Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology.
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.
It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app. I would say the internet has brought a lot of positive things in my life so far. The open source movement we have today wouldn't really be possible in an offline world.
When it comes to all the toxic things that social media can bring, I think we're slowly learning about them as a society, and maybe that's a good thing? Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result. On twitter you have a one-to-many broadcast system where one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments. On reddit, you can get high karma, but everyone basically has an equal shot at writing a popular post, and negative comments tend to get downvoted. Clearly, some patterns lead to more or less toxic and hateful interactions. We should study and learn from them, and use that knowledge to design better social media platforms.
> I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.
Of course, this completely depends on where you are on both Twitter and Reddit. There are bad and toxic parts of Reddit, and there are good and wholesome parts of twitter.
The one main difference though that's useful to compare between the two is that a post escaping the original audience, with the context collapse and everything else that brings, is a foundational feature of Twitter. It's a lot harder for that to happen on Reddit.
> one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments
Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.
Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.
I sometimes think the Internet is like the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It can show us what we want: if what we want is knowledge it will show us that, if what we want is proof that we are right it will show us that and if we want to see how horrible other people are, that is what we will see.
It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
I think the problem is also that we also are shown what other people want to see. I genuinely don’t want to see political positions of my relatives, or my neighbors getting into heated internet fights. But I do want to see my relatives small joys, and I do want to know important neighborhood news and activities. That I can’t filter appropriately makes social media toxic, as I can feel my social animal brain see heightened emotions and want to participate in social heightened emotions online, even though it doesn’t do anything for anybody. Even fighting the urge to post and participate just makes my day just that little bit less fulfilling.
Not only can you not filter, the stream is purposefully toxic to increase 'engagement'. I have a lot of friends on my feed that post constantly. Memes, cat pictures, etc, a few posts are about 'libtards'. Guess which posts show up on my feed.
My filter list consist basically of football and religious proselytism, two topics I never want to read about.
During the last world cup, or last euro cup or some event like that I had to filter about 10 groups, and the thing is, it works. I never get any football content in my feed any more.
I wonder if there's a single Product owner in social media organizations advocating for these points, but they're being drowned out by optimizing for profits. I could easily imagine, at the top of the timeline, a dropdown toggle that lets me toggle politics, neighborhood news, etc. But of course, I can't, so I've left FB altogether. At least with Reddit I can browse by topic, which somewhat puts me back in the driver seat. I can go to r/MyCity or r/cooking, but what I don't have then is those small, non-political joys posted by family/friends. Texting and phone calls for small life updates it is.
I think it's a combo of physical distance and ease of commenting. Remember the old Penny Arcade comic that frequently made the rounds years ago (about the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory)?
Not a terribly subtle bit of commentary itself, but it was a humorous reference to something most of us had experienced. In person, there are reactions to see. The other person/people's humanity is on direct display and most of us have at least some degree of innate empathy that keeps us from being a complete asshole all the time. And even those who don't mind (or relish) being an asshole have to worry about repercussions.
In contrast, if I read something I disagree with, it's a lot easier for me to just fire off a smartass reply without the effect that socialization has on me to consider how appropriate the comment is or what effects it might have. I'm just countering some words that I don't like with some other words I do like.
Large-scale social media just turns into the comment section for the entire internet.
> You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
Well, that's my argument against a communist society. It was designed only for perfectly altruistic people, and that's a kind of people I have never found anywhere. If we want something that actually works, we need something designed for the people that actually exist.
It's the same with the Internet. Once the spammers got the gist of it, it has been a constant struggle between spammers and anti-spam people. We have reached some form of equilibrium, but anytime a new person connects, it's a brand-new learning about avoiding potentially bad stuff. It can be very expensive learning.
I’m going to count HN as a social network. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet. It surfaces great content, and the comments are a gold mine of top-notch information and advice (by and large).
What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)
- a generally invested community that appreciates this is a special outcome
The interesting thing to me is that Slashdot shares many of these attributes, has a relatively sophisticated moderation feature and is a cesspool. It feels like a ship adrift in the Caribbean and the fourth generation of rats born on the vessel are at war.
