Today's web is the opposite of what early Internet utopians had in mind. Now the situation is somewhat similar to climate change: even committed activists can no longer turn the tide for the better.
Today's web is the opposite of what early Internet utopians had in mind. Now the situation is somewhat similar to climate change: even committed activists can no longer turn the tide for the better.
For me anyway, the modern web feels like the realization of those early internet pioneering ideas. I run my own personal site, with a nice open source google photos replacement, hosting my own VDI, streaming services, you name it. It’s all running on a pile of discarded speak and spell’s in my basement (a joke but only barely, this junk will run on anything that can host a container). It’s all possible thanks to the open source shoulders of giants I’m standing on and in spite of my lack of coding experience (I’m dev/ops). The fact that I run more infrastructure than my first few jobs combined, as one hobbyist, kinda blows my formerly teenage brain.
It’s still out there, just so long as you are willing to DIY. I am holding great hope for the fediverse, although I’ve been getting used to disappointment lately.
That's the spirit. I hope this did not discouraged you in any way. This post was never intended to bring you down, but rather to raise some awareness to how beautiful the internet could be...Yes, I'm making this up. Tbh it was just a literal showerthought - I did not think this would discouraged anyone. I'm very sorry!
No worries bud, I get the feeling and it’s completely understandable when looking at the current landscape. It’s been an amazingly shitty run of luck for me lately so I’m clinging to hope.
This is why I like shower thoughts, makes for great conversation :)
I don't ever see a server like that standing up to popularity.
In early days, you could maybe get 100 people interested in your site, and that was really cool - it might mean you have to get a second spare computer to load balance. But now, you go beyond 30 people interested, and you'll have an army of bots scraping the site, people re-hosting anything interesting you made (animations, videos) on YouTube and TikTok so there's no reason to go to you, and someone deciding to DDOS you for the hell of it.
I’m not interested in traffic. I’m literally a bored old dude who plays with junk. The only purpose for the site is me to play but I post for fun in case anyone stumbles across it. I’m delisted from everything.
Back in the 1990’s as a teenager I loved my little part of the webrings of personal, pointless sites full of random crap. I’d check in on friends on their personal sites and geocities pages that overused the blink tag and animated gifs. That’s the classic internet that I’m talking about, and I fully embrace it on my little pile of shit. But point taken so link removed just to be safe.
That's the spirit! One of the great things about the Internet is we can build our own alternatives, like with Lemmy and DIY servers. My friends and I have our own little Internet ecosystem. Outside of some Lemmy time, my personal Internet usage is largely served by our arrangement.
What do you use as a Google Photos replacement?
There’s a few out there that are pretty decent. I actually use two at the moment but will consolidate eventually.
Been using Librephotos for a while now: https://docs.librephotos.com - tried a few but landed on this one not for any real technical reasons, I just like the interface and it’s easy manage.
I also use https://immich.app - I started using it as a simple way to backup my families phone photos but it’s on such a furious development pace that I’m pretty sure it’s going to replace librephotos for me as well someday.
Immich is good alternative
It was discussed here recently.
I imagine you weren't old enough to remember the early days of the Internet and the hopes we had. Maybe I'm wrong.
I’m old enough. First had internet in 1994, made my first website in 1996. Back then everything was DiY, and most regular people didn’t really see the use in it until AOL convinced them by giving them email and easy-to-access yellow-pages like thing (which was AOL’s website bundled with a browser they could install without knowing anything technical). At the time, computers were sold in furniture stores along with entertainment centres.
I vividly remember explaining to multiple clients in the early aughts that AOL wasn’t the actual internet. They couldn’t find their new website because they had no idea anything outside aol.com existed, and they were entering their web address in AOL’s site search.
I remember the hopes very clearly. I remember before that when BASIC was fun and magical.
I gotta agree – this is the natural culmination of those hopes, if not actually better. ISPs are comparatively cheap, everyone can access most sites for free and with zero technical expertise, and anyone can say anything they like on one site or another. In the beginning, it really seemed that it would be very expensive and not very accessible. Those are massive hurdles that I don’t feel get enough credit in these conversations. I’m typing this on a small computer in my hand, ffs.
