[HN Gopher] Clifford Stoll was right; the web isn't nirvana
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Clifford Stoll was right; the web isn't nirvana
Author : andrewnicolalde
Score : 9 points
Date : 2022-05-28 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techaeris.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techaeris.com)
| rektide wrote:
| A lot of this is too much for me, is too grumpy, disregards the
| value of online space & connectivity too much, favors the past.
|
| But Im sympathetic too.
|
| One thing that stood out, that- by seeing tagging & aggregators,
| de.icio.us and digg- I thought wecd be much better at by now is
| layering context & critiques, building trust & peership & review
| as layers atop the web page medium. Tagging, organizing,
| categorizing, issue-based-information-systems (IBIS), and other
| techniques were, I though, by now going to be voluntary overlays
| to help us organize & orient, to discern. There have been neat
| projects- e.g. Newstrition[1] browser extension- but generally
| progress has been minimal. Im surprised after all this time how
| right Stroll still is:
|
| > _Lacking editors, reviewers, or critics, the Internet has
| become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to
| ignore and what's worth reading._
|
| [1] https://our.news/
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I like Cliff Stoll and I'm really far from being an internet
| booster, but that's incorrect on the face of it. Every website
| has one or more editors, including this one. And every newsblog
| _is_ a filter. It's your choice which ones to follow.
|
| There is infinite data available to you and infinite ways to
| consume it. You -- essentially anybody -- can take an entire
| degree curriculum taught by top professors online for a ton of
| subjects if you don't care about getting credit toward a
| degree. That degree of democratization of knowledge was
| absolutely unfathomable in the mid-20th century, when Stoll was
| likely born.
|
| It's important not to let Facebook and Twitter and the dark
| side of things completely obscure your vision.
| rektide wrote:
| There's plenty of nice, refined systems, & high knowledge.
| Yes. 100%. This site is a decent example.
|
| But online spaces have some kind of free-for-all area, & it's
| usually a shit show. I have a pretty good, sharp, caring,
| concerned set of friends on Facebook, it's actually pretty
| ok, but I definitely see plenty of others with just madcap
| bedlam in their feeds all the time. Most sites have comments,
| and even here where it's pretty good, I feel like 20% are
| actively misleading, are concealing & have a non-
| straightforward agenda they're pushing.
|
| There's a duality right? Good and the bad? There's plenty of
| amazingness. But we allow & celebrate interaction, it's an
| interactive medium, and so much of the activity comes from a
| shouting class, from borderline lunatics, from warped
| concerns. I absolutely celebrate the good, I love Twitter
| dearly (though I've been away for a long time), but there's
| so little guiderails & helpers, it takes such a mature
| mindset to navigate & orient oneself amid the seas of so much
| teaming noise & din.
|
| And we haven't really made gains in taming the wild. There's
| kind of still this dual, of high tower work, and the mass
| spaces. What younger me was expecting was that we'd refine &
| build better visibility, so we could be more enlightened &
| better understand what we ran across, collectively, wherever
| we went. There's been little progress in layering in context.
| The shouting has gone up.
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| Many technologies do not democratize or result in leisure time or
| cure any of the legion of ills that humanity suffers. Tech
| usually just amplifies the existing power of a political entity,
| be it statesman or soldier or businessman.
|
| The singular piece of revolutionary tech of the last millennium
| which actually has improved lives for millions, is the laundry
| machine, which unlocks many hours of peace and relaxation or
| education or whatever is needed, for the poor, particularly to
| the benefit of women who traditionally washed our clothes. The
| Internet is nice, but perhaps not as pivotal as that invention.
| davesailer wrote:
| Check out the video. "Clifford Stoll talk from 1999" at
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvqFo-EU9W0 "The man is certainly
| eccentric."
|
| "This is a video of a presentation given by Clifford Stoll at a
| Sequent User's Group 'Enterprise Solutions Summit' in Portland,
| OR. I happen to find this program on a DVD as I was cleaning out
| some old boxes and figured it was probably the only surviving
| copy of this presentation in existence. Of all the programs,
| presentations and lectures I've attended over a long career in
| the IT field, this presentation has always stuck with me and I
| figured it would be a shame if this were lost to the world
| forever. I hope you enjoy the presentation as much now as I did
| then." -- William Danger Newman
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