The primary difference IMHO is dang. Anytime I think about the overall quality of HN, his efforts bubble to the surface of my mind as the primary causal factor.
The people who make Slashdot a cesspool probably pushed the reasonable ones out, and the refuge for these is HN. The same could probably happen here at some point, but people who want a civil forum could simply move elsewhere if that happens.
It helps that something like HN can be easily duplicated, so there will probably always be a space like HN where interesting and civil discussions happen.
I certainly agree that dang's moderation is excellent and contributes to the uniqueness of HN. But "+5 Funny" on Slashdot was a big driver in the other direction, rewarding the endless hot grits and Cowboy Neal humour, which usually drowned out more sophisticated comments.
There are profit motives and Y Combinator is being transparent on this. From the FAQ [1]:
> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.
>
> What's the relationship between YC and HN?
> Y Combinator owns and funds HN. The HN team is editorially independent.
> HN gives three features to YC: job ads (see above) and startup launches get placed on the front page, and YC founder names are displayed to other YC alumni in orange.
But HN seems incentivized to keep the level of quality high and to not interfere too much with content beyond moderation, or people would leave. So it leaves us with good quality contents and discussions.
HN's incentives are well-aligned with serving its users best, and this is probably partly what makes it a good place.
Moderation, but also a community that is by and large more intelligent than the general pop. Add to that a set of common reference points grounded in tech. We almost al understand logic, math, have good language skills and tertiary education. This perhaps makes HN a little bit of an echo chamber in some respects but it also means there is space for well presented arguments that go against the grain.
I do think this website is still small enough to have decent moderation, but there are plenty of borderline toxic and/or trolling comments I've seen here that go unmoderated. I've also seen tons of blatant and dangerous misinformation posted in the comments section, you only have to look at the vaccine threads from last week to see that. Nothing is perfect anywhere and medical misinformation is really bad for everyone. Maybe we can blame Facebook for bleeding out into the rest of the internet and turning things toxic, but we still have to deal with the effects of it.
By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects. If you used it right it would just give you euphoria, motivation, stimulation and potentially nootropic effects?
For many ADHD sufferers there’s literally a healthier form of crack. Well actually meth. It produces most of what of what you mention, except the sense of euphoria. The euphoria comes from quick rushes of dopamine and are what lead to many of the worse outcomes of meth/crack like dropping hygiene or eating properly. Conversely meds generally help ADHDers with basic hygiene, motivation, etc.
> By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects.
But how would something like work? It's the substance's ability to cause euphoria that makes it addictive. You cannot have one without the other. Addiction occurs when one loses the ability to regulate their dopamine-driven activity, causing something akin to an infinite loop. Adderall is basically legal meth, and it's easily the most abused medication in the US.
It should somehow be able to reset or configure brain's chemical state.
There's 2 addictions, physical and psychological. Psychological, could yes still happen of course even if you restored the balance of dopamine and other relevant chemicals, but in theory you could at least get rid of withdrawals if you were able to manipulate those chemicals. We don't have a way to do that, and may be we won't have, and maybe we'll invent something completely different first that would make something like this or drugs completely obsolete. But just in theory.
What you're describing sounds vaguely like some naturally occurring psychedelics, but again, those typically aren't addictive because the body often tries to reject them, even when you achieve an altered state of mind. They're not pleasurable to take.
I highly recommend reading the Molecule of More, which does an incredible job of explaining the brain chemistry behind addiction in an accessible way.
I've switched completely over to a well-moderated mastodon instance and haven't looked back since. Finding an instance that aligns with your values is the tricky part but once you have done that it's a lot of fun. The absence of any advertisements or algorithms really has an impact on the quality.
Yes, but imagine crack/amphetamines/stimulants without negative health effects. With no addiction, tolerance, or making people stop doing basic habits like eating, drinking water, brushing teeth etc. A healthy form of crack that would only have benefits of the crack that could make you into a real motivated, energised work horse or entrepreneur. You could be on it, you could be off it with no consequences, but if you want to be extra productive you would be on it.
I think OP's really onto something here.
Maybe something to reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up. It surely must be possible in some way.
