At least you could see the popups. I default open things in an incognito window, and it won't even load if you're in incognito, just shows you a big banner shaming you for using incognito mode and asking you to log in.
It'd be kinda cool if HN had reddit-like flairs for stories so you could tag them as "no-incognito" or "soft-paywall" so you knew what not to bother clicking on.
Just disable javascript. Media sites are too broken these days to take a risk on their code any way. The LA Times devs have done a good job keeping the fallback readable.
Really good hint, didn't think to try that. Toggling javascript off for that site in uBlock Origin should make future clicking on links to it a much happier experience, thanks!
"You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards."
It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship rather than a consensual one.
Not exactly in my opinion. My understanding of the passage is that he wants to block the entire website outright. So not, "Look at reddit, but block ads." Rather it would be, "Block reddit."
Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be like in a parallel timeline where that happened?
This is effectively what we should be doing: Either accept what the site is offering (content monetized by ads and data collection) or don't. But what happened instead is entitlement: People decided they had the right to view that content without paying it's cost, and went for ad blockers instead.
As much as I loathe ads, I am still surprised ad blockers work: That vastly more websites haven't simply made it impossible to view them without either seeing the ads or paying money/subscribing.
Lots of people who use ad blockers aren't opposed to ads themselves. If a site shoves an "Eat at Joe's" div in beside the content, that's fine, we'll look at it, because after all ad blockers won't block such an ad. What we oppose are ad networks with all the tracking and privacy violations those entail, and those are blocked by ad blockers.
This already sort of happens with ad-blocker-blockers, except the other way around. You signal to the website you don’t want the privacy-invasive mess that are ads, the website tells you to sod off.
I kinda recall there being some options in old browsers (>10 years ago) where websites could send their privacy policy as a blob in the http header and the browser would enable/disable content based on pre-defined user options. However I can't recall the name of this and a quick search isn't showing me anything that rings a bell.
Well, the visibility would have to be there. If my privacy settings blocked Reddit, would it know? If I said "Okaaaaaaayyy let me view this particular site this particular time" would Reddit also know? ("There's a customer that we likely won't see again because of our privacy settings.")
As individuals, right? Since according to the author nation-states blocking websites that don't comply with their law is "balkanization" which is bad, but please also we need governments to be more involved in regulating the internet (but how to do that without balkanization or control?)
I don't disagree with some of what the author is attempting to propose, but it's not thought out at all well or clearly, which is a let-down.
when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest.
now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.
Google is a driving force behind the destruction of the web. They like the content they do not like the links. The best way for the web to develop from Googles point of view is if we all consume just the content that Google forwards us to without horizontal bridges between pages. So that's why you will see Google push to reduce the importance of URLs and why Google will - shamelessly - lift content of other websites and display it as their own as the result of a query on the results page rather than to link to the site that they took the content from to begin with.
> They like the content they do not like the links.
I'm not disagreeing with your appraisal - in fact I probably agree with it - but I do find it deeply and painfully ironic to read, given the entire foundation of Google's being - PageRank - is based on analyses of the web of other people's links.
It seems like the parasite doesn't realise the damage it's causing the host.
This phenomenon has been discussed to some degree; here's an article about the changing web and who benefits from it and what we've lost in the process:
Yes, this is a common topic between my girlfriend and me. Internet as we know it (we grew up in the 2000s with MSN, forums, etc) doesnt exist anymore.
First (at least for us, for other people there would be another "first") were the basic webpages done in Frontpage or Dreamweaver (if you had enough RAM), uploaded to free webservers like Tripod, Lycos, Geocities, copying and pasting scripts found out there to remove popups and iframes, reading Photoshop tutorials to do some effects or gifs animations. Everything were more crafted, it took more time to do these kind of things (now everything is an app or a drag and drop).
Then came the second version of the internet. Everything was a bit "more pro" - even amateur fansites payed for their hosting, they had forums, online chats, etc. The open source community allowed this. From Wordpress with its themes to phpBB2 forums, vBulletin, etc. Oh, I miss those days.
Then slowly all of that was lost. Nowadays we only have social accounts for things. Fansites? Only accounts on Twitter, INstagram, YouTuber. Ask an INfluencer if they have their own website. What for? Everything is centralized.
My dad, who started using a smartphone just 2 or 3 years ago, doesn't fully understand what the internet is. For him, it's just a set of apps (Whatsapp, Facebook, and the website of his fav newspaper). Outside that he doesn't understand there is (or there was) a full world of websites with a lot of contents.
It makes me sad because "the original internet" will be never be like what we experienced. I don't know who to blame for, tho. If I were in the shoes of Facebook or Twitter's founders I would have done the same. But they definitely have eaten all the webpages around them.
