281–290 of 327 posts
All the problems mentioned in that article can be distilled down to two words: * anonymous * broadcast If either of those words is eliminated from the technology all of the spoken problems immediately die, and thus new never imagined problems will take their place.
Why would you think that?
I find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased communication, allowed peopl…
It’s a particular point of view that obviously won’t find resonance in this HN audience. Were the author’s view to prevail, you would be out of a job. Vast majority of people here owe their livelihood either directly or indirectly to the democratization of the internet. But that doesn’t mean the author the author is naive. There are certainly (unvoiced) masses largely sympathetic to his point of view. Take the exampl…
Is it the democratization of the internet, or the commercialization? I think it's more the latter you're benefiting from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Internet is not as bad as cars. That's harsh! Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative. The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took…
> On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative. Honestly there's no way this is true. How many people would die if they couldn't use an ambulance? How many people are surviving on goods shipped to them via trucks? Of course things can be improved, but there's no way the automobile was a net negative on humanity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the early internet it was extremely cheap to host a webpage either on your own It still is. You can get your website hosted for $5/mo.
Not if your site is popular.
* IP->UDP+TCP->HTTP->HTTPS should have been IP->UDP->TCP->HTTP->Skype/Tor/IPFS/Universal-performant-P2P-encryption->HTTPS
* NAT, UPNP and other informal/non-scalable enterprise solutions had no place on the web because they made low-latency P2P communication nearly impossible to implement, so relegated most users to being second-class netizens
* Software patents ruined JPEG, GIF, streaming, file compression and so many other ubiquitous technologies by contaminating protocols with restrictive licensing or DRM, which severely limited use cases and tended towards consumption rather than production, which also relegated most users to being second-class netizens and set us up for:
* Declarative and data-driven innovations like HTTP and HTML regressing back to hand-rolled imperative solutions running natively on mobile devices, which opened the door to:
* Private companies being the gate keepers of which applications and online tools are allowed in app stores
* Free and open online communities funded by advertising being marginalized by greed from ad agencies (including Google) to the point where customer acquisition costs usually exceeded their lifetime value, which prevented most web businesses from being scalable. Which led us to:
* Walled gardens which use surveillance (rather than ads) to extract value from users and sell it, which led us to:
* Extreme wealth inequality where a select few individuals and organizations picked winners and losers by deciding which startup ideas got funding (arguably the majority of startup IPOs today revolve around zero sum games, disrupting key infrastructure companies that employ millions of people, and providing services or service industries which solve pain points instead of providing real innovations in sustenance/basic needs/standard of living)
* Entrenchment of internet service provider duopolies in almost all cities while simultaneously banning municipal wifi via bribery/lobbying
* Filtering of the service/gig economy through unelected referees like Yelp and ad/payment processors like Google/PayPal being able to starve income streams arbitrarily
* Monopolization of almost all publishing/broadcasting, starting with the AOL-Time Warner merger, creeping slowly through canned radio/the loss of DJs/nearly all radio subsidiaries being owned by a single broadcaster like Cumulous, while simultaneously eliminating most independent newspaper journalism by consolidating papers under umbrellas like News Corp/Fox, and culminating with expensive a la carte streaming services grabbing any remaining eyeballs so that travesties like Sesame Street moving from PBS to HBO Max are unsurprising anymore
* Monopolization of almost all online commerce under single entities like Amazon so that if products aren’t blessed by a prime designation, sales fall by orders of magnitude, which led us to:
* Wall street taking priority over main street, rainmakers picking our elected officials and populism being coopted by Stockholm syndrome so the masses clamor for it
I added that last one to illustrate why the loss of the free and open internet can be detrimental to society.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of which are funded by showing you ads for things you don't need or selling your personal information.
And regular people would consider that a net gain.
I encountered the internet in about 1985, while I was working for Olivetti, who had a batch feed from the UK AT&T headquarters, across the Thames. I connected from home in my spare time via a UK geek forum called CIX. I connected using a 1,400 baud acoustic coupler (they still have some in museums). It was necessarily text-only, and was populated mainly by programmers (back then we didn't call ourselves "systems engineers"), pilots, D&D enthusiasts, and a mishmash of non-normies, e.g. furries, whom appreciated anonymity.
I could have used it to send email to relatives, but my relatives didn't have a connection. There were no browsers - there was gopher. It was largely person-to-person; I got involved in Usenet, which used servers, but importantly they were highly distributed, and mostly run from bedrooms. When browsers finally arrived there was no tag. The tag, combined with the ending of the ban on commercial use of the network, changed everything. Spam arrived, and never went away. Now most traffic is to or from a server (back in the day we called them "mainframes", and they were huge, and incredibly expensive to buy and run). Nobody put a mainframe on the internet, because you'd never recoup the outlay.
I can certainly see how the internet conferred great benefits; here I sit, after all, posting a message to a website called Hacker News. It has brought democratisation, in the sense that you no longer have to belong to a clique of tech nerds to use it.
But widespread network abuse has brought a wave of balkanisation that is still growing; that threatens the very principles on which the internet was built (anyone can communicate with anyone, no "special" hosts, etc.)
I don't really see the benefits of being able to order stuff from a website and have it delivered to your door; sure, it's quicker than sending a messenger-boy to the merchant, but that quickness is just an encouragement to impulsive purchases, which is really just a benefit to the merchant. (Of course, only today I took delivery of an online order). For most needs, it not unreasonable to take your time or plan ahead.
With respect to the "cars" analogy (which I choose to twist into "trucks"), the weight of traffic has now become just too great. Set aside arguments about global warming; I have a common lung condition (COPD). I notice the stink of a diesel vehicle that drove down the street I'm standing on a full 2 minutes after it passed (i.e. it's an almost continuous problem for me). I am considering moving home (which I don't want to do), but where would I move? Even small villages around here are no more than 500yds from some 6-lane bypass. The top of a mountain in some place like Switzerland?
Full decarbonisation of road traffic is at least 20 years away. And even then, they have to be charged somehow - um, power stations also run on carbon. Fusion is still at least 2 decades away.
OK, so with much fewer cars and trucks, we'd have to find another way to move stuff around; gee-gees seems a solution. Of course horses belch methane and cover the roads in shit; but at least you can compost the shit, to get "good stuff". And we'd need lots more of them than we needed in 1900; there are a lot more people.
I part-own a car, with my wife; I hardly ever drive, I'm a cyclist. I don't travel much. Being much more local - shop locally, live near your work, that kind of thing - might help a bit. But really I don't have solutions to either the internet's problems or the traffic problems. Having less people is really my best shot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Internet is not as bad as cars. That's harsh! Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative. The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took…
> On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative. Honestly there's no way this is true. How many people would die if they couldn't use an ambulance? How many people are surviving on goods shipped to them via trucks? Of course things can be improved, but there's no way the automobile was a net negative on humanity.
Also, our shipping system is backboned by freight rail and ocean shipping, not trucks. In particular, the US has a really robust freight rail system for moving massive amounts of goods across the country.
I find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased communication, allowed peopl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Internet is not as bad as cars. That's harsh! Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative. The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took…
> On balance, cars [...] has been a huge negative. That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Cars have had a huge impact on mobility and availability of goods. It's easy to just see the downsides since all those benefits can be taken for granted nowadays, especially when living in a city where cars are less important for personal use.