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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#11
post #8
post #4

Actually, the web began dying in the late 90s.

Hard to tell if you’re joking. If you do actually believe this, I assume you also believe that e-commerce broke everything?

No, I'm not joking.

It's not so much e-commerce that broke everything. Although there were many who did argue that.

For me, it's been the shift from self-published (and indeed, self-hosted) to Google, Facebook and cloud services. And the tide turned in the late 90s.

Edit: When I first got online, it was AOL, CompuServe, EcoNet and The Well. I was on all of them except AOL. And then we had Usenet and websites. And networks of websites. The prospect of citizen-based journalism. But now we're back to something a lot more like AOL.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#12
post #7

>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.

Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.

But what makes wireless telecom giants any better than ISPs?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#13
post #7

>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.

Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.

Could you elaborate on this?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#15
Personally, I think both Google and Facebook are only a few short years away from imploding.

Why?

The internal documents are slowly getting leaked, which will soon make open communication inside these organizations quite precarious [1]. Not merely ironic, but also poetically just, considering that these two companies have done exactly that to nearly the entire human population.

Already, the only folks who are left at these companies are politically correct drones (PCDs) who cannot say anything which doesn't toe the party line. Soon the hiring process will start optimizing for PCDs, and then you will have the usual churn, and finally everyone will be PCDs who start talking, acting and thinking like each other.

[1] You can ask James Damore. And on a somewhat hilarious side note. I once knew an ex-Facebook employee who claimed that Facebook was "completely open and transparent" with its employees. His tenure actually coincided with a lot of scandals, such as the friendly fraud case. He probably wishes he never used those words, because by definition he has basically acknowledged he knew about these scandals. I am not in touch with him anymore, so I don't really know how he feels about this. :-)

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#16
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to tell if you’re joking. If you do actually believe this, I assume you also believe that e-commerce broke everything?

No, I'm not joking. It's not so much e-commerce that broke everything. Although there were many who did argue that. For me, it's been the shift from self-published (and indeed, self-hosted) to Google, Facebook and cloud services. And the tide turned in the late 90s. Edit: When I first got online, it was AOL, CompuServe, EcoNet and The Well. I was on all of them except AOL. And then we had Usenet and websites. And net…

or something a lot like Prodigy...

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not joking. It's not so much e-commerce that broke everything. Although there were many who did argue that. For me, it's been the shift from self-published (and indeed, self-hosted) to Google, Facebook and cloud services. And the tide turned in the late 90s. Edit: When I first got online, it was AOL, CompuServe, EcoNet and The Well. I was on all of them except AOL. And then we had Usenet and websites. And net…

or something a lot like Prodigy...

Damn, forgot Prodigy.

I was mainly a CompuServe geek.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#19
People used to sit on a couch and watch TV for hours and also spent hours on the old phones talking about the most exciting shade of nail polish. Shopping is also fun.

Now all that activities largely moved to Internet. Thanks to omnipresence of smartphones the hours dedicated to those activities had also increased. Of course share of general Joe Doe's website got smaller as said website does not always cater to few most popular people's activities.

That does not mean that the total amount of Joe Doe's websites decreased. It is growing, just not as fast as the amount of my cat videos.

Sure big companies may try to subvert the Internet but I think that creative type of the populace will always find ways.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naw, with the coming of 5G it will destroy their monopolies on the communication lines which should open the door to more local competition.

But what makes wireless telecom giants any better than ISPs?

I think their point is more competition is better regardless; every one of them will try to find some way to make themselves seem better than the other. Though the problem with that regardless is that from a business perspective, there's a very finite amount of spectrum, and it's being gobbled up exclusively by four (maybe soon to be three with the pending Sprint merger) companies.

From a technical perspective, there's definitely been mixed reactions to the effectiveness of 5G technology. That's another topic in and of itself, though.

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