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 ad needs its own website.
The "original Internet" is still there, and I dare say more people are using it than back in the 90s. It's just that a lot more people are also using the newer stuff that you don't like.
I think maybe they're bemoaning the dichotomy between increased access and apparent decreased use of the internet for creation of content by ordinary users -- or at least content that's not being exploited for advertising/marketing?
I'd warrant a tiny fraction of users have their own blogs now compared to a decade ago?
But that was apparent from the get-go. Most people just want to consume. In the early years, "going online" already took some effort or knowledge - only as it became gradually easier did the large swathes of consumers join.
If you lived through Eternal September, you kind of knew this was coming.
But again, just because plenty of people consume, and plenty of companies cater mostly to the consumers, doesn't mean there isn't another world out there for those who look.
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 might find blogs posts about pugs, people's personal sites filled with images and stories of their own pugs, a small community pug-loving, pug-adopting as its own forum.
Now the first page of Google for "pug lovers" shows: a Facebook page, an Amazon page, a Pinterest page, two Etsy pages, two bespoke (catering towards dogs) storefronts, and one cute site (http://pugdogclub.org.uk/gallery/pug-lovers/).
There's no objective better or worse - people want the things all the new top results provide - but I know which era of results I prefer.
AOL was the internet for some people (and maybe still is!).
It's just capitalism, put a fence around something, sell access, keep people ignorant of what they're missing.
It's impossible for things to stay good under unrestrained capitalism because there's always some [even very minor] deleterious action that can be exploited for profit (financial or control). Those actions tend to proliferate and cascade.
What you are describing is dilution of users who are not technical at all.
The people creating content, stupid simple websites, blogs, catalogs or very niche websites are still there, it's just not that obvious that they are there.
Your posting this on a website that is pretty much exclusively links to other websites, "hey I made this" stuff, and people talking about their hobbies.
However, we could also call this a dedicated bookmarking app with discussion threads appended to it. This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.) For "normal" websites, there are only few left that consider themselves as part of a bigger web, in which they are constituting yet another node (trying to make this web as a whole worthwhile).
Sure. And you could find a name like that for pretty much every website in existence in the 90's.
I strongly disagree that it's a special case, and I strongly disagree that there are only few websites left that feel like part of a bigger something. I think you are romanticizing the past (as most people do with most things they remember from their youth - remember when kids' TV shows were actually good?).
There's definitely a difference. In what may appear here as "the good old days", authors usually showed their authority on a subject by frequently linking to other sources they would consider interesting in context, thus contributing to knitting the web. (Edit: It was this very phenomenon, which provided the base for the Page rank.) Personally, I see this rarely nowadays. Also, the entire idea of adding "something amazing" to the web, another sight to see and visit, has become a rare affair. Surfing is somewhat a thing of the past.
Out of curiosity, what period are you referring to as the "good old days"? Must be prior to, say, 1993-1994?
I also remember these days as the days where we had to be very, very nice to other people and play by their rules (universities, free hosters, ...) in order to get something published online. Domain names were expensive. $5 cloud hosting? I don't think so.
I mean, I get what you mean - but I simply cannot agree.
I'd say, "surfing" became a popular buzz-word around 1997/98?
Edit: Regarding availability of webspace, back then some for personal use usually came with an e-mail account for free (but you usually had to pay for this e-mail account, as free e-mail wasn't yet normal.) And, you could find full-fledged dedicated web-space for about $5/month. (Personally, I have been working for/with ISPs since 1996 and am hosting a personal website since 1999, before this using free webspace, which was provided either by the university or the employer.)
Edit #2: Who remembers tilde-addresses (www.domain.com/~<account>/)? – These were usually free webspace.
>This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.)
I'm not so sure about that. This site isn't that different from stuff like reddit or tumblr at it's heart, even if the level of discussion/quality of posts is higher. If you distilled these types of sites even further, it's really not all that different from social media like facebook or instagram. The only difference is the type of content shared and the fact that facebook and instagram are usually used with you being "yourself" rather than just a username. Then again, enough people on hackernews link their profiles to their own personal websites/linkedins/etc. that even that distinction isn't so sharp.
There's an entire category of web-applications derived from the original forum idea. However, I'd say, while fora were once a frequent thing (and, considering Steward Brand's the WELL or FirstClass, maybe the original internet application), they've become rather rare and there are only just a few "community watering holes" left.