A friend of mine had this idea but with opioids. He invented an opioid painkiller which was, IIRC, a positive allosteric modulator of the mu opioid receptor - I'm not an expert, but I believe the gist was that it enhanced your endogenous opioid system, and was therefore less prone to addiction.
He ended up finding a handful of papers scattered across the last decades where people had come to the same realisation, but nothing came of it. Now, it's very possible there was something wrong with the idea. He did synthesise the molecule and we both took it, but not for long enough to really assess - even in a Shulgin-like way - whether it was addictive. But he ended up suspecting that the reason nothing came of it is that a non-addictive drug is simply not profitable, and is dominated, in the game-theory sense, by addictive drugs which bring consistent and greater revenue streams.
Also, apropos of:
> reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up
You may want to look into ibogaine. It doesn't give you both the high and the 'resetting the brain' functions - it only does the latter - but it's a very interesting case in that it has a very successful track record in resetting addiction. Though research is hampered by the fact that its cardiotoxic properties have killed a bunch of people who didn't do proper ECGs etc to check for heart abnormalities before taking it.
> I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.
That entirely depends where you are. The big frontpage-able/default subreddits are strongly moderated (with at least some pressure on the mods to behave), but other subreddits have ended up as self-reinforcing cesspools, especially when moderators collude to ban any opposing viewpoint (as happens with r/conservative). And then you have the subreddits that were explicitly created for toxic purposes (e.g. T_D, c..ntown, fatpeoplehate, and a boatload of others listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...).
> Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I run a few social sites, nothing as major as Facebook, and this is something I struggle with daily. The problem isn't the tech, it's the people.
They post disinfo? So you put up a little warning saying this is wrong, they get upset and scream censorship, you push too hard and they just go to another platform.
People like being upset, they like having drama.
I have no answers, but I do think a friends-only feed, where you have to expressly opt-in to see posts works best, combined with easy discoverability (hashtags, interest channels and pages etc)
It does take knowledge to learn though sadly (and personal drive), I'm helping some family in an underdeveloped country and I stupidly want to be like "learn to code" but yeah... that doesn't really work. They have the time but not the ability to learn even though they have wifi/computer.
Anyway I too learned from the web and it has benefited me a lot.
“ It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app.”
If you genuinely believe it was, i suppose you're just incredibly unaware of how gated information was before the internet.
The poster said "easily accessible". The wealth of knowledge and information i have at my fingertips today was before hidden behind public libraries I'd have to plan a trip to, in courses i would have to attend, in the brains of experts i would have to interview in person, i would generally have to dedicate years of my life in order to match what I can today learn in a matter of days just because of the difficult process of sorting through the information and finding what I'm looking for.
Quite the exaggeration if I may say so. How were you born then? Did your parents meet on the internet? All of the mentioned tasks were not casual in nature. Most books are far better and more in depth than tutorials found online, so for true expertise you will most likely seek long form information found in books.
Sure, some online information may be “more accessible” but is it necessarily better information?
Sure, and before the invention of the telephone and telegraph you could just write someone a letter, and before the invention of the printing press you could just hire a scribe. Before the automobile you could just ride a horse. Before the cotton gin, just put some slaves in a field. Nothing is new under the sun.
Having all of this information available at one's fingertips and having the ability to communicate and publish globally, and practically for free, has been revolutionary in and of itself.
Revolutionary? By what measure? The pace of true core innovation has slowed by many measures. The largest and most valued businesses today are largely marketing organizations masquerading as “tech” companies.
Finally, I would argue that more, easily accessible information is not necessarily better information.
One thing that adds to this feeling for me, is that any device I own that has an OS, unless that OS is Linux, feels distinctly hostile. I can't own a handheld computer that's not trying to enmesh me in an "ecosystem" of some sort, curate my options without my consent, do god-knows-what in the background, brick itself on a timer, and the list goes on.
It's even worse with laptops and desktops, unless I'm willing to devote big chunks of my dwindling free time to making a hobbyist OS (which, to be fair, is a breath of fresh air when it works) behave.
When even the terminals to our increasingly-hostile internet are themselves hostile, it makes me dream of just walking away from it all that much more.