If you didn’t watch all that happen from the inside (I’ve been a software and firmware developer since the mid 90s and a user experience designer since 2002, and began fucking about with programming and hardware in the mid 80s), I can totally see how many people are more cynical about expectation/reality. From the relative outside, the internet seemed to pop into existence like magic in only a few years – and it really did seem like magic, with early-adoption consumers rightly believing it could change the world.
I think the bigger issue is that knowing what all humans are thinking is not as fun as we thought it would be.
i remember growing up I'd literally get a buzz off a good thread or from reeling off a good post. it felt so incredible being able to communicate with people across the world and be taken seriously, evaluated on the merits of my words rather than dismissed due to age or race or anything. and most of all, it felt like this special secret between you and other dorks. now everyone has phones in their pocket. going on twitter is like going to mcdonals.
Well, at least we have Lemmy.
I dismiss this comment because your age and race are ambiguous and everything else! /S
Seriously though I kind of feel like Lemmy has at least some of that nostalgic feeling. Surfing through instances, finding that one semi-active obscure interest community you fit right in with. It's definitely not the same but nothing stays the same.
Smaller communties vibes.
The worst comment section of all belongs to Instagram. Absolute cesspool full of the most moronic people i've ever witnessed. Smart phones killed the internet. We need something that isn't THE internet, and is only accessible if you have the patience and knowledge to connect to it.
Knowledge gating was the reason the internet was great to begin with, only more educated people knew or cared about it, and the quality of discussion was better
*glowing on Twitter like a fly to a zapperX
I imagine you're probably talking more about content, but you've uncovered a pet peeve of mine having more to do with the structure of web pages.
The original vision of html was to have this beautiful format that flows text and graphics elegantly over whatever space you give it. I remember thinking this is great! One day we will have pocket-sized displays and the web is already future-proofed to work seamlessly in that world.
Then fast-forward to smart phones. By now, web pages were so rigidly formatted that they had to design special mobile versions of every site.
For a laugh, view the page source and scroll down.
well, at its heart, the 'www' was supposed to be a bunch of documents linked to each other contextually... in a similar vein Wikipedia handles things
you ever try and use the web without images? genX remembers.
Yes, I'm mainly concerned with the content. HTML certainly gives you all the possibilities, but it has ultimately led to boring but easy-to-use and correspondingly restictive UIs. I think anyone who wants to reach a lot of people today will do so via social media (original Myspace unfortunately didn't work out, tho).
actually made my own site https://sandwich.sh/ you can do quite a lot with just html, I just don't know what. the archive section is html generated with a bash script. sending it here because I think it's cool
One of the early utopias was that people would no longer debate about things because the internet would bring people together and provide them with information about anything and everything… well then algorithms and social media happened, and now we’re stuck with echo chambers of anti-vaxxers and flat earthers.
Other than that, it’s been nice in many ways nobody could have anticipated back then.
Social media empowered narcissistic self-publication, which is one of the main things that ruined the Internet.
The problem is that the subject of discussions was moved from objective topics to the self. Every topic being discussed is now tainted with the insertion of the self as part of the topic, for the purpose of garnering attention to the self. Instead of the topic being discussed, now it's "Look at what I'm talking about, isn't this interesting what I'm telling you?"
Facebook and Xitter are very user centric platforms where you care about the person more than the topic. Meanwhile, in (formerly) Reddit and (currently) Lemmy I rarely even look at the usernames. I care about the topic, and that’s why I’m here in this thread.
I think the Internet really did make people more knowledgeable overall, but my personal theory is that, as a collective, we are in the area of knowing that dunning-Kruger effect takes place. With our current collective intelligence machines really crystallizing that to me, where if ask an LLM something it doesn't know, it will act like the average person on the internet and make shit up and assume it close enough.
The information age really speaks to the idea that information is not knowledge, but knowledge can be formed from information. I think the next major revolution and why social media algorithms, AI, data science, etc are so hot is because they are attempts to enter the knowledge age. To take all of this access to information and truly learn something from it, at the same scale.
Well said. In many cases we’re riding the highest peak of the DK-curve, and you can tell by the massive aura of confidence radiating from some comments.