P.S.: Here's an exemplary link to what was once the major FirstClass node in my country, which first migrated to the web and then became obsolescenced [is this a word?] by Facebook (the tagline reads "forum for politics and society", operational 11.11.1992 - 1.12.2012): http://blackbox.at
HN is pretty niche. In some countries like the phillipines, most internet users stay on Facebook for almost their entire session. Even so their internet is filtered through Facebook Basics (and one could make the argument our internet is filtered through google).
Even when looking at reddit in the western world, most people don't click the links, they stay on reddit.
I would say we did get something wrong by not regulating enough and allowing companies to monopolize the internet and further to act as private intelligence agencies with no legal liability for the data stored.
I would say that the people who today only consume, and stay on single sites (eg not clicking the links on reddit) would simply not have cared about the internet if it had been the way you suggest.
Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is up for discussion, of course :-)
I always find it interesting that different people view the golden age of the internet as happening at a different time.
Some say the 2000s. For me it was the late 90s. For others, "eternal september" marked the end of the golden age - 1993. And I'm sure the current crop of children will say it was the 2010s.
I think the only common thread here is that the internet changes. And people don't like change. What is new is bad, what was old was good.
Maybe it was all part of the golden age and people just remember the specific year that they started using it? 20 years of a free internet for the masses was not a very long period of time.
> we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.
I've felt this too. Example: I made a pointless little humor website that got mentioned on HN once. I got a bunch of nice replies, and a few thousand visits that day. Since that day, none. Zero other than robots, literally.
I'm not complaining that it didn't go viral, I'm saying, in the old days, a brief spurt of popularity translated into a trickle of ongoing traffic, because people shared links to sites in a way they don't really do now. Links pages don't exist anymore (unless they're SEO spam). Slashdot and boingboing are just news now. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet used to be a valuable thing, and now it isn't.
Alternate explanation: the competition is better now.
In the early days of the web if you put some time into making a funny site there just weren't all that many other funny things to link to. You were one in 1k or in 10k. But now there are so many other options, many of which publish new funny things every day, that you're one in 100k or in 1M.
A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet it still a valuable thing (and more or less the premise of HN, Reddit, etc) but the bar is higher.
You've misunderstood. I'm not saying "my site is so awesome that you should be surprised no one goes to it!". The thing I'm saying is surprising is the disparity between the reaction on day 1 and on day N.
I know it sounds like I'm whining, I'm really not. All I can say is, if you weren't there, it's hard to describe how much "I found a neat site" was part of the currency of social interaction online twenty years ago. To get a dozen positive comments and emails but no shares or links was just not a thing that happened. People shared the urls to weird/funny/awesome things the way they share memes today. And I guess that change is not surprising - memes don't have ads, don't have google analytics, don't beg to put you on a mailing list, etc.
It feels like author is depressed. It's a bit sad to read. He manages to pull so much negativity out of the things that are generally have a net-positive impact, things that drive the progress, that are progress.
Disappointing article. I don't need this negativity in my life.
Almost every big positive change in society is a result of people feeling negative about the status quo.
This reminds me of Steven Pinker who goes around saying, please stop whining; some/many/most/all things are better than they used to be! while somehow neglecting the fact that to the degree things are better, they usually are because people didn't stop whining.
Well, yeah I agree that makes sense. I misspoke. Only idiots are always happy and this endless treadmill, our ability to see possible improvements in systems that were already perceived as decent, drives the progress.
I think Pinker's point is that many of the people whining are trying to "fix" things by changing the very things that got us here in the first place -- much of which was luck, or success after many failures, not just people whining.
Progress for a select few, for everyone else things are going backwards. Life expectancy and quality of life is doing nothing but going down year after year in the United States.
If you're one of the few privileged elites who benefited from the internet, congrats! You're a very small minority.
How did it go so wrong - the same way it did go wrong with many other tools - people used them to better themselves at the cost of others.
> We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties — which means pretty much everyone.
Exactly. The "ethical" roots people imagine weren't actually the roots of the Internet; they were an ideal that was hypothetically possible (but in hindsight, probably assumed too much human virtue atop an infrastructure built around assumed trustable nodes). The actual roots of the Internet would be to kick most users off and keep individual nodes behind locked doors controlled by a joint military-industrial-education confederation of separate institutions with overlapping goals. Privacy was assumed close to nil at several of those institutions.
That's a non-starter for building a system that can serve all people on the planet, so it's not the right approach. There is no way back; the only way is forward, informed by the past, but recognizing the weaknesses of its origins as well as its strengths.
There were plenty of us there who were accidental visitors, curious kids who found ourselves in this interesting world. Kleinrock mentions this briefly in the original article, but there was a high degree of trust and optimism on the early internet, and if one was technically inclined and a little outgoing and generally a good egg, it wasn't hard to get an account somewhere.
