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30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

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Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#41

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

codegeek wrote: post #24
echelon wrote: post #7

The WWW was pretty great at age 10, but took a wrong turn in its teen years. We now do signal amplification of the worst of humanity. The giants are walled gardens, and in another 10-15 years the "web" will be subsumed by Facebook, and Google's "Cromification/AMPlification" (content lives on their servers and there is no URL bar.) We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty. Now instead of sharing content and…

I would focus on the overall positives at least in this thread. Yes there are lot of valid criticisms but that is more on the companies and not WWW in itself. WWW is Free, Open and you can do anything you want with it even today. You mention personal websites. No one is stopping you from getting a cheap server and setting up your personal website. In fact, I would argue it is has become easier to do that with so many…

UMW in Fredricksburg, Virginia has a program called "Domain of One's Own" where you get set up with a personal site at a domain of your choosing, available to every student and everyone on staff.

https://umw.domains

Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#42

Post by JiNCMG »

struct wrote: post #10

It's great that the web is so durable and long-lived, but I wonder about the health of it - it's got so complicated that we're down to only three implementations (Firefox, Chromium, WebKit), no realistic possibility of a new engine emerging, and essentially one implementation defining the standard. I wonder where we'll be in another 30 years?

It's always like this until the next new thing. The big guys will control everything until something new comes around that they don't want to implement. It will be a bit harder because you have the Web Browser which is a lot flexible than the old AOL Clients. Also WebKit is available publicly for any one to fork and create a new service.

When modems were available for residential use, BBSes were the gateway and slowly were killed by the big guys (AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy) but what these big guys refused to do is work together to allow further communications with people outside of their networks.

It took kids coming out of college and wanting to keep their internet access for email, ftp, talk, usenet, gopher and http. They started to partner with universities and offer TCP/IP (over PPP) access for $20. Local BBS started to open gateways to allow it's users to send/receive SMTP emails. By the time the big guys realized they were at a disadvantage, they started to offer communications between AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, At first charging their users extra fees, some plans made it like SMS and were charging per message. Eventually users where just using their clients to get to the internet and that service dies. Most of those small internet providers were purchased by bigger companies.

What will need to change now to kick the big guys (Verizon, Google, Apple, etc...) in the balls again? The tech is so regulated that I doubt we will see anything new as far and networking. In NYC WiMax was hobbled by the communication companies like Verizon TimeWarner and RCN.

Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#43

Post by echelon »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #40
echelon wrote: post #7

The WWW was pretty great at age 10, but took a wrong turn in its teen years. We now do signal amplification of the worst of humanity. The giants are walled gardens, and in another 10-15 years the "web" will be subsumed by Facebook, and Google's "Cromification/AMPlification" (content lives on their servers and there is no URL bar.) We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty. Now instead of sharing content and…

> We've destroyed much of the quirkiness and novelty. Yawn. People say this over and over again. It hasn't been destroyed. It's just not at the top of your search results. Within the last week, HN's front page had a link to this little gem: http://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/locations.htm ... a catalog of every (?) redwood tree in the British Isles, lovingly maintained and deliciously retro. How can you believe that the q…

While it may not be destroyed, the reward gradients changed.

I'm not imagining a world where technology froze in place, rather a different evolutionary path.

The incentive structures today produce a massive amount of negative externalities that we're nowhere close to addressing.

Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#44

Post by johnwheeler »

If you were around at the beginning of the boom and had an AOL, Juno, or Prodigy account; eventually gave NetZero a try; watched Hackers and even The Net, know what a .nfo file is, marveled at Napster; collected Winamp skins; signed up to have DVDs delivered to your mailbox; and when Internet, Information super-highway, World Wide Web, and cyberspace were used interchangeably, you’re one of the lucky ones. I love the Internet for all it is now, but man do I miss the wonder it instilled in its nascency.

Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#46

Post by adventured »

laurent92 wrote: post #4

I’m more impressed that the first smartphone is only 14 years old and it has changed so much to our lives: - First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal dopamine addiction), - Second, Youtube was the world wild web of all politics and militant movements, - We’re in a third phase wher…

> First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal dopamine addiction),

No, the smartphone did not do that. All it did was amplify some of those aspects of human nature, making them even easier to project; aspects which were already prevalent across essentially all cultures throughout history.