Reading the Covid discussions was absolutely wild. Suddenly we got all these people who seemed to know things about epidemiology, virology, biochemistry, statistics and what not. Plenty of confidence, little bit of information, but hardly any knowledge, let alone humility.
But you could actually learn and grow via the internet then. Information was free, available, and tools actually helped you find it.
I think that is still true. It isn't that hard to immerse yourself in the free web. There is a ton of high quality and user-friendly FOSS software these days, much more than in the old days. I actually think we are living in a golden age of FOSS software right now. Other than games, I don't have much need for commercial software anymore.
The same is true of information. There is a spectacular amount of free information available online now compared to 30 years ago. You can leaen to fix damn near anything nowadays just by watching free YouTube videos. Not to mention high quality, well-produced free videos, free podcasts, free databases and reference materials, journalism, etc. about any subject you can think from history to computer science, math, biology, literature... the list is endless. It wasn't like that 30 years ago, that's for sure.
Even on the commercial side, $15 a month for my whole family to access almost any music, anywhere, anytime? Shit, I used to pay $15 for one CD and the only way to get music on the internet was to pirate it! Cheap, high quality, comprehensive music catalogs availabe everywhere at the touch of a button is what we used to dream about and now it is a reality. And video? I remember the first video I ever watched on the internet. It was a tiny, grainy, 20 second video of a Shuttle launch being streamed over the internet... and we sat in awe with our mouths hanging open watching it over and over, lol.
That isn't to say that the internet is perfect. The tracking nowadays really is horrendous. But, damn, it is much better now compared to the old days in terms of content.
i dont understand this at all.
theres nothing stopping me from building stuff for the web. dude, i run a social media server named moist
if your complaint is that 'users are hard to wrangle away from corporations', well, that has less to do with the internet and more to do with lazy/ignorant people.
i think the fact they use every psychology trick to hook and deceive them has some significant impact in this.
Yeah exactly, let's not wholly blame the victim (humanity) here, that shit's engineered to be addictive.
Please don't get me wrong: I have the greatest respect for all those who try against all odds. I just think that the idea of the Internet utopians was that the Internet would promote enlightenment, understanding and education. I simply have the impression that the opposite has generally happened.
It's not perfect, by any means, but it's definitely having a net positive effect. Traditionally, the right has sustained themselves by getting the next generation "on their side" through various tactics such as messing with education and such. It worked pre-internet because small towns were somewhat isolated and the flow of information easier to control.
Gen Z, the first generation to grow up entirely online, has proven they aren't buying their shit this time around and I'd argue it's because of the Internet and all the information they can access regardless of if they're in some podunk town in bumfuck nowhere with like 300 people or a major city with millions
I know I thought that...but I was wrong.
There are these tiny villages in Africa, where people take laptops or tablets and a huge stash of DVDs, and often there isn't even a roof just like 4 sticks poking up from the ground, maybe a tarp above it or possibly not even that. People come from hundreds of miles away, even walking, and they can watch videos from literal Harvard/Yale/etc. professors on whatever subject - engineering, lessions on how to speak English, biology, physics, etc. The barriers for people who truly WANT knowledge are pretty much entirely gone now, world-wide.
Which lasted it seems for about a minute, while instead now, misinformation flows even more freely. Those setups that I mentioned above took DECADES to create, leveraging the technology available at each timepoint, and more than a little prep work to discuss with the recipient culture to let them know it is an option. And even then, situations such as Boco Haram continue to threaten their continuation, bc girls (& women) learning things is considered bad in that case.
Thus, I learned that ignorance is extremely easy to cure (barely an inconvenience, if you know that famous YouTuber's catchphrase;-). Entire courses are available freely online, such as the Crash Course series...of series (US History, World History, literature, biology, chemistry, physics, check it out!), and nowadays the most dumbed-down explanations of extremely complex topics as you could ever want, see e.g. this video.
The barriers nowadays to knowing things are "different". See e.g. the movie WALL-E, where the humans all just gave up and sat down... but then were never able to get back up again.