When I first logged into MIT-ITS around 1982, coming in over dialup as a teenager calling a modem bank near the Pentagon, the login-failed message said something like, "Sorry, that username does not exist. Would you like an account?" It was RMS himself who gifted me (and a lot of others) a free account for the asking.
It's a hard thing to explain to people who weren't there -- I think this is why so many people in this thread see Kleinrock as naive or worse. My girlfriend never believes me when I try to explain the early internet; it seems an impossibility to her, as if I was talking about some pre-historic hunter/gatherer culture.
I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing
all barriers to communication between different races and
cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else
in the history of creation.
> Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
The huge ironic joke that made Adams a good writer was that the legend of the Tower of Babel was about nations coming together with a common language (which got up to haughty stuff)
Very insightful. No, I'm not being sarcastic. The internet has in general been great for literally billions of people, but it's not an unalloyed good. It has a dark side, which Adams foresaw. Some people need to be kept isolated. It's great that people who suffer from some rare condition can find and support each other. It's not so great that Nazis can.
I don't know the solution. I'm not sure anyone does, or even that there is one. Maybe this is why the rest of the universe seems so empty.
I think they've always been there. They've just been quiet about it, because they've been relatively isolated. The internet has allowed them to find each other, form stronger communities, and coordinate their actions (of which upvote/downvote brigades on sites like this one are the least of our worries BTW), making the whole much more potent than the sum of its parts. As I said, this same ease of communication is wonderful when it's all in a good cause, but it can also be used in a bad one.
> by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures
Often overlooked in my opinion is the significance of the unseen barriers to true, high fidelity communication. The ability to translate a written message from one language to another is surely beneficial, but even when sent between two parties who speak the same language, how successful is the "communication" really? Might we be vastly overestimating the magnitude of fidelity (the degree to which something is an accurate copy or translation of something else), where "something else" is often an extremely nuanced idea, with (often unseen) inter-relations to many other nuanced ideas?
For the communication of any given idea, the sender must first attempt to get some reasonable conceptual handle on the idea themself (depending on the complexity of the topic, this is massively error prone right off the bat), pack it into a message in a relatively (compared to the complexity of reality itself) simplistic language (that they likely have a rather imperfect grasp of), put (using flawed communication/articulation skills) that message into some medium of transport (text, audio-only, verbal discussion via teleconference, in person verbal discussion, audio only presentation, audiovisual presentation, etc), each of which comes with it's own variety of shortcomings, and then the receiver must do all the same in reverse, subject to all the same problems, plus some additional issues like the human mind's tendency to subconsciously supplement received communications with additional information from mental storage, a process not detectable to the conscious mind. (This is what they said, but what did they really mean?).
It seems to me a big part of the problem is that we've invested so much brainpower into figuring out how the physical world works, resulting in incredible technical achievements and tools that now have extremely widespread use, but we've invested a relative pittance into understanding how human minds and societies work. Just as nuclear weapons are dangerous in the hands of those who lack sufficient wisdom, might there be something similar going on with mass communication technologies? How would one even know the answer to such a question?
If you consider the internet as a reflection of mankind, then maybe seen it as wrong and broken is only a measure of your belief system against what is society in its crudest form?
Also I disagree on the "create a new crypto system" to solve our issues trope.
When talking about stolen databases I would argue it is a problem of not using state of the art to protect privacy as there is realistically no incentive to do so.
> websites should provide a privacy policy customized to you, something they should be able to do since they already customize the ads you see. Websites should also be required to take responsibility for any violations and abuses of privacy that result from their services
These sorts of policies will completely annihilate small sites. Only large corporations and institutions with their own legal teams will have websites.
I don’t agree the internet had “ethical roots.” Drugs were sold on the internet since the 80s. And the whole thing was funded in the name of warfare. Also the idealized notion that the internet allows for more extremism, as if the thoughts people express online would not be possible in the brains of these people had they stayed offline, make no sense.
I think the article is correct to assume the internet will become more balkanized and countries once they gain the ability to will control their internet very tightly
>once they gain the ability to will control their internet very tightly //
Did you have some particular ability in mind here that countries don't already have? Countries sensor the web, turn off access to services (social media), and such, already.
I can imagine on-the-fly editing might help countries, but can't really see what else you might have in mind?
A difference is that the "unacceptable" opinions people once expressed to their friends in the neighborhood bar can now be broadcast over the internet to a wider audience.
The Intenet is only one piece though. The other piece is how digital technology makes the production of media cheap and ubiquitous. This breaks the monopoly of media organizations on production, just as the internet and hosted web services break the monopoly on distribution.
