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Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

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Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#21

Post by eksemplar »

SilasX wrote: post #17
AVTizzle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain and cryptocurrency comes to mind - especially given HN’s frequent dismissals and distaste of the two.

I see a lot of people making this exact mistake regarding blockchain: >So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? IOW, “It hasn’t displaced some other market already, so it never will.” It’s only a few steps away from “it has the volatility associated with being a small market, so it’s inherently flawed”. With that said, I’m skeptical about whether it wil…

Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist? I have an app that lets me send cash instantly and free to anyone else with the same app. It’s operated by our largest bank, but it works for anyone in my country regardless of what bank they have.

I can also shop instantly all over the world, I do pay a tax to the bank for this, but it’s currently a lot cheaper than paying for most crypto transactions.

I guess with crypto, I would be free of the banking tyranny, but I actually rather like the security that comes with centralized banking.

The internet on the other hand changed the world. It made it possible for me to browse your product catalog, buy and pay for your products, almost instantly, even though you live in another part of the world.

Crypto never really had that, it wanted to uproot existing systems for political reasons, but the technology by itself, has frankly always been somewhat obsolete.

The internet was hard to predict because it was new, a currency isn’t exactly a new thing. Hell, blockchain isn’t even the first attempt at a decentralized currency.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#22

Post by laumars »

zouhair wrote: post #12
scalio wrote: post #6

Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects. > The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony…

Any predictions that pertains to the technological aspect of our lives is utterly futile. Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane. On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn'…

Normally I might agree, but tablets where already being common place in sci-fi (Star Trek TNG, 2001 Space Odyssey, etc) and PDAs were starting to get prototyped in real life around that time too. So we are not talking about technology that was completely alien to mankind in the 90s.

In fact the reason people were predicting great things for future tech and the internet (which the author of this article is arguing against) is because it was technology already emerging - not some imaginary theoretical stuff.

Ok, the pace of change and the specifics (smart phones with high speed internet, eink displays, etc) might still have taken people by surprise, but the rest isn't that shocking. I mean back in the mid 90s I was building 3D websites in VRML and just assumed by the 2010s all sites would have a rich, communal, skeuomorphism interface. Clear I was wrong on some parts (thankfully) but not that far off the mark.

So the signs were already there but the author was too busy trying to imagine those predictions being utilised with then current technology. You could argue that is a failure of imagination on his part but I'm tempted to go further and say it was down right ignorant. He's clearly techy enough to understand the then current tech better than most yet failed to notice the emerging technologies. And he clearly witnessed the evolution of technology for the 10 years leading up to the 90s yet assumed hardware would suddenly just stagnate at that point. That was his biggest mistakes and ultimately why his predictions were so out of sync with what many others had predicted (yhise if whom did see the change happening and the future potential they had).

To be honest though, I do wonder how much of his comments where based on his own comfort zone and not liking a the thought of a digital future so allowed his own prejudices to bias his vision of the future.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#23

Post by GordonS »

eksemplar wrote: post #16
finknotal wrote: post #2

"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure." Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the c…

VR would be my bet. Every time is exit VR I feel like my monitor is limiting. It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.

It feels like decent VR has been 'any time now' away for decades. Is Oculus still the only real attempt at it these days?

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#24

Post by SilasX »

eksemplar wrote: post #21
SilasX wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of people making this exact mistake regarding blockchain: >So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? IOW, “It hasn’t displaced some other market already, so it never will.” It’s only a few steps away from “it has the volatility associated with being a small market, so it’s inherently flawed”. With that said, I’m skeptical about whether it wil…

Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist? I have an app that lets me send cash instantly and free to anyone else with the same app. It’s operated by our largest bank, but it works for anyone in my country regardless of what bank they have. I can also shop instantly all over the world, I do pay a tax to the bank for this, but it’s currently a lot cheaper than paying for most cr…

>Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist?

Of course there are other arguments. I even suggested I agreed with that one. I was just pointing out one kind of fallacy, of using current low adoption as evidence of a fundamental flaw.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#25

Post by hcs »

scalio wrote: post #6

Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects. > The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony…

I feel like he was right about it being worse, but didn't realize there would be so much more of it.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#26

Post by WhiteSource1 »

marvin wrote: post #20
gboudrias wrote: post #3

This is so hilariously, specifically wrong, you'd think someone wrote it now and travelled back in time for giggles. Great find! And I'm amazed they still have the article online, the only one by Clifford Stoll, funnily enough. Still, a good lesson: It remains too easy to miss the forest for the trees. We never wanted salesmen or paper, what we actually wanted were products and information. In other words, it's easy…

Look back at Hacker News in twenty years. You'll see whole threads full of comments that are so specifically wrong it looks like a parody :)

That implies that Hacker News will be around in 20 years. Newsweek will be (in some format or another).

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#27

Post by ianai »

mercer wrote: post #18
lordnacho wrote: post #9

The main thing that he's right about is that it's a mess. There's so much noice and little authority. When I was a kid in the 90s news and information was curated. If you read an opinion in the paper it was some guy who'd been writing for a long time, who'd done the background reading, and who normally presented things in a balanced way, whatever his leaning was. Nowadays you can find just about any extreme view, bad…

This has been on my mind quite often when I use reddit. I grew up on phpBB style forums where every user was immediately identifiable, through avatar, signature etc. And to a lesser degree I find myself developing a kind of 'image' of various HN posters. On reddit this somehow doesn't happen. Every comment stands on its own and half the time what looks like a threaded conversation is various different users replying…

You’re totally right. If it’s an argument then maybe one of the replies convinced the original poster. But some other person may reply to the most authoritative reply and claim superiority and falsehood of that posts authority. And there’s no way to correct it automatically. So all the smart comments wind up fighting the incorrect and an honest third party will likely have gained nothing.

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#28

Post by EGreg »

Although most of what he said has been easily addressed in the last 20 years, one thing lingers. And it’s not because we can’t solve it, but the VC model has prioritized ads instead, and for whatever reason, social networking hasn’t had any good OPEN SOURCE platforms. My guess is because they would have to work across websites, and very few standards too off.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

I have spent the last 7 years and nearly $1 million dollars building such a platform. It’s free and open source but we have yet to make the marketing for it. It needs to be clear how to get started with it, and a community needs to grow. Going to release it later this year. Maybe Nov 5th?

https://qbix.com

Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

#29

Post by notahacker »

zouhair wrote: post #12
scalio wrote: post #6

Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects. > The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony…

Any predictions that pertains to the technological aspect of our lives is utterly futile. Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane. On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn'…

The idea that pocket sized devices which had shrunk and become more popular since the 1980s would shrink further and potentially be consolidated into fewer devices was less a radical idea and more an extrapolation of trends in the 1990s.

An iPhone would have been strikingly impressive in 1995, but few people would have difficulty grasping what it was, or that there might be a demand for it, especially not if they already possessed a Walkman and mobile phone, thought their next camera might be a digital one and had considered buying a PDA

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