41–50 of 129 posts
Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent livi…
I'm not even sure we'll be able to read content created in this epoch at all two hundred years from now. While the NY Times article is mostly HTML (with lots and lots of script injected, but still), sites such as medium.com and many others created in this decade are just a single big JavaScript blob with auto-generated CSS.
I'm not sure why we wouldn't be able to? The binaries / source of old browser versions aren't going away. It seems like it's a much easier problem than emulating old closed source console games, or dos programs, both of which have been done very well.
Also, running old games in DOS Box is often a finicky process that requires some tinkering for every game. That's one of the reasons GOG.com took off so rapidly. People are gladly paying several bucks to save themselves the trouble of messing with configs and reading forums about game's quirks.
This isn't a huge deterrent in case of games, but it will be a huge deterrent for retro-browsing, because the whole point to the Web is its interconnectedness. Plus, there are many more websites than there are games.
I feel like 200 years from now, our times will be viewed as something akin to the industrial revolution. Recency bias makes us feel as if we're more important in history, but 200 years is a long time. I'm sure there'll be another "revolution" or two in that time. And the people of that time will probably consider it to be the most pivotal revolution yet. History folks. It repeats itself.
So we've got the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, then the industrial revolution about 200 years ago. I can't think of any other separate event of equal impact. And you are suggesting that no only are we currently within a similar scale event (plausible, but hardly proven), and there will another two such magnitude events in the next 200 years? Or are you noting that we, and future generations, will al…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess I see value in news as "here are some issues that people are talking about, go find more info if you want to learn more" The problem is that most news falls outside the circle of control for the people reading it: it makes people worry , but in practice they can't or won't do anything about it. There's no point in worrying about something if you don't intend to act on it. But that runs counter to the notion…
I guess I see it as: People should be worrying. Things are scary, and there's more field of interest than ever to worry about. But people have to focus on what they think is the most important thing, or set of things, to worry about. I see news as a way to give them an introduction to the subject. Though, I agree it doesn't seem to work well in practice. I wonder what could change to make that happen.
Very little news actually does that. Watch a TV news program, or read a newspaper, and try to imagine what the call to action is on each story. For most stories, there isn't any, other than "Worry more!" or "Resent these people!" or "Get annoyed!".
> Though, I agree it doesn't seem to work well in practice. I wonder what could change to make that happen.
Build a source of news whose fundamental premise is "if it doesn't have a specific call to action that people can act on if they care about it (and that in practice people do actually act on), it doesn't get published".
The way I've come to view culture is that it is a byproduct of communication. Stick three people in a room and have them talk to each other, eventually they come to share a culture (a small one, but nonetheless significant to them)[1]. If it's indeed a byproduct, it follows that the amount of culture generated is directly proportional to the bandwidth/speed of that communication. In that interpretation, the internet…
> In that interpretation, the internet can only be an accelerating force; driving society forward into greater levels of social consciousness. Not necessarily. Take evolutionary processes. Diversity arises in part from isolation. This is why the Galapagos are such a crazy local ecosystem. The Internet globalises all communication -- it is easy to see how this can lead to more "bandwidth" as you say, but less actual c…
You only have to spend a little time consuming digital media to understand that products that rely on advertisements for income suck. As soon as subscription services started offering ad-free versions of their product, I started buying them. I'm not saying it's the best way forward, but would it kill Twitter and Facebook and Snap to experiment with some of these models? It's working for content creators, why should s…
Right now I just don't want to be getting billed by a bajillion different people for all the content I consume. It's an administrative hassle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I see it as: People should be worrying. Things are scary, and there's more field of interest than ever to worry about. But people have to focus on what they think is the most important thing, or set of things, to worry about. I see news as a way to give them an introduction to the subject. Though, I agree it doesn't seem to work well in practice. I wonder what could change to make that happen.
> I see news as a way to give them an introduction to the subject. Very little news actually does that. Watch a TV news program, or read a newspaper, and try to imagine what the call to action is on each story. For most stories, there isn't any, other than "Worry more!" or "Resent these people!" or "Get annoyed!". > Though, I agree it doesn't seem to work well in practice. I wonder what could change to make that happ…
Although I kind of agree with you, what about problems that don't have a clear, actionable response by most people? Although those are probably rare, I'd personally want to know about them and decide for myself.
Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent livi…
With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something.
I feel like 200 years from now, our times will be viewed as something akin to the industrial revolution. Recency bias makes us feel as if we're more important in history, but 200 years is a long time. I'm sure there'll be another "revolution" or two in that time. And the people of that time will probably consider it to be the most pivotal revolution yet. History folks. It repeats itself.
So we've got the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, then the industrial revolution about 200 years ago. I can't think of any other separate event of equal impact. And you are suggesting that no only are we currently within a similar scale event (plausible, but hardly proven), and there will another two such magnitude events in the next 200 years? Or are you noting that we, and future generations, will al…
Admittedly that probably can't be attributed to any one technology or idea, but I'd put that as a solid contender for a third entry in your list.
[EDIT] for a fourth I'd skip some of the other suggestions in this thread like the Enlightenment or Renaissance, and instead add The Printing Press.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So we've got the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, then the industrial revolution about 200 years ago. I can't think of any other separate event of equal impact. And you are suggesting that no only are we currently within a similar scale event (plausible, but hardly proven), and there will another two such magnitude events in the next 200 years? Or are you noting that we, and future generations, will al…
~800-300 BC generated most of our surviving major religions (the major exceptions being Christianity and Islam, but both trace their origins to a religion that was formalized and created or finalized [most of] its canon in that time) plus the beginnings of mathematics as we know it, our earliest writings that are kind-of science and that often represent the founding documents of entire fields of study, the foundation…