Nobody invented the internet. It was only a matter of time before computers sent messages over far distances, like phones had already done. The internet isn't broken. There are millions of Internets just like the one the author laments losing, only they are for other people. The mainstream web is what has people down, because it's a reflection of the mainstream, which has long been foul. The problem there is using mainstream internet instead of using 50 year old technology to create your own networks.
In case that Firefox does not offer the icon to open reader mode for a page, you can visit it in reader mode by manually prepending about:reader?url= to the URL.
> "Citizen-users need to hold websites more accountable. When was the last time a website asked what privacy policy you would like applied to you? My guess is never."
Wrong guess. This happens multiple times per day, thanks to the GDPR legislation in the EU. Annoying, but also correct. I take great effort to disable everything I don't like (ad tracking in particular), and like the article says I should:
> "You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards."
There are increasingly websites I refuse to use because they don't work in a way I consider acceptable.
Some major websites are surprisingly broken. Twitter on Firefox on Android, for example, is notoriously bad.
Regarding GDPR, this is true for the EU, but the article was published in the LA Times, though…
It would be nice, if those properties, which can be applied globally, were already integrated in the browser as a preferences setting (and enforced by law). Meaning, privacy concerns must become part of the protocol. (What about some kind of 451 response by the browser?)
I still remember the moment I hit the Yahoo! home page and saw a banner ad for the first time, and said to myself, "here they come." I didn't project out to surveillance capitalism though, was still a bit too young for such thoughts.
"Hey, a long time ago, when the only people that used it were just like me, things were really pleasant."
There is a lot of conflict in the world. As the pool of people on the network grows and changes they will bring conflict with them into this arena. It's a kind of naivete that sees the homogenous origin of the network as a better time.
Personally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam, malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things. Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the internet. I can work for anyone over the internet and make money for myself and my family. I can communicate with family members and friends across continents. With all the hate social media gets for example, imagine a life without them again. I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse or outdated.
So Thank you for creating the internet all you tremendous people. I personally wouldn't trade it. Can we fix a few things ? Sure we can. But it has not gone wrong. It has changed lives, mine included for the better.
Same story here but that alone doesn't mean anything. Just because it worked out well for me that doesn't mean anything. I watch as my Grandad gets told to go online to pay his bill by the gas company and he has no clue what to do, then he gets letters from debt collection agencies because it's too hard to figure out how to pay using another method. This kind of thing also happens to lower class poor people in the UK. Some level of phone or internet savvy is assumed for many services now.
Side note: I'm in a hotel room right now overlooking San Fran as the morning traffic starts to pick up. It really is a shit-hole city.
A German and a Slovenian talk about life and work. The German says, "You know, life's pretty good. I make 5k a month, send my kids to school, put 2k in my mortgage, spend 1k on groceries, and there's plenty left over"
And the Slovenian says "Wow that's cool. What happens with the other 2k?"
"Oh we don't ask that in Germany. It's impolite"
So the SLovenian goes "Ah that's nice. We got it good in Slovenia too. I make 2k a month, send my kids to school, put 1.5k in my mortgage, 1k for groceries, and still got enough for a 500 payment on my Audi"
I taught myself how to program through the internet, which is the only reason I have a job right now. The internet also let me discover cryptocurrencies which is the only reason I have a house at a young age. As far as I'm concerned it's an objective fact that the internet helps motivated people multiply their wealth in ways that were not possible prior to its creation.
I don't understand your theory of how the internet has "lifted so many people out of poverty".
I'm not saying I disagree with it necessarily, I don't even understand what you're suggesting enough to disagree or agree with it. It's definitely not _obvious_ to me that the internet has somehow lifted so many people out of poverty, I just don't understand what you mean.
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.
(For starters, I don't even know if fewer people are "in poverty" now than pre-internet or not!)
Increasing global trade leads to better outcomes for those producing those goods. The greatest alleviation of poverty and creation of the largest middle class in the history of humanity happened in China starting the early 90s and that was fuelled by increased global trade made possible partly by the Internet.
> I suspect very strongly that "new types of products available" has nothing to do with lifting people out of poverty
Your suspicion is wrong. GDP per capita has increased significantly in emerging markets where cheap labor creates these "new types of products", with China being the prominent example
> I don't even know if fewer people are "in poverty" now than pre-internet or not!
That is a well known fact, you'll just have to google it.
> I am gonna want some analysis based on actual numbers of some kind that shows the internet did those things
There are countless analyses on the benefits of globalization which was enabled in part by the advance of near-instantaneous telecommunication
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.
