people without monetization as
| their primary motive. Will Gen Z (or whoever come next) be tired
| of the walled gardens and try to reinvent what the old web was,
| or will they just be amused by the shadows on the wall of their
| caves?
| rob_c wrote:
| I can point to several communities which unfortunately died after
| they tried to mistakenly expand and embrace a wider audience.
|
| Small forums worked because a lot of people soaked up the cost of
| running a little web page on a box that wasn't very expensive per
| year. A lot of them eventually, decided they didn't want to spend
| the money or time and hand off to a new maintainer.
|
| The new maintainer looks to (reasonably) expand the community and
| embrace new technologies, e.g. live chat, video. This creates 10x
| the work at least and eventually they give up and pack it in.
|
| Now, unfortunately the work to take over the community on it's
| current state is much larger than the original site and so it
| eventually dies without someone wanting to work a full time job
| without the pay...
|
| I miss the optimistic lose communities of the 90s when I was
| growing up. Not to mention the communities on topics which are
| now no longer of interest to a wide audience. The amount of
| organic search needed to rediscover any new forums now is also
| unfortunately a new barrier to entry there never used to be :(
| solmag wrote:
| Gated Private Internets can probably flourish. Stuff like Urbit
| chatrooms.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > I miss the optimistic lose communities of the 90s
|
| You're just a product of your time - like me and everyone else
|
| The 2010s have been dark. It's easy to see in mass media, which
| is a reflection of people self perceptions and interest:
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheNewTens
|
| >> For the first time in over 70 or 80 years, the political and
| economic climate has impacted the socio-cultural in an
| inescapable fashionnote , becoming more watered-down and risk-
| averse compared to the "alternative" trends of the late 90s and
| 2000s,
|
| >> On the one hand, the early years of the decade were marked
| by escapist fare, such as Glee, the Marvel Cinematic Universe
| films, young adult-geared romantic dramas and "shiny reboots".
| However, sordid settings and cynical attitudes thrived in
| media, reflecting the turbulent sign of the times. Dystopian
| fiction (The Hunger Games, The Last of Us, Divergent) and
| horror films (The Purge) served as allegories for the growing
| social and economic divisions in American society. Dark cable
| dramas (Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad) took
| away the spotlight from broadcast network shows, and several
| franchises got acclaimed grim-and-gritty interpretations in the
| vein of The Dark Knight Trilogy.
| rob_c wrote:
| No. I miss the communities and simple forums which have died
| typically for the reasons stated above.
|
| I don't think this is "I remember the sky was brighter" or
| any other common misunderstandings. I follow some simple
| forums still and am aware yes, they are technically inferior
| and have issues and even getting https on some sites is
| effort due to the internet having evolved around old code.
|
| Some do evolve and adapt, and saying "I prefer the way they
| were" would be closer to what you think I'm saying. The
| communities I miss have gone. There is no subreddit covering
| the same topics afaik and as such that probably means I
| should reach out and start to find these communities myself,
| but I miss the old forum interactions, hence why I follow
| other forums.
|
| There are a few still out there who have survived the purge,
| but only because the people/person behind it have invested
| personal time/effort/money over the year out of their
| personal commitment
| thumbellina wrote:
| I'm jaded about the Internet.
|
| https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence didn't last.
|
| The web is no longer "surfed". The web is an escalator of
| sanitised material, surveilled and stateful.
|
| On the plus side, the web is now used by billions of people to
| solve real problems. That's nice, but it's not a place of
| exploration for me anymore.
| guidovranken wrote:
| The internet is infinitely interesting and I'm still as
| spellbound by it like I was 25 years ago. You just have to look
| beyond the FAANG websites. Most recently I have been having a lot
| of fun using AI image generators like https://neuralblender.com/
| and grepping 4chan's /x/ archive for cool spooky stories and
| anecdotes. Did the same with Hacker News
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28598590). I can give a lot
| more examples of how to find interesting content.. Let me know if
| anyone would like me to do a blog post on it.
| windock wrote:
| Yes please, I lost this skill myself
| pvinis wrote:
| please do!
| mikewarot wrote:
| The internet is a network of nodes, none of which are secure. The
| addition of commerce to that network brought in a profit motive,
| which will always find new ways to exploit the insecurity of the
| nodes, the routes, and the end users, for profit.