The same was said about books, but have you ever read a dollar-store romance novel? Or newspapers, but there's also The Sun.
Everything that can be used for good, will also be used for evil. It's all there, but you have to wash out the shit yourself. That's what seperates the chaff from the wheat, so to speak.
The US is using 40% renewables, China a bit more, many smaller countries are testing 100% renewable days, ozone was mostly fixed iirc. Progress may be slow, but to say it's not happening is factually very false.
40% renewables for electricity.
Not to make perfect be the enemy of good, or to poo-poo that progress…but electricity is only 1/3 of GHG. And demand for electricity goes up with the move towards EVs, so while we take the energy out of the “transportation” column, we put it into the “electricity” column, at a 60% discount.
Thats…good. It’s progress. But it’s honestly such a baby-step in the grand scheme. We should be using green energy and EVs exclusively by now, and significantly cut down on meat and dairy consumption. We should be a lot further by now.
I blame Nader, the hanging chads, and Bush v. Gore…but mostly Nader. Had he not run in 2000, the majority of his voters, particularly in FL, would’ve voted for Gore. Nader got 97,488 votes in FL. Bush won by five hundred and thirty seven votes. That…the spoiler effect that resulted from an idealist candidate (and the shortfalls of FPTP, not to mention electoral college), is making perfect the enemy of good.
The same could also have been said of NH, by the way. 22,198 votes for Nader, Bush won by a margin of a third of that. Either FLs 25 or NHs 4 EC votes would’ve flipped the election and the course of history.
All probably true, but all the technological progress has done little to change the fact that we continue to destroy the world we live in with our eyes open. This is my point: technology is generally not used for the good of humanity, but for monetary gain. If we wanted to, the world could be a better place, but we don't use our resources that way - they are not managed by the general public, but by people who don't have the good of humanity in mind. I think the Internet is a good example of this: Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the www protocol, didn't earn a cent from a patent or something like that - he was just interested in scientific exchange at the time. In my opinion, that's a true hero, not Steve Jobs (he was a great businessman tho).
This is a very pessimistic view, and with a fallacy. The fallacy is to consider that greed will always win and yadayada. The fact is that it is a product of liberalism, it makes states resign from doing things to the profit of companies. Even in liberal countries liberalism is being contested though, and power countries are opposing it (for better or worse).
Internet is still there. And in some places, it won true victories against liberalism, like in Europe where net neutrality did won some battles and big Internet companies are being contained, if only to fight US espionage.
My opinion is that Internet companies are incapable of sustaining their tools, because they're too greedy to provide a good service long term. Free solutions will appear, and ultimately they will prevail. Lemmy is a example that is at a baby stage yet. Most of the innovation and infrastructure relies on free softwares today. It's just in the background. Computer and Internet technologies are still in their infancy, it will evolve.
I’ve been saying this for years. The internet was better when you had to be a little bit more intelligent than the average person to access it.
Back when you needed knowledge of computers and software, modems, anti-virus, hardware etc, it kind of meant you needed a brain in your head to gain access. I’m not saying that made the internet an overtly-intelligent space, but it was more intelligent and measured than it is today.
As soon a smart phones and data plans entered the game, you could be as dumb as a second coat of paint and gain access with a single button. That opened the flood gates for the stupid. Now the stupid are here en mass and internet is just a dumpster fire full of retards.
Your post gives vibes of elitism... I don't think your intelligence argument holds any water. The Internet of the late 90s/early 00s was easy to access.
The difference from before is the advent of social media. The stupid have been on the Internet for a very long time now. But you would't hear them much.
I know we had bulletin boards before, but social media, particularly Facebook IMO, allowed more people to express themselves and gave everyone an audience.
It was meant for porn en now the biggest part of it is porn. I'd say a success.
As far a I know the porn industry has actualy driven innovation in various web-technologies including streaming, e-commerce, VR...and now probably AI, I guess.
We should put porn on climate change
The Internet is really really great 🎶
I've got a fast connection so I don't have to wait 🎶
I don't think the biggest part of the internet is porn. There's a LOT of porn and a few really big porn sites, but I don't think they hold a candle to social media and shopping.