These jobs are shrinking as low level apps get dumbed down... The process of creating a simple web site has gotten much much more complex as scripting languages have changed. I still can't believe we're compiling code for simple phone and web sites and apps.
Corporations have lobbied to take away Net Neutrality, and to institute throttling and make running a personal web site much more expensive. Social media sites de-prioritize regular users under corporate (paid) marketing posts...
These days you have to pay to be seen, the Internet was originally based on having everyone on an equal playing field, and now everything is being based around the new rules to prevent us from going back.
The Internet is becoming less effective because it's no longer an equal playing field. Its becoming much more expensive and complex over time to run an independent web presence, when in the past it was simple and inexpensive, I think that's the major issue.
The Internet is changing because people who use it are changing it. This is what happens with tools. The Internet’s current state is a reflection of our societal values, which I think is what you’re really decrying.
It's actually very easy to make websites and apps now IMO, never worrying about hosting and network intrusion and things like that, but you sell out to the centralized, pervasively monitored model of the web in doing so.
I meant in terms of being able to totally own and control your design, presentation, and content...
If you want to use a platform like WIX, sure it's easy, but the minute they run broke and need to shut down you're screwed. Also having your own (independent) domain pointing to a web site that you made is very costly to a layman without an enterprise account...
I would wager these unflintchingly ethical telcos are bideing their time on this one. The beancounters are probably salivating about ideas such as this one from a few years ago:
"In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages," he wrote. "A huge advantage for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in front of people which stifles innovation. This is what's at stake, and that's why we have to save net neutrality."[1]
Why do we need to look at Portugal? Net Neutrality was only in effect from 2015-2017. We have decades of experience in the US without net neutrality, and it has been fine for small publishers. Do you really think the beancounters care about Mommy Bloggers, or Bob's Keto Korner? If anything, they are looking at big dogs with lots of cash that use lots of bandwidth like Netflix and upstart startups like Disney.
Well, you're right that the internet has not yet turned into Cable TV style bundling, and you're double-right that they could hardly care less about Kombucha Korner.com.
The crappy swings at CaTV-style service bundling that the telcos have whiffed so far such as Uverse failed to grab enough momentum to jack any of the internet streaming video limelight from youtube, netflix, or really anything from anything else at all. Who really uses Comcast's, or even Verizon FIOS' bundled voice service? A gas station before they get fed up?
Also, please consider Verizon's NXDOMAIN[0]: Purposefully hijacking RFC behavior in order to slurp in a few extra ad clicks off of granny. And if that doesn't just scream "Corporate Governance", I've heard they know which porn I visit. I mean, no surprise here, but my point is that while I really like my car insurance and recommend it to my friends, boy howdy, I have never enjoyed interacting with any telco for any reason, ever.
But, I wonder--if the FCC had never bothered with regulating away the gale-force of swarming telcos voraciously borging away at the PCS spectrum in the 1990s, would MVNE services even be available today? And if they weren't, or were just really shabby, How would The Bell Collective choose to market its services to the low end of the cube market? I mean would they program customers to remit extra currency units for a special Verizon speed-charge port for your alcove or something? Their service couldn't possibly be that bad. Everybody here would be out of the job.
Nowadays, AT&T Uverse keeps putting on for some reason, meanwhile at Comcast and Verizon, their top lobbyists have miraculously cured their chronic internet content aversion syndrome, commence with bundling Netflix. On the other side of the cubefarm, just past that one weird closet nobody ever goes into, Verizon Wireless is slowing some of its MVNO customers.[1] This is fair play too, since two years ago I'd say. Who is to blame them for propping up their own quality of service at their competitors expense if there is no regulatory recourse?
I realize that Verizon Wireless and Verizon Verizon are not the same Verizon, for some Verizon, even though they're both owned by Verizon. Regarding Verizon, I have met many former and current Verizon customers. I assure you, we are very certain that neither Verizon nor Verizon Verizon would deign to charge you any less out of the goodness of its heart.
Helpfully, they seem quite eager to itemize regulatory fees and taxes.
So I'd say you're triple-right about looking at Verizon-er, uh, I mean Portugal.
Creating jobs isn't good by itself if the work being done is to a bad end. Despite how much promise the internet has for free information, lots of people have been paid to pollute it with garbage that is the opposite of helpful. Or to spy on people so that knowledge can be used against them. The internet is a great thing technology wise, but it has enabled bad actors as much as enabling humble and well intentioned people.
>Creating jobs isn't good by itself if the work being done is to a bad end. Lots of people have been paid to pollute it with garbage that is the opposite of helpful. Or to spy on people so that knowledge can be used against them.
Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?