|
| Most people seem to think that computers, the nodes of the
| internet, can't ever be made secure. I believe they're wrong, but
| still have to wait a decade or so before the basic design defect
| in most operating systems is corrected.
|
| Most computers "on" the internet aren't fully privileged nodes,
| but rather second class citizens with "access" to "content",
| instead of being a fully functional computing peer. I'm not sure
| if this will ever be corrected.
|
| Humans are always going to fall for scams, but that's not
| specific to the internet, so we can ignore that in the judgement
| of the nature of the internet. It speeds, and widens,
| communications between people, when done properly.
|
| I think things will get better in the next few decades, if we
| don't fall victim to our knowledge of physics (nuclear weapons)
| or biology (gain of function research).
|
| [Edit/Append] It's extremely important that we don't lose free
| access to general purpose computing, if we want to maintain our
| freedoms in general. With general purpose computing, you can
| build a sneakernet, or your own internet.
| anoojb wrote:
| It's possible that something like the "Internet" never happens
| again. By which I mean a somewhat distributed collaboration
| built on open protocols without a series of large entities
| (companies or countries) capturing the majority of the market
| value.
|
| Whether future developments are "better" or "worse" is
| immaterial. Things will unfold as they are.
|
| Humans fundamentally make choices that reflect their values and
| biases. They can choose to: build, consume, get scammed, be
| vigilant, etc.
|
| I am certain that it will be interesting to witness and
| participate in the new world. What a time to be alive.
| supperburg wrote:
| I also feel like the illusion of variety has been broken for me.
| I feel like it's always the same kind of person who you find on
| any forum regardless of the topic -- a power user who is on the
| spectrum and socially awkward and not very smart in certain areas
| of life. I used to come across a comment and wonder what kind of
| person wrote it but now I feel like I kind of know who wrote it
| and the internet has become a lot less mystical and useful since.
| The parts of the internet where non-spectrum people hang out have
| all the same problems of exclusion that the real world has for
| me. It's all pointing to the fact that the internet hasn't really
| changed anything fundamental like we were all led to believe by
| the hype.
| rado wrote:
| 90% of the web is broken/slow/glitchy/inaccessible. It's an
| absolute scandal. Shame on you managers and devs.
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| I'm jaded about people in general which is the root cause so most
| things made by people including the internet follows suite.
| solmag wrote:
| I would only salvage Archive.org, Libgen and Scihub. Funny taht
| two out of three things worth something are by Russians dodging
| copyrights.
| sterlind wrote:
| Wikipedia too please! I've spent oodles of time on it, more
| than any other website. Everyone knocks Wikipedia but if you
| look up technical concepts and check sources on contentious
| issues it's pretty amazing.
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not jaded, but then, I was never that excited by it, either.
|
| It's a tool. A substrate. An infrastructure.
|
| All of these things go through a "The sky's the limit!"
| excitement, when they are first introduced. Electricity, TV, and
| even nuclear fission, were greeted in a similar manner.
|
| I'm glad it's here. I use it all the time, but I don't feel
| disappointed that it turned to shit, because I never expected it
| to be anything more.
|
| http://hmpg.net
|
| https://www.internetisshit.org
| egypturnash wrote:
| It was exciting when I was a teenager but now I am a fifty year
| old lady who is just trying to use it to get paid for drawing
| stuff and I am really tired of fighting the social media
| corporations' constant decisions to de-emphasize posts with
| offsite links to places where I can get people to pay for my
| work. The thought of pivoting to making vertical videos because
| all the kids are on TikTok now feels incredibly exhausting,
| especially because I know it'll probably be replaced by yet
| another corporate-owned social site with its own bullshit in a
| year or two.
|
| NFTs just seem to add an extra layer of bullshit where every
| transaction happens via a bunch of people wasting an absurd
| amount of energy to perform useless computation in hopes of being
| the one who wins the lottery for some cryptocurrency. Don't tell
| me your favorite crypto's moving off of PoW, it's wasting
| incredible amounts of energy _right now_ and moving off of that
| relies on getting a consensus from people who are financially
| incentivized to stay on PoW.
|
| (The most damning sentiment about NFTs I've seen is that there
| are two groups who are historically at the forefront of new ways
| to get paid on the internet: porn makers and furries. And
| _neither of them is into NFTs_.)
