You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.
> and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.
That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements.
The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology.
Where is technology still fun? The places that don't have ads being vomited at you 24/7. At-home CNC (including 3d printing, to some extent) is still fun. Digital music is still fun.
A lot of fun new technology gets shouted down by reactionaries who think everything's a scam.
Here on "hacker news" we get articles like this, meanwhile my brother is having a blast vibe-coding all sorts of stuff. He's building stuff faster than I ever dreamed of when I was a professional developer, and he barely knows Python.
In 2017 I was having great fun building smart contracts, constantly amazed that I was deploying working code to a peer-to-peer network, and I got nothing but vitriol here if I mentioned it.
I expect this to keep happening with any new tech that has the misfortune to get significant hype.
It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads.
But it's fundamentally a correlation, and this observation is important because something can be completely ad-free and yet disempowering and hence unpleasant to use; it's just that vice-versa is rare.
> It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads.
Yes, a number of ad-supported sites are designed to empower the user. Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. When I was growing up, TV executives picked a small set of videos to make available at 10 am, and if I didn’t want to watch one of those videos I didn’t get to watch anything. It’s not even a tradeoff, TV shows had more frequent and more annoying ads.
No, they wouldn't. On Youtube, for example, videos were consistently trending longer over time, and you used to see frequent explainers (https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-video-extra-long/) on why this was happening and how Youtube benefits from it. Short-form videos are harder to monetize and reduce retention, but users demand them so strongly that most platforms have built a dedicated experience for them to compete with TikTok.
You can. It’s not a hermetic seal, I assume because they live in the same database as normal videos, but if you’re thinking of the separate “shorts” section there’s a triple dot option to turn it off.
> That happened because technology stopped being fun.
Exactly and I'm sure it was our naivete to think otherwise. As software became more common, it grew, regulations came in, corporate greed took over and "normies" started to use.
As a result, now everything is filled in subscriptions, ads, cookie banners and junk.
Let's also not kid ourselves but an entire generation of "bootcamp" devs joined the industry in the quest of making money. This group never shared any particular interest in technology, software or hardware.
The ads are just a symptom. The tsunami of money pouring in was the corrosive force. Funny enough - I remain hopeful on AI as a skill multiplier. I think that’ll be hugely empowering for the real doers with the concrete skill sets to create good software that people actually want to use. I hope we see a new generation of engineer-entrepreneurs that opt to bootstrap over predatory VCs. I’d rather we see a million vibrant small software businesses employing a dozen people over more “unicorns”.
>The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology.
Disagree. Ads hurt, but not as much as technology being invaded by the regular masses who have no inherit interest in tech for the sake of tech. Ads came after this since they needed an audience first.
Once that line was crossed, it all became far less fun for those who were in it for the sheer joy, exploration, and escape from the mundane social expectations wider society has.
It may encompass both "hot takes" to simply say money ruined tech. Once future finance bros realized tech was easier than being an investment banker for the easy life - all hope was lost.
I don't think that just because something becomes accessible to a lot more people that it devalues the experience.
To use the two examples I gave in this thread. Digital music is more accessible than ever before and it's going from strength to strength. While at-home subtractive CNC is still in the realm of deep hobbyists, 3d printing* and CNC cutting/plotting* (Cricut, others) have been accessible and interested by the masses for a decade now and those spaces are thriving!
* Despite the best efforts of some of the sellers of these to lock down and enshittify the platforms. If this continues, this might change and fall into the general tech malaise, and it will be a great loss if that happens.