Maybe this can count as more of a smartphone thing an internet thing.. but it's still largely an internet thing that would allow someone in a rough spot to still be able to connect with people online and look/apply for jobs.
> Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?
Not that I know the answer, but I would have to see a source on this. Why would a device that may increase access to job postings, but a non-homeless job candidate is much more likely to have than a homeless person, increase the chances of said homeless person in getting a job? I'm not even sure that the ability to access job postings is the main problem there.
I’ve worked with and volunteered with an org who among other things got smart phones to our local homeless.
Yes, it does help quite a bit. It’s a $50-100 setup and even without data they can go to any million places with free WiFi and get emails, call job listings, keep in touch with family members. It’s a pretty big deal to them.
1. Comparing the chances of a homeless person in the modern world with a smartphone, to a homeless person in the modern world without a smartphone.
2. Comparing the chances of a homeless person in the modern world with a smartphone, to a homeless person in a hypothetical internetless world (where noone can have a smartphone).
The org you volunteered with dealt with comparison #1 above. We're discussing comparison #2.
>>>> Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?
>>>Not that I know the answer, but I would have to see a source on this. Why would a device that may increase access to job postings, but a non-homeless job candidate is much more likely to have than a homeless person, increase the chances of said homeless person in getting a job? I'm not even sure that the ability to access job postings is the main problem there.
>> [My reply about first hand seeing it]
>We're discussing comparison #2.
I think whatever meaning you had in another thread hasn't been in the one I replied to.
I think both you and @lucideer are right at a certain level. I did mean in the absence of cellphones altogether, since I'm referring to the fact that the non-homeless population almost all have cell-phones now, so that's really just "table-stakes" in the job hunt market.
That said, your experience provides an important data point too. I would be curious to know whether it's the phone access or the "among other things" that you refer to, which I assume means other kinds of aid, training, and support, that provides most of the value in them finding a job.
The among other things is haircut, shave, cloths, boots, shower, shelter, sleeping bags, getting touch with family, basic medical, training, mental health evals, etc. stuff that actually helps today as opposed to the feel good “just build more housing and give it to people for “free”” ideas.
Is the phone worth more than the sleeping bag? Depends on the temperature. But, yes for the most part the phone is helpful. I would guess a lot get sold, but in those cases they are typically going to someone that does actually want it. Let’s be honest, a Samsung whatever 5 isn’t going to be traded for a 5th of whiskey and sold eventually to some highschooler, they wouldn’t be caught dead with that phone.
People have this impression that homeless are all 60-80 year old bums harassing you for change, there are a lot that have jobs, live in their cars, and could really use a phone, even with their families, or live in other people’s houses. The invisible homeless.
> Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?
Do they? How?
Are you suggesting that online jobs website make it easier to find a job? A homeless person with a smartphone isn't the only one with access to the jobs website. Nor does the existence of such a website intrinsically create the jobs behind the ads on it.
A sibling commenter talks about the existence of the internet facilitating job creation through other means, but I don't think homeless people having smartphones has much bearing on this.
It's worth noting that income inequality has steadily increased in the last ~40 years at leastm (in the US), so talk of the internet lifting people out of poverty has to be considered in that context.
A homeless person desiring to gain some employable skills has an easier time doing such with the Internet and an access device, such as a phone - even if the phone has no cell service but can use free WiFi- than prior to the existence of the Internet and those devices.
There is a silent class of homeless people whom I am not clear you are including when you state "homeless", and that is people living on cars and/or "couch-surfing". On the occasion I've seen it mentioned in articles, it seems that it is nearly impossible to come up with reliable numbers on the actual population of homeless people living under such conditions due to their transitory nature.
It is likely true that the genuinely destitute homeless people, which is comprised in large part of people who suffer severe psychological and mental disorders, are only minimally aided by cell phones. I suspect the way they actually benefit is they carry on their persons a means for those trying aid them to find them as well as a life line they can tug, should they so choose.
"Inequality" is a divisive term with no genuine academic definition. Another correlation is that as "inequality" has risen, so has the greatest reduction in people living in subsistence farming and abject poverty in history of mankind, a conclusion that would suggest that "inequality" positively correlates with greater human flourishing, but the real purpose of my mentioning this is to demonstrate that "inequality" is a largely meaningless metric, by itself, used for manipulating people not familiar with broader understanding of what has occurred for so many billions of people on the planet.
Can they show up reliably on-time? Public transit costs money -> Homeless -> no address, so can't use a bank, cashing of checks can be done, but only if there is credit offered by an employer, or through charity of others. So from the get go, there's a geographic limitation w.r.t body-here types of work.