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I have to disagree with you about Web3 (Cryptocurrencies,
| NFT's, Blockchains, that whole space), I think this is the next
| frontier of the internet and it's an incredibly exciting time.
| NFT's and Crypocurrencies are just one of the earliest
| implementations of this new technology.
|
| The first implementation of NFT's is for artwork but that's
| just one implementation. When you step back and look at the
| actual technology, it's introduced a paradigm shift for how we
| think of objects on the internet. Before NFT's, everything on
| the internet was fungible, if it existed on the internet, you
| could copy it. Sure there are things like DRM, but that is just
| an abstraction on top of a fungible thing that tries to make
| that thing non-fungible.
|
| I don't know where the technology will take us, or what it will
| look like in 20, 30 or 40 years, but when you think about the
| idea that everything up until now on the internet has been
| copyable and we are just starting to figure out how to actually
| give a digital thing ownership, that will change how we look at
| just about everything on the internet, from DRM to
| authentication and many other aspects. I think when I'm your
| age (mid 20's now), NFT's will be everywhere and "NFT Artwork"
| will be looked back on as the very first implementation of the
| technology, and likely with many jokes about how bad it all
| was.
| lekevicius wrote:
| Looks like OP's post is out of the homepage, so I can reply
| without downvote avalanche incoming.
|
| I agree with your sentiment. It is probably the most exciting
| aspect of the internet, and digital ownership concept has a
| long and exciting road ahead.
|
| I am also utterly baffled by how this sentiment is met on HN.
| Thoughtful responses are downvoted, cheap shots against this
| sentiment rise up. I no longer want to participate in
| discussions about anything crypto on HN, negativity is too
| strong.
|
| And there is absolute irony that this is happening on a
| thread called "Jaded about the internet?".
| yuuu wrote:
| I agree with both of you guys. It's clear to me that this
| sort of decentralization will prove to be revolutionary.
| People who immediately equate NFTs with JPEGs are idiots
| and don't get it. They won't get it until they're using
| them to buy and sell tickets to events, which is probably
| the next major use case.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _They won 't get it until they're using them to buy and
| sell tickets to events_
|
| I'm not really pro or anti-NFT. But, I will say that
| people frequently champion them by stating potential
| future use cases. I think it's unfair to do that as a
| basis for claiming current detractors have it wrong.
|
| Right now most enthusiasts are heavily promoting the
| primary use case as essentially digitized files (be it
| JPEG or whatever--but mainly art).
|
| So, that's the current argument, as opposed to some
| future wherein they supplant x or do y.
| yuuu wrote:
| I'm not saying that enthusiasts can't be idiots, too. But
| the naysayers arguing against strawmen enthusiasts is
| getting pretty annoying, and it's pretty clear most of
| those people don't even know the technical definition of
| an NFT. The parallels with criticism of the early
| internet is so obvious.
| cableshaft wrote:
| > I no longer want to participate in discussions about
| anything crypto on HN, negativity is too strong.
|
| And this is how the negativity stays so strong on HN. I get
| it, I usually just say my opinion on crypto, accept it'll
| most likely be downvoted, and try not to engage in a back
| and forth too much, but it's tempting just to let things on
| here be and have those discussions elsewhere because it's
| relentless.
|
| Which just makes me wonder what other tech trends people on
| HN are being intentionally obtuse about.
|
| I don't even mind legit criticism (environmental concerns
| are worrying for example), it's people saying provably
| false crap like "it's only used for money laundering and
| crime" or "it's just the new beanie babies" one line
| dismissal of a $2 trillion dollar industry (and has a
| larger market cap than physical silver) that's annoying.
| Gigachad wrote:
| People have grown tired of crypto posts because we have
| been exposed to over a decade of marketing hype and still
| no concrete product or useful service has come out for the
| average person. Almost all of these crypto products die out
| after the hype, fail to deliver on their promises, or were
| outright scams.
|
| I was personally interested in a bunch of them 5-7 years
| ago and feel burned when none of them have lived up to
| their promise and seem technologically impossible to fix.
|
| The main winners of crypto hype have always been the ones
| selling something while the users get burned.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think the vast majority of people care at all about
| "owning" a digital image or "verifying" it's integrity.
|
| Furries pay lots of money to have custom work done of their
| character. They don't pay to "own" some random pre-existing
| art.
|
| And basically everything that NFTs do, a database can do
| better.
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