Yeah over the past few years this has been an issue I have found myself becoming increasingly passionate about. It's a particular problem of internet connected devices - in the past it was not really possible to own something which is acting on behalf of another party while it's in your possession, but that's exactly what corporate-owned operating systems do. And we haven't taken the time to develop legal frameworks around how that should work.
I think the core of the problem here is the free ad-supported model that's so pervasive in the industry. Data mining in order to optimize targeted ads is the business driver for this bad behavior and society has struggled to grasp it's implications.
The problem is that once something is free there's no going back. You'll never be able to compete with free. Free is the new antitrust. The only players that will be able to survive and thrive in this model are the ones with the most data and the most socially exploitative techniques.
Lots of us are happy to pay for nice things like operating systems that don't use this model but there aren't enough of us to adequately fund such projects. We're just not a big enough market share.
I'm thinking about some times when I chose "paid" over "free" and a big part of it was that the paid option was 1) considerably better and 2) unavailable for free due to physical limitations.
The first example I thought of was when I was younger and wanted internet access. I didn't pay for dialup as long as I could figure out a free option. Our library had some free system you could dial into and I figured out a way to make reasonable use of that. Then when I moved, I used some of those Juno and Netzero type services for a while.
But once I had the option to pay for cable internet, I just went straight for it. The experience was an order of magnitude better, and there was simply no way to hustle a roughly equivalent free option out there. But looking back, I don't know if I would've considered a free, ad-based cable provider if it existed back when I was a broke young dude pinching pennies wherever I could.
Then again, nowadays, I would pay a bit extra to ensure my cable internet provider did not read, prioritize, or otherwise mess with my data if that was an option. But I doubt many others would choose to do that if it was extra charge for nebulous benefits.
I would say that there's two models driving us to hell. In addition to the ad-supported model, there's also the "everything is a service" model. The AAS model is increasingly the only alternative to the ad-supported model that's available to those of us willing to pay for nice things. Teslas and iPhones are certainly not free, yet they're just as much inscrutable black-boxes as low-end smartphones and commodity "smart" TVs. The only difference is that they spend less time misbehaving because of careless updates, since this model motivates the manufacturers to invest more in QA. They're less openly hostile-seeming because they view the user like a high-end hotel views a guest - to be pampered and indulged. But the "user" is still a guest with limited-time and carefully-controlled access to the facilities, not an owner.
Am also from that generation, but got into an IT career from the early 80s.
I understand where you're coming from. I'm increasingly the least-tech focused of my family/social circle, despite being the most heavily involved in the tech industry. In fact, I think my lack of bullishness in tech is due to the fact that I've been in the tech industry for 40 years. I know where the downsides lie.
However, don't let the current reality get you down. One thing that being in this industry has taught me is that nothing is completely fixed and permanent. To wit, the global monopolist who benefited the most from the network-effect lock-in used to be IBM. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Facebook. In time, this too will change.
What wont change is the need for level-headed 'grey-beards' and those others who have lived sufficiently long in the tech space to have accumulated some level of wisdom, which they can then share with those that follow.
> To wit, the global monopolist who benefited the most from the network-effect lock-in used to be IBM. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Facebook. In time, this too will change.
Why does there have to be a global monopolist though? I wonder if we ever will end up in that decentralised dream.
The outage yesterday reminded me of how many other services do the exact same thing. The only app I use by FB is WhatsApp and it wasn’t too bad using signal, FaceTime and sms to communicate.
Let the sheep have their facebook apps. Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent. I have a dongle that plugs into my phone that can decode aircraft transponders, or tune any station on a wide spectrum, that cost less than a fancy coffee. Tech has brought many wonderful tools to those of us willing to learn.
Those "sheep" (i.e. people who aren't crypto-nerds) are the people I mainly want to communicate with.
> Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent.
And those pathways are almost never used, except by people who have an unusual interest in the pathways themselves and people who want to use them to do ignoble and illegal things.
Also, those technologies aren't as powerful as you think they are. Any major government that cares to detect and block them can, and if they want to find out what you sent they can always hack your endpoint or beat you until you tell them. China is the proof of concept for that.
