Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#301

Post by wolco » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

dkonofalski wrote: post #270

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been a science and technology enthusiast all of my life. I started running my own BBS over 30 years ago on a Commodore64. To say that I am passionate would be an understatement. Alas, lately I am becoming a Luddite. Feature creep is the enemy. I don't want or need an 'info-tainment' screen in my vehicle. I refuse to join the Apple or Google walled gardens. The warnings from Science Fiction have been ignored, a…

>The internet has been weaponized. Ugh... I can't believe that I'm saying this but... I agree with you, wholeheartedly. I am about as nerdy as you can get and a huge tech enthusiast and I'm just starting to hate the internet outside of a few sites that I visit to stay "in the know". I feel like every day I'm learning less and less valuable information and more and more pop culture, meme-ified information just because…

Where do you visit? From the darknet to using translation software to read what is going on around the world the internet... to checking out random pastebins. There is a lot of interesting stuff...just not on facebook/twitter.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

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Post by ThomPete » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #111

ThomPete wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Created jobs, increased global trade, allowed for people to teach themselves, new types of products available, higher awareness about what is going on around you, technology share, open source, free products etc.

OK. Except for possibly "created jobs", it's not obvious to me most of those things lead to "lifting so many people out of poverty." (For instance, I suspect very strongly that "new types of products available" has nothing to do with lifting people out of poverty). I am gonna want some analysis based on actual numbers of some kind that shows the internet did those things, and it lifted so many people out of poverty.…

The invention of how to create fire or the wheel also created a bunch of jobs but also allow warmongers and thieves and murdering pyros to do their evil deeds.

Every innovation has consequences short and long term.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

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Post by wolco » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

y4mi wrote: post #227

lmpostor wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the obliteration of producers in favor of consumers More consumers begets more producers. I would assert you have better odds of producing in a wide variety of areas.

No, it does not. everyone is just following the most popular producers and the rest are basically irrelevant. Just look at the follower counts and how it drops off on any of the popular sites such as YouTube, twitch, patreon etc We got more consumers than ever, but they're all following the same people, centralizing it even more

The newer people who joined the internet late are on a handful of sites they see as safe. They came from the mobile phone era and they include grandma and your ex-school teacher. The people who were here before joined them because that's where the action was happening.

Google decided to go with the masses and dumb down the results to only a handful.

Offtopic: The only day I tried a specific search with quotes in duckduckgo and google. Only duckduckgo had it. Makes me wonder what I've been missing using google.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

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Post by wolco » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

y4mi wrote: post #269

spunker540 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct-to-consumer businesses have taken off due to the internet. It’s never been easier to start a sock company or glasses company etc. Historically you had to get in to the big box retailers to sell anything non-local but the internet has flipped that on its head. Even big platforms like eBay and Shopify (and even Amazon) are offering small businesses and individuals way more opportunities to sell than they would h…

And yet all your local retailers are closing down while Amazon gets bigger every year. It applies basically everywhere. while you're correct that its easy to get started on Amazon, it's just as easy to get marginalized there. There a tons of reports from sellers which got ruined by Amazon undercutting them after they've pioneered the market for example. The internet enables centralization like never before as everyon…

Shopify is pretty big too these days outside of the amazon world.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#305

Post by senderista » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote: post #267

efdee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been thinking about this even more recently, specifically in the context of online portals for Flash content (games, movies, web comics etc). My conclusion is that there has been a loss, and it's largely related to reason for creation. Everything is now so product and marketing focused that creation for creation's sake makes the end result different. E.g. if you were to search "pug lovers" two decades ago, you m…

Try “pug lovers” with Safe Search turned off.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

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Post by rabidrat » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #97

The internet never "went wrong". Nor did it go right. If we want to talk about the internet going wrong, we can talk about running out of IPV4 addresses, the garbage that DNS/BGP can be. The insecureness of SMTP etc. Yet from a technical standpoint, it has gotten amazing. There was a time https/ssl was not a thing, when everyone shuffled data via FTP, when telnet ruled, when NFS was world rw and rlogin/rhost was the…

In the early/mid 90s, there was a big political fight over whether commerce should be allowed over the internet. On 'our' side (geeks, academics, netizens), we believed that commercialization of the internet would lead to its downfall. All of the technical things you mentioned would likely have happened without commercialization, and most if not all of the problems you mention are either created or exacerbated by this commercialization. I think the OP's analysis that the first 25 years were great, and the second 25 years it started to go off the rails, completely coincides with what we argued back then. Unfortunately the cat is out of the barn and there's no way to right the internet without going back in time.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

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Post by wolco » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

manthedudeguy wrote: post #278

malvosenior wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"There's no way". What a compelling argument. There's "no way" that 60 million people would have died in the 20th century if there was no such thing as an ambulance. I'm positive we would have invented a workable replacement.

Shipment of food / water / medicine might.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

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Post by NateEag » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 7:17 PM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #265

adim86 wrote: post #103

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…

And yet, can you blame him for the negative tone? I'm sure he and his collaborators back then had much higher hopes. And indeed, until the mid-late 90s it seemed like we were getting that open internet. The internet has fostered an epistemological crisis that has recently led to the rise of tyrants in the US and elsewhere. I'd be disappointed too.

The US has a narcissistic jerk for a president, but he's not a tyrant.

Wanting to be something does not automatically make you that thing.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

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Post by vasilipupkin » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

vasilipupkin wrote: post #159

JohnFen wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would also agree the internet has been a huge net positive. I thought that not terribly long ago. I have to admit, though, that with every passing day I become less sure that it's really a net positive.

Of course, it is. Put it this way, there is absolutely zero evidence that it’s not net positive.

those who downvoted me, I am curious what evidence you have that it's not net positive. I've never seen any such evidence, only a list of problems, which of course exist with any human endevour.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#310

Post by spc476 » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

reyqn wrote: post #199

ArtDev wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned cars, which is good comparison. Obviously, cars are essential. But here is short a list of completely unnecessary issues brought on by greed and industry: * The health and societal cost of leaded gasoline and the industry resistance to transitioning to unleaded. * The Automobile industry purchase and subsequent removal of train and light rail tracks in the United States. * The Automobile industry resist…

He mentioned car, which is an awful comparison. Cars should never have been invented and they are the worst thing that happened to humanity. Just imagine how much money has been wasted into cars, and roads, when any other mean of transportation would have been more efficient.

But what do we do with all this horseshit?

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...