I found this link that has porn being #s 14 and 15. It was actually hard to find recent data that included porn at all. I think some counters were too embarrassed to admit porn existed.
Those are just the biggest sites. Also 12 is a porn site. But it doesn't say anything about the size of the total porn on the web. Like, amount of sites and content. Estimates are roughly 80% of the entire internet is porn.
I feel like it's still mostly fine for individuals who are savvy and know where to look. In summation, though, I think the abundance of mis/disinformation spammed on social media combined with a lack of media literacy is socially corrosive.
Social media is a huge part of the problem..
Stop using social media and 90% of the internets issues stop affecting you.
Search is still fucked tho
Hopefully we can use AI to filter out AI articles at some point in the future lol. Or at least find better sources using Search.
Content-wise, I think we aren't in a bad spot. There's a tonne of information available online that wasn't accessible before. Wikipedia is a pretty great example, but the millions of howtos scattered across Instructables, YouTube, and other sites are also pretty amazing. Yeah, there's monetization and SEO crap, but I think (hope?) it's a net positive.
Application-wise, I think we're also in an okay spot. Almost anyone can publish videos, text, and opinions on corporate publishing tools. If you want, you can spin up a private server with just a credit card, and do whatever you want with incoming traffic. Web browsers aren't quite Neuromancer/Shadowrun decks, but they do allow anytime to run untrusted code safely on a local machine.
Did all this free information bring us together? No. Not yet, at least. But I think that's what the early tech utopians got wrong. We aren't insufferable jerks because we don't know any better, we're insufferable jerks because we know better and choose to do it anyway.
That's true, of course. I didn't mean to say that the internet doesn't also have very positive effects. It's a blessing that knowledge is now much more accessible. But on the whole, it seems to me that people don't really make use of it - quite the opposite. It seems to me that many more people are now confusing their uninformed opinions with scientific knowledge. There is no other way I can explain this strange hostility towards science that a not inconsiderable number of people are displaying - this is a phenomenon of the recent (internet) past, or is my impression wrong?
It seems to me that many more people are now confusing their uninformed opinions with scientific knowledge. There is no other way I can explain this strange hostility towards science that a not inconsiderable number of people are displaying - this is a phenomenon of the recent (internet) past, or is my impression wrong?
I don't know. My bias is that human nature is constant over time. As such, I think we're using the Internet the way we used other resources in the past: cherry picking statements that confirm our existing beliefs, and dismissing statements that challenge them.
I grew up at the end of the Cold War. Without the Internet, people were able to convince themselves climate change wasn't a thing, planetary annihilation with nuclear weapons was an ok risk, and smoking was yucky but got an unfair bad rap.
The Internet hasn't caused people to be idiots, it's just given idiots another platform.
but I think (hope?) it’s a net positive.
Definitely a net positive. My friend and I were discussing something similar the other day. He rides motos and I ride downhill and we both learned via youtube. What used to be restricted to people who could afford private lessons or coaching are now available to people even in third world countries. It's opened up a lot of new horizons for people.
That's the unsung hero of all this. A friend and I were able to build RC planes with the help of a couple of YouTube videos and a printer. It would have been possible before the Internet, but it would have been harder and more expensive.
"The trick is not to ignore the mainstream but to selectively raid it for things we can use." -Mike Gunderloy, back in the 80s.
It's almost as if something gets infinitely worse once the masses adopt it
Normies ruined the internet
I recently played the video game Hypnospace Outlaw and one of the things that stuck out was there was a set of five "subverses" of sorts about nerd culture, and the parent company that runs Hypnospace wanted to get more of that sweet ad money, so they consolidated them into one space, and put it on a slower server. And when you visited these pages, they were noticeably slower compared to the new "sports" space which they did to chase that sweet new customer retention money, all in the leadup of, well, see for yourself (major spoilers).
What do you want? Do you want the internet to be for academics again? Because we're past that. The moment you have to put a monetary value to something, it becomes about seeking monetary value either to 1) keep it going or 2) keep it going and make a bit of cream on top. This is how the world works now. I hate it, but i'm not pining for the old days either. The cycle continues from Geocities, to Social Media, to the Fediverse, and probably the Metaverse after that.
