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Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

latimes.com

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Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#41

Post by codegeek »

Personally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam, malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things. Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the internet. I can work for anyone over the internet and make money for myself and my family. I can communicate with family members and friends across continents. With all the hate social media gets for example, imagine a life without them again. I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse or outdated.

So Thank you for creating the internet all you tremendous people. I personally wouldn't trade it. Can we fix a few things ? Sure we can. But it has not gone wrong. It has changed lives, mine included for the better.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#42

Post by vultour »

bilbo0s wrote: post #19
frereubu wrote: post #6

"You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards." It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship rather than a consensual one.

Not exactly in my opinion. My understanding of the passage is that he wants to block the entire website outright. So not, "Look at reddit, but block ads." Rather it would be, "Block reddit." Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be…

This already sort of happens with ad-blocker-blockers, except the other way around. You signal to the website you don’t want the privacy-invasive mess that are ads, the website tells you to sod off.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#43

Post by andrew_ »

One of many great takeaways from this article, a great new word to add to my vocabulary:

Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a derogatory geopolitical term for the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or uncooperative with one another.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#44

Post by masswerk »

efdee wrote: post #39
workthrowaway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something definitely went wrong, imo. when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest. now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks…

Your posting this on a website that is pretty much exclusively links to other websites, "hey I made this" stuff, and people talking about their hobbies. I think it went /okay/.

However, we could also call this a dedicated bookmarking app with discussion threads appended to it. This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.) For "normal" websites, there are only few left that consider themselves as part of a bigger web, in which they are constituting yet another node (trying to make this web as a whole worthwhile).

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#45

Post by efdee »

101008 wrote: post #37
workthrowaway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something definitely went wrong, imo. when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest. now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks…

Yes, this is a common topic between my girlfriend and me. Internet as we know it (we grew up in the 2000s with MSN, forums, etc) doesnt exist anymore. First (at least for us, for other people there would be another "first") were the basic webpages done in Frontpage or Dreamweaver (if you had enough RAM), uploaded to free webservers like Tripod, Lycos, Geocities, copying and pasting scripts found out there to remove p…

People still run blogs. People still run their own forums. Nothing is "lost", there is just a whole lot of new things that apparently don't interest you as much.

Personally, I can't really say that I miss any of the sites designed like they were in the 90s, with their ever-rotating GIFs, Flash-based intro pages, "Designed for Netscape" badges.

And does an influencer need to have his/her own website? Not more than an ad needs its own website.

The "original Internet" is still there, and I dare say more people are using it than back in the 90s. It's just that a lot more people are also using the newer stuff that you don't like.

And that's fine.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#48

Post by myth_buster »

> With the profit motive taking over the internet, the very nature of innovation changed. Averting risk dominated the direction of technical progress. We no longer pursued “moonshots.” Instead advancement came via baby steps — “design me a 5% faster Bluetooth connection” as opposed to “build me an internet.” An online community that had once been convivial transformed into one of competition, antagonism and extremism.

This cycle is perhaps fundamental to all __human__ inventions and core to the theory of disruption.

This played out out the same way with Bitcoin. Ethereum had to step in to disrupt that cycle and as ETH grows to that size, some thing else needs to come in and disrupt. Same holds true for IBM > Google > Facebook > ...

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#49

Post by efdee »

masswerk wrote: post #44
efdee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your posting this on a website that is pretty much exclusively links to other websites, "hey I made this" stuff, and people talking about their hobbies. I think it went /okay/.

However, we could also call this a dedicated bookmarking app with discussion threads appended to it. This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.) For "normal" websites, there are only few left that consider themselves as part of a bigger web, in which they are constituting yet another node (trying to make this web as a whole worthwhile).

Sure. And you could find a name like that for pretty much every website in existence in the 90's.

I strongly disagree that it's a special case, and I strongly disagree that there are only few websites left that feel like part of a bigger something. I think you are romanticizing the past (as most people do with most things they remember from their youth - remember when kids' TV shows were actually good?).

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#50

Post by agumonkey »

codegeek wrote: post #41

Personally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam, malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things. Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the internet. I can work for anyone ov…

I won't go too heretic on internet, but I think it kicked the old structure too hard and too early.
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