I used signal this morning to talk to a team of 100+ people on a big project. I sent an encrypted email to my parents last night. A month ago I used Tor to bypass a hotel's silly DNS block on "Torrentfreak.com". My laptop is running a linux distro that I downloaded as a torrent. These are all everyday non-cryptonerd activities that leverage very powerful security products.
n=1 and all. I think "almost never used" isn't far off the mark. All of this sounds like hardcore nerd territory to me, with the possible exception of Signal, which still has strong nerdy vibes and is very tiny compared to its competitors. Sending encrypted e-mail from Linux definitely seems to be something that's almost never done, at population scale. If that isn't crypto nerd territory, what is?
If you were looking for everyday things lots of people do that make use of powerful security technology, Whatsapp's e2e encryption or https would be much better examples I guess; people actually use these en masse and can do so all by themselves, without support or nagging by experienced hardcore nerds.
I had the same sort of attitude to the parent comment until I remembered that maybe you and I don't live in the same culture that the parent does. I mean culture here as group of networked individuals with overlapping interested. Maybe there's a significant portion of people out there that do use those tools on the regular, and you and I just haven't been exposed to them. The earth is huge, and it's very possible that while we think his n=1, from his perspective n->100%.
Sending encrypted email and using Tor to bypass WiFi is restrictions are very, very crypto-nerd things to do, and running Linux is non-mainstream at best.
Tempting. Sadly, if we let the sheep have their FB, the likely result will be that we lose whatever semblance of democracy we have left. Already we're down to one party that belives in free and fair elections. Our system depends on informed citizens, not massive authoritarian psyop experiments. The longer we go where the majority can't get overwhelmingly popular policies accomplished, the closer we get to turning to any strongman who promises bold action, no matter how nightmarish that would be for most people.
That is the US story. It has less to do with facebook and more to do with the US political system. There are plenty of countries who have very different systems that have not followed the same path in recent years. Tech companies are part of the problem but should not be made scapegoat to avoid the deeper issues within the American political system, issues that existed long before the internet was a thing.
UK Brit here. Countries like the UK and the US certainly have their flaws, but I'd take them before nearly everything else that's on offer.
China's system seems terrible. The whole of Africa seems like a corrupt system. The EU seems mostly woke, and I'm not sure I particularly want that. Canada seems to have bought a first class ticket on the Progressivist crazy train from what I've been hearing. What's left? Not much, by the looks of it. Singapore, maybe?
I’m by no means an expert in US political history but all books and papers I’ve read indicate that this polarisation between the parties did not always exist. Members were allowed to vote according to their own principals instead of just the party line which is basically always opposing the other party.
Senators and other politicians would have bbq on Saturday at each other’s place. It appears that this no longer happens.
Too much transparency. If thousands of eyes of gatekeepers are at you at all times, and immediately start screaming that you are a DINO or a RINO if you do not hold the party line at all times, you have all the incentives to be strictly partisan.
We generally consider transparency in politics a good thing, especially because it may reduce corruption. But it comes with significant downsides. Only very resilient personalities are able to ignore the psychopathic monkey cesspool that is the political Twitter. The rest will submit to Moloch.
(Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" are a good read; I was lucky enough to meet the author two days ago at a meetup in Prague.)
I am talking about career politicians here, who usually use social networks to keep in touch with their electorate. Though they often have staff to do the lowly comment/response work.
Maybe it is a bad idea and a NNTP newsgroup would be better. Should be tried.
Deregulation of lobbying seems to have been the trigger, but any two party state with silly electoral systems like the U.K. and US is vulnerable to such polarisation.
Also "winner take all" election system combined with gerrymandering. The gerrymandering works short-term by helping you win the election, but it also makes you hostage to the more excitable and active of your party's members.
Sheep are interesting animals. I was in the Rockies last week, read a newspaper article about a female sheep who killed a bear who was threatening her children.
Temporarily shrouding oneself in Tor, DDG, VPNs, etc doesn't address the root problem: the commoditization of data. The next generations will have fewer and fewer tools to subvert the system. Real change will come from addressing the root problem rather than finding individualistic, temporary solutions.
The discussion environment is worse because there're more people online. Being online alone was a great filter for fruitful discussions.
