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Facebook technically kills the whole internet

37 points by ernestosoo ↗ HN
The Facebook technically kills the whole internet. (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/facebook-is-eating-the-internet/391766/). It tries to copy other startups, so people can stay on its platform and watch more "ads".

Instead of surfing idiosyncratic webpages, flaneur now surfs facebook. It is like going to Paris and one only sees McDonald and Starbucks. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html)

In addition, nowadays, people do not create webpage for fun. They want to commercialize their online presence. Everything, including oneself, is a brand now (http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/50-tips-to-brand-yourself-online/). This leads to the totalitarianism of minimalism (https://www.sitepoint.com/less-minimalist-websites-still-rule/) where they want to people to "see" their webpages "efficiently". People are wearing a mask in and out. There is no authenticity and honesty.

The internet was the place for playfulness and wonder. DeviantArts, Rate Your Music, Geocities were really fun.

Now, the internet is full of BS. Startups are full of BS ("This is a site that spits out whole websites of fake bullshit web companies. Hit "get started" to refresh. http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=243648772317). Reddit is a rare phenomenon because it was founded by Aaron Schwartz and he never got any credit. And I am pretty sure Aaron Schwartz would never go to “Hackathon”, “Entrepreneurial leadership at Stanford”. They are full of BS. No one has a deep passion for truly improving people’s lives. Everything is for efficiency.

Palo Alto becomes a dead place now. There is only one bookstore in Palo Alto area and no students ever visit. Stanford students do not love to learn at all. They are “excellent sheep”.

The dark net is okay and it becomes boring after a while.

16 comments

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marak830
I do not agree. I use the internet quite regularly, and I'm never on Facebook.

Seems pretty alive to me. As for then stifling competition and copying them, it happens in every industry, yeah it's shit, but you just have to compete on value and service.

ernestosoo
Have you seen these websites before? If you know any subculture internet user in 1990's or early 2000's, you should ask them what they think of the internet now! Unless you have the experience, otherwise you can't tell the difference.

http://www.deviantart.com/ http://rateyourmusic.com/list/novocaine69/the_great_obscure_... http://www.novaexpresscafe.com/main.html

Today, my Uber driver was a DJ and he mentioned how stink the internet is. He is still using Usenet now. This is how pathetic internet nowadays.

And Silicon Valley is the least creative place I've lived. It is quite pathetic. It is "creative" through "newspaper" only. You can't argue against their success.

Nothing is more successful than success. You can't argue against success.

marak830
Deviant art I only really started seeing pop up in the last few years, (I guess my styles are changing as I fet older).

I wouldn't know about silicon valley. A)I'm not American so it doesn't really effect me, b)well I guess a summed it up haha.

I socialise with all my mates using voice comms recently, we try out new games and leave messages on steam.

I frequently read new and interesting news and science pieces from places I have never hear of, thanks to Google news and Reddit.

I don't miss the old internet pre Google days, facebook seems like a 900lb gorilla, but aside from auto blocking their tracking buttons, it never effects me.

I do think it can seem depressive though, I do occasionally miss bulletin boards, but then I remember how annoying it was to dial in hahedit: typos, thanks phone

xxtjaxx
Technically what used to be bulletin boards with all their maneurisms and excentrics has now been moved to reddit.

You still have flourish of subtopics and categories and groups you can post to on reddit just like you were able to do on usenet bulletin boards. However for the most of places there the problem of an eternal-september is in constant effect in so far as everyone with an internet connection and an account can post, which makes moderators (unbiased ones especially!) all the more valuable

ry4n413
how high are you right now?
throwaway2016a
Kind of like saying HTTP killed TCP/IP. They exist on different layers of the stack in many ways. Facebook exists because of the Internet and cannot exist without it.
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kyriakos
It doesn't kill the internet - a more accurate description is that it killed a part of the web. For me for example it has killed forums which were abundant before Facebook became popular.
notacoward
I miss forums. You could talk about a subject, and people you don't already know would join in with different opinions - more or less intelligently, more or less civilly, depending on the forum and its moderators. They had sophisticated ways of tracking where you were on each topic or sub-forum and showing you only the new content. There's nothing that checks all of those boxes any more. What forums are left are full of trolls, or they're severely topic-limited, or their interfaces are absolutely unusable. I follow literally hundreds of sites, mostly via RSS, and all of them together yield maybe one comment thread a month worth participating in. So people turn to Facebook, only to find that they can't pierce the walls of their own private echo chamber to get the kind of conversations that used to be everywhere - from Usenet to BBSes to M-Net and its ilk to any number of Invision/vBulletin forums. The OP might be incoherent, but the point that the internet isn't a real communications medium any more has a certain truth to it.
kyriakos
I miss forums too, I used to run two medium sized ones (1million posts+) a decade ago which slowly died out with the explosion of social media. I think Google+ groups was an attempt on that concept but failed because the rest of the network was a ghost town. Some Facebook groups are very targeted and feel like forums but they miss the content persistence we had with forums e.g if I remembered something I saw a month ago on a group there's no way I can find it again.
greatemployee
More or less true. I think a lot of the early enthusiast web-places have either disappeared or are inactive.

But this is predictable. When hordes of normal people come online, of course Facebooks, Tumblrs, Instagrams are the result. A lot of the people primarily interested in using social services such as these frankly aren't on the web to learn things or explore. They use the web insofar as it resembles or enhances the lives they have outside of it. Even some of my old IRC / BBS friends are basically Tumblr zombies today. This is the nature of things-becoming-popular.

What I'm interested in is, is there any rendezvous for the curious today or are all mediums of communication now machines for self-promotion, passive indulgence, etc.? I want to believe that there is something else, but I think the transformation that occurred, where everyone is given a voice, is something that happens once and only once.

The curious will always be able to discover new things, but for now it looks like these things will be more about the author or human source than about the content or things theirselves. And since the content we find is inextricably tied to the profit of some other personality, we may continue to find content that is less risky, controversial, dangerous, etc..

Objectivity is a precious thing that our cultures don't seem to value today.

DougN7
My take away from this post: Facebook is the new AOL. For you youngsters, we've been through this before. Nothing lasts forever, and this too will eventually wane.
meira
FB is AOL done right, but this shows some strategies that could work against them.
meira
The ratio developers/ratio most be in a historic low level (at least here in Brazil). Everybody is a consumer of a siloed technology nowadays, producing content for them for free (or earning scraps), while not getting the internet bigger picture.