Tabloids, newspapers, magazines, television, radio, photography, automobiles, physical mail, audio recording, the Internet & PCs, books, scrolls, tribal story telling, and on it goes. The smartphone is merely the latest amplifier.

Lifestyle showoff? There has never been a time in which people didn't commonly do that. There will never be a time in which people don't commonly do that. It's a core, fundamental system of human evolution and social structure. It's a competition. Humans never stop competing for survival, competing for position in the pecking order of society, competing to get the best mates, and so on. Very high levels of social superficiality did not begin with the smartphone, it has always been there.

Body photos? Since the first photographs. Drawing & painting eachother before that.

The ancient Romans and Greeks were hyper social, gossiping cats. They could be superficial as all hell. The same was true of the colonial generations in Europe. So were all people throughout all of history and without exception, to the extent they weren't busy trying not to die of deprivation.

The smartphone didn't fundamentally change anything. It amplified, and in some cases simplified, what we were already doing.

Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#47

Post by 14 »

To me the internet means an access to information not seen by previous generations. I’ve learned a lot of backyard mechanics from my dad. But I have since gone on to achieve a lot more in that field by having access to YouTube or other forums where I can find detailed instructions on how to fix things. I think about hacking my Xbox 360 and jailbreaking my first iPhone when I realized the jailbroken phones could video record and stock iPhones could not. I met my first wife online. I was there in the beginning when pictures would slowly load from the top down because speeds were just that slow. The stuff you can do now over the internet is beyond imagination from a couple decades ago.

Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#48

Post by tannhaeuser »

Yeah congrats to TBL and his baby. Actually, I believe the date is slightly off, and it should be August, 6th, according to the fist website [1], and in particular [2] linked from there.

But I've got to ask what has W3C done lately? I mean JavaScript and CSS is not their fault, but looking at W3C's accomplishments, they were busy with XML and WS-* (SOAP), then RDF/Sparql, and whatnot most of the time, creating a cottage industry of "enterprise" standards but completely loosing relevance on the web. Meanwhile, HTML stagnated, and CSS had to become the way overcomplicated beast it is today to make up for HTML's shortcomings, HTML still mostly being the casual academic publishing markup language it always was.

The result is the monopolistic browser landscape we have today and web authoring becoming unapproachable for all but an entrenched profession of "web developers" when the web was primarily a medium for easy self-publishing. Soon, Google implanted itself as the middle man, when getting rid of publishers and closed networks was the whole point of the web in the first place. Meanwhile, W3C continues to take money for driving CSS complexity ad absurdum (though they have talented people on the CSS WG for sure) and drops requirements for at least two interworking implementations for their XML stuff (such as XSLT). Basically, W3C is acting like a self-serving, pay-as-you org for advertising stuff as "standard". W3C's HTML 5 and SVG efforts have effectively stopped about three years ago.

Today, almost nobody is inspired to make websites; even developers flock to github and other centralized services for their stuff.

As much as I believe TBL acted in good faith, I think W3C as a standardization organization failed on all accounts that you could reasonably expect from a standardization effort.

[1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

[2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html

Edit: see also [3] for the proper date

[3]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt

Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#49

Post by input_sh »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31
codegeek wrote: post #22

"What happens in an Internet Minute in 2020, for example: - Zoom hosts 208,333 meetings - There are 404,444 Netflix user streams - YouTube users upload 500 hours of video - Consumers spend $1,000,000 online - 1,388,889 people make video/voice calls" Mind blowing if you think about it. I really want to focus on the positives of WWW in this thread. I, like million others, am making a living out of WWW and that itself i…

I'd be curious to know how many combined page loads there are for PornHub (and cousins) per minute. It's just as much a part of what the web is today as any of the services listed above.

Pornhub is very open about its metrics: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review

Re: 30 years on from introducing the Web to the World

#50

Post by gremloni »

laurent92 wrote: post #4

I’m more impressed that the first smartphone is only 14 years old and it has changed so much to our lives: - First, it developed the usage of superficial socialization (lifestyle show-off, body photos, up to lewd behaviors or prostitution, depression for a lot of people, massive societal dopamine addiction), - Second, Youtube was the world wild web of all politics and militant movements, - We’re in a third phase wher…

I don’t believe democratized prostitution is a negative thing. If anything countries like the US would have far fewer criminals and desperate incels if we just legalized it.
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