At least we have Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, which fit the vision of "tech utopia". It would have been great if there's more stuff like that (I left out the vibrant open source landscape, because it also sort of existed in the 90s, in a (way) smaller scale though.)
There really is a gigantic portion of the population who seem to completely ruin everything they touch. It happens to everything that gains popularity. That root of the problem isn’t getting better.
Well as you get older, you are just more likely to be surrounded by the moan and drone crowd. Its just life.
Upto you to get out of that space now and then. Go watch the communities where kids are developing games, unity, webgl, godot, twitch streamers, VR/AR etc etc. That same energy and excitement of the blog and website era still exists.
It does, but it's different now. Back in the 90s people were excited by the tech, and the creative possibilities the tech afforded them. People would spend a lot of time making a website (home page) about their favourite thing just to tell other people about it.
That creativity still exists but now no one makes a site about their favourite things. Now it's pretty much always a play to get fame and fortune. If someone likes a show they have to "review" it to demonstrate their superior opinion that's worth subscribing to. If someone likes a game they start a channel where they play it live to an audience. If someone makes a game it's to try and make money through Steam Greenlight or Kickstarter. Even the creative coding scene seems to have shifted to trying to sell NFTs rather than just being about making cool looking things with math.
The passion to make things is still there but the motivation has changed from the joy of sharing what you like making to trying to make money, and that has changed things quite considerably. I think it's had a chilling effect on what people are willing to share.
> Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe
Local monopolies rather than a global one.
What if there was a global, international messaging system available to everyone with a phone, that strove for five-nines reliability? And wasn't funded by advertising? And didn't deplatform anyone(+)?
Oh wait it's called SMS and everyone hates it, largely for good reasons. The internet has a lot of problems but it disrupted the telcos by being far cheaper despite using the same infrastructure while offering more capability.
I mean a reason SMS gets its hate is because the moment you send a message across international borders you start paying ridiculously large sums of money (compared to the amount of data transferred) for every single message. If you now take Europe for example where it's easy to have friends in another country that you talk to regularly and you can see why WhatsApp quickly gained in popularity there simply because it was the cheaper option.
Within Europe monthly free SMS to other European countries have been a common theme for a while. The main reason I see nether SMS not WhatsApp being popular today around here is how much more a app like Telegram does and how some of these apps actually protect your privacy. SMS is flawed, and WhatsApp everything but private.
I understand the feeling, but SMS really doesn't work. A the end of the day, it is just a hack on top of the telephone network.
There are countries were SMS is actually local to the carrier, and they don't route user messages out of their bounds. In the olden days it was fun asking people where they contract their phone to decide wether to mail them or message them.
Some countries have horrible reliability for SMSes, I think India is a famous one. Trying to do user auth over SMS becomes a nightmare.
Then the issues if you cross borders, where you'll be enjoying both countries SMS idiosyncrasies on top of the round trip costs.
Then carriers won't open SMS to non voice SIMs, even if they get an access to the network. But you'll need to meet specific criteria to get a voice enabled SIM.
All in all, it's a tried and true protocol in limited setups, but not something to hold as a global gold standard (I think there sadly is no global standard to hold on a pedestal...we can hope we make one in the future)
Tech enthusiasts never had the numbers to realize that world. It was the "It just works" users that determined how economic interest would shape the net in large parts.
That said, the classical internet is still there, it just isn't as buzzing as social media. I really appreciate that.
I think you had wrong expectation. I was 11 in 2000, when I got access to the internet behind my parents' back.
I was surrounded with shady people, learned the darkest of the dark of humanity very young and never had any utopia: people are monsters, women are always men, help is never truly free etc. Im not sure how it was before the internet, but clearly I never had a view of it as an utopia: it s a jungle.
Facebook and opinion sharing network in general are not very important: if people could be Nazi in 1940, Im not sure why you think it's different or even facebooks fault: they simply reflect what we are.
And nobody want decentralization of power really. People want power centralized closer to them.
For one, I think the internet became better and cleaner with time. Or it s me who get trapped a lot less.