Nice try Zuck
theoldnet.com ftw
Well that was a silly 10 minutes lol
Thanks so much for that link! I have the impression that the point has been reached where there are enough users to abandon all open standards, which were certainly necessary to achieve a relevant user count in the first place. Now the so-called platform economy has become a reality. That was inevitable, I guess. All major social networks have been working towards this for a long time.
Watch me.
It's exactly the way David Bowie described how it would be back in the 90's, though.
Is this a joke I don't get or is there any source of what did David Bowie said ? (o･ω･o)
Here you go. Interview he did in 1999. I can't find it right now, but this isn't the full interview; he goes into a bit more detail after this and mentions the bad things it would bring that we are starting to become more well known and widespread.
What do you mean by "turn the tide for the better"?
Unshitify it.
Exactly.
I didn't ask you and you didn't explain shit.
For example, efforts in the areas of data protection, freedom of information, combating misinformation, improving working conditions in the online sector, creating fair digital remuneration models and so on and so forth. Pretty much things that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, NOYB and many other such organizations are committed to.
The EFF is great. Perhaps going a little bit off-topic, the EFF creates plug-ins, but I wonder why the EFF doesn't create a privacy-based ecosystem similar to Proton?
A VPN provider or a system like Proton with encrypted mail, VPN, etc. is entirely based on trust and yet we trust our privacy almost entirely to for-profit corporations, which are inherently untrustworthy over the long haul. It would be cool if a non-profit with a long history of defending privacy, like the EFF, developed such a system. Mozilla seems to be moving in that direction, but it seems like a good fit for EFF too.
Wow that a whole lot of several different things jammed together. This thesis would make a good article or book but as a shower thought it doesn’t really stand on its own.
Sorry, it was really just a shower thought. I was thinking of two things: 1. the hopes that were placed in the Internet have, in my opinion, not materialized at all. Of course, there are many positive effects, but on the whole, the Internet has by no means lived up to its potential. 2. we are now faced with a situation where large corporations control most of the internet used by the general public. This brings with it responsibilities that I don't believe these corporations are living up to in any way. Hence the analogy with climate change: a change for the better would probably be possible, but there can be no solution as long as those who are largely responsible do not accept their responsibility. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this will never happen.
I see it a little differently. I think the internet has lived up to and exceeded its potential. It’s done things we couldn’t even have thought of back in the beginning. Or course as it grew, it became no longer just the playground of academics, scientists, and creatives. It now has huge commercial regions and is as mainstream as any other medium. It’s no longer solely a cool place where cool people are doing cool things. It is now also playing a role much like television for a bunch of dumb masses to be shown commercials by corporations.
What’s worse is the unimagined downsides. Election misinformation. Hate group echo chambers. Terrorists using it to organize. We failed to imagine these things back in 1992 but maybe that really is just a failure of our imaginations, not the internet. I remember the heady dreams of democratization and universal access to quality information. It was all pretty naive. There were people who imagined television technology would be used for in-home education, too.
But the bad stuff doesn’t erase the cool stuff. It is still enabling creativity and science, arguably moreso than the halcyon days of HTML 1.0. Did any of us ever imagine in 1992 that thousands of scientists could use images from hundreds of locations around the world to construct an image of a black hole, sharing data, tools, code, and ultimately the image itself over the internet? It’s just wild. Remote surgeries, AI, self driving cars, tracker tags, home automation… it all runs on the internet. A lot of it is scary, but it’s also fascinating and far beyond what we imagined 30 years ago.
We used to talk about video conferencing like some far off future. Just because now we see it as mundane doesn’t mean the internet didn’t deliver on its potential. It delivered, and more. We just forget how cool a lot of it is, we were dumb to think it would be nothing but roses, and it’s changing life so much that it’s getting a bit scary.
But didn’t live up to its potential? Nah.
So I don’t really even see your posited problem, and this makes it hard for me to understand your point about a solution. I guess “corporations bad and no one will fix it,” is the bottom line? Well, that has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with capitalism. It’s the worst system there is, except all the others that have ever been tried. If you have any new ideas, we could sure use them.