Facebook and other social gardens took the Star Trek out of the internet
In a related thought that'll probably be when the next big internet wave happens - spaceships and colonies offline-first until a data sync drone flies by
>Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
Not out of necessity. It's not as if any one corporation controls the internet and has a monopoly on mobile communication the way JP Morgan used to control the railroads. Plenty of options to text and communicate other than through Facebook exist. People are dependent on one specific app because they choose to be, not because they have to be.
And "sizable portion of humanity" is overstating it. For the vast majority of humans, this was a non-event, or at worst, a slight annoyance.
People always had the option to avoid JP Morgan’s network of rails by walking or using a horse. But of course that’s silly to say. JP Morgan had built the one and only network. It was the fastest and easiest way to move goods and people so that’s what people “chose” to use. They “chose” it over options that vastly inferior. That’s what a monopoly is.
And I would encourage you to think about the long-term implications of monopolies. Specifically when it comes to inequality, inefficiency, and opportunities for innovation. The negative externalities go far beyond “a slight annoyance”.
And Facebook isn't the one and only social network, or means of communication over the internet. They don't own the infrastructure, and throttle all other sites into uselessness. They don't manufacture all of the mobile phones so that they only use Facebook.
>It was the fastest and easiest way to move goods and people so that’s what people “chose” to use.
Facebook is not significantly faster or easier in this regard than other solutions. A few years ago someone made an app that just texted "yo" and it got a million dollar valuation. An app that sends texts over the internet isn't rocket science.
>That’s what a monopoly is.
And clearly what Facebook isn't. Thank you for making my case so strongly.
> The negative externalities go far beyond “a slight annoyance”.
Not when it comes to the simple matter of being able to communicate with people on the internet. If losing Facebook means you in essence lose communication with the outside world, that isn't because Facebook controls all world communication, it's because you chose to center your entire life around a single application.
This was a non-event for most people. If Facebook had the stranglehold on global communication that many claim it does, the entire Western world, if not much of the entire world, would have come to a screeching halt.
Same. I started online in the late 80s with something called Wired Writers - we shared stories online with famous writers who critiqued us. At the time I didn't think much about it (I was a kid) but it was sponsored by an oil company. Now I think about it a lot. I went on to digitize libraries, set up university databases (Silver Platter etc). I think about how my nieces don't know that internet that we saw. It is because the form of our society does not allow decentralization. This censors the content. I think about that.
I remember the late 90s a little differently. At least in the USA, it was a time where most people used centralized networks like America Online and Compuserve, and instead of websites, brands would direct you to their AOL keyword. Everyone was concerned about the centralization of power, but there was a lot of hope about the possibility of decentralized information. AOL lost its power in the begenning of the millenium, but it was quickly followed in popularity of other centralized networks like MySpace. Meanwhile, the decentralized networks only continued to grow along with them.
Maybe the mistake was thinking that the Internet would either be centralized or decentralized, that one model would win in the end. The large organizations never gave up, but the small networks didn't either. There's no meaningful end to depth of the current Internet, and the decentralized part is larger than ever. Even Gopher space has continued to slowly grow. Maybe the only thing we lack is curiosity, and that's easy to rediscover.
> I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world.
Thanks for making me feel depressed right in the morning.
I was just cogitating this morning on how the internet is also drifting towards centralised infrastructure. The mesh is becoming a star. It may be more efficient to stick a tube in my body to feed me. I am not sure this is progress however. In the same way "easy" communication and infrastructure may not always be progress.
If it makes you feel any better, it's not exactly just about the internet or what we modern folk consider contemporary technology. The question of societal transformation to a place where technical knowledge (in a broad sense) has become a requirement for basic living and the side effects or unintended consequences that it entails have been on the minds of philosophers since the industrial revolution. People have notice that the reliance on "machine" is going to change their world similarly to how the internet changed our 80s and 90s world.
Two very interesting things I'd recommend reading for a different way of framing this issue (but from the same perspective) that's been helpful for me. Both by Jacques Ellul. First is "Technological Society" 1954, and second is "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" 1962. The second one might not seem related, but it is.
I would argue that the internet has been very good at decentralizing power. The problem is that this is what decentralized power looks like. There are a seemingly infinite number of groups flexing their collective muscle, generating their own realities, and even their own economies.
I get that the rich have gotten richer and corporations have gotten bigger, but in so many ways their power has decreased. We live in a world in which the most important force in modern American society is freaking 4Chan (QAnon). The billionaire class has lost the thread on how to control this. They try to put the squeeze on the Facebooks and Youtubes of the world, but that seems to have little effect on the spread of very insane but incredibly meaningful movements.
I some times wonder if the mistake we all made was thinking decentralizing things was a good idea.
This is not surprising in the historical sense. "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu shows how this repeatedly happened to industry after industry, with every disruptive comms technology bringing about a stage of unfettered, ebullient, and at times reckless innovation, followed by consolidation, monopolistic behaviors, and finally regulation where the govt essentially creates inefficient but necessary safeguards against otherwise monopolistic, predatory, large companies. It happened with radio, television, landline telephony, mobile telephony, Internet, PC OSes, mobile OSes, social networks, and it is not over. It is the natural tendency of capitalistic markets with network externalities. The saving grace of it is, and that looks rather unusual from the historical perspective, there is still a relatively effective notion of net neutrality (Chinese firewall excluded). This means it is possible for an upstart like TikTok to effectively challenge incumbents like Facebook or Snap in a way that competitive telcos never could have 30 years ago (they really needed govts to crack monopolies open).
Optimism about new media tech doesn't survive long when average humans get their hands on it. It's all fun when it's computer enthusiasts only, but when FB or Twitter makes it so even the least considerate, most highly misinformed, and most toxic individuals can reach hundreds of others...that's the other tail of the distribution, that's the snake oil salesmen, conspiracists, religious fanatics, assholes, jerks, and all the people we used to go online to avoid.
Tech is having a negative impact on the elites, which is good. In the past they could basically get away with saying whatever they wanted unless another elite wanted you to hear otherwise. Now when $politician posts something on Twitter there is a regular person calling them out on their bullshit right underneath within seconds. They are working hard to re-cork this bottle with censorship and such, but I don't think that will happen in most places.
I wouldn’t put nails in the decentralization coffin yet. The Internet isn’t really that old, and it’s a complex topic.
Technical platform decentralization is hard for technical reasons and the Internet may indeed contain a bias against it, but physical decentralization (telework, geographic diaspora) is a decentralization prediction I see starting to happen.
Physical decentralization was underway before COVID. The pandemic just accelerated the trend by years.
> where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world.
The point is that this was never true. Well for me as a person with strong technical background it used to be true. But for many "regular" people not so. And when the usability and difficulty was lowered for the others, it was no longer feasible to self-publish websites.
> in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!)
I was in the same framing of age and schooling as you describe, and in an affluent area as well; perhaps the difference between your technology classes and mine was that mine were not "ham radio oriented".
The problem is that these corporations don't pay correct taxes and corrupt agencies don't do anything about it. This is causing centralisation as they have huge competitive advantage over honest businesses.
> In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened
I completely disagree.
Corporate power changed, and sure, companies like Google and Facebook probably hold more power globally than companies in a single country.
But, individuals have gotten more power also. People can be more informed, and affect more change than they could previously, which is both a good and bad thing.
The tendency towards centralization (corporate or state, doesn't really make a difference) is because of three things:
1) Economies of scale for machinery (in this case, computers, routers, etc.) Nowadays, Facebook and Google are laying their intercontinental fiber optic cables. Apple and Amazon are developing their own silicon. Decentralized can't compete with that.
2) Economies of scale for user networks. In Monthly Average Users we trust. Maybe a Mastodon instance works out for a small group of like-minded tech-literate friends. Realistically, small platforms just can't compete without growing into large platforms. Even in the naturally-decentralized blog space, medium and substack dominate.
...hey Carl, substack and tiktok are new upstarts, how did they compete with centralized giants?
3) Economies of scale for attention. Advertisements these days are pretty compelling. UI is important for online platforms to get mass adoption. Both of these things need capital to build out, and benefit tremendously from scale.
Add these things up and there's no surprise the masses gravitate towards centralized services, especially since they've figured out a business model that's free and "just works" for the non-technical user.
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.