What about mental/computer work? Assume a smartphone. Still homeless, so no address means no bank. Could send a check to a P.O. Box maybe; but if there is company hardware you need to be vested with, that may not work out well. BYOD is a thing, and can work out, this is truly a success in that regard, but again, lack of address complicates things.
I mean, you aren't totally wrong, but I'm just not convinced that the homeless jobless experience has been revolutionized to the point people in poverty have been uplifted by the billions. If anything, infrastructure automation has allowed more to be done with less in terms of previously manual jobs, and enabled more efficient fund extraction from the average consumer through economies of scale. Especially in terms of rent seeking. If you look at the number of contracts entered into over a lifetime as a metric, software/the Internet has allowed an explosion in terms of the "one-sided contract" and has led to a social tilt away from the original purpose of the construct which was to serve as a meeting of the minds between equals.
Essentially, it's allowed for the carve out of unethical contracts at massive scale, and consolidation of capital intensive workflows through automation and standardization.
Can people learn and share? Yes. Are people all uplifted equally? I'd say no, and certain populations in particular are likely worse off. I'm thinking Kenya's predatory debt crisis, China's maturing surveillance state, and even the United States and U.K. are getting uncomfortably close to that event horizon.
Marketers ruined everything. We just wanted to be able to learn stuff. They had to turn that around and take it to the unhealthy extreme in the name of targeted advertising.
Where there are public spaces that aren't actively policed, with public outlets, that's where they hang out. I used to live in a neighborhood next to a public library with a sheltered area and an outlet, and every night there'd be a couple of homeless people camping out there. They plugged their devices, had a smoke, and had shelter for the night.
Thankfully, the neighborhood itself was tolerant enough to let them be -- I never saw them being kicked out, and why should they be? They're not making trouble, and life's hard enough if you don't have an address to your name. Give them the small, quiet dignity of a place to stay dry from the rain and browse reddit.
The number of people in extreme poverty globally have dropped roughly 650m since 1990. Some part of that is probably due to the internet though I'm not sure you could say how much exactly. (Our World in Data graph https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/04/Extreme-Poverty-p...)
The often-repeated trope, touted as an achievement of capitalism, relies on defining "not poor" as earning 2$ PPP per day, or 60 bucks a month, or 700$ = 0.7k per year.
Not to mention, ignoring any other measures of quality of life or progress besides raw dollars. It's judging capitalism via a metric internal to capitalism. Pure circular reasoning. E.g. subsistence farmers in rural areas made 0$ and were "poor" by that metric, now they work 14h a day at factories for 2$ a day and are "not in poverty" anymore. Congratulatory handshakes all around!
That's not how subsistence farming is counted in GDP and poverty statistics. The value of home production is still counted. If you are eating only $2 worth of rice per day, you are counted as poor whether you buy it or grow it.
The international poverty line does take into account of subsidence farmers [1]. Dollars is just used as a standard, so that there can be a tangible value.
Even though the facts appear wrong, I think this comment does raise the interesting question of whether money is a metric that is internal to capitalism, or if capitalism is the natural consequence of using only money as a metric.
There's plenty of ignorance to go around on HN, but this is shockingly so. Global poverty statistics don't count subsistence farming as zero income, which would render the entire exercise meaningless. Two dollars a day isn't an objectively high number, but the point is that passing that bar is a threshold that means you're not _below_ $2/day. The kind of poor we're talking about deal with starvation, easily-preventable diseases, dying from indoor wood burning for lack of better heating systems,etc. Projecting your privileged, first-world notion that none of that matters because they aren't self-actualized and the resource level that helps you avoid that "isn't that much" is just sheer idiocy.
Yeah there are a number of factors in play. I doubt though that China say would be turning out tech in the way they are for example without being able to look stuff up and order stuff on the web. And I think it will kick in in Africa too.
I am one of those people. I was a poor boy in a remote village in a third world country. The Internet brought me opportunities to know and connect to people far far away. The Internet has shaped my thought process, education, job opportunities. Just about everything I have today was due to the advance of computers and the Internet.
It is a fair question. I assumed based on my own experience that this is very clear but let me clarify. I am privileged to be living in the United States (richest country in the world) but I am originally an immigrant even though that was 20+ years ago. I hire people from all over the world as freelancers from time to time. Internet allows me to hire some random person from a random part of the world and in many cases from a very poor country. I am more than sure that if they didn't have internet, they wouldn't be able to get those freelance jobs and make a living since their home country does not provide a whole lot of options.
So I don't have exact data and technically I am guessing the impact but considering how many people live in countries like India, China, African countries, I would assume internet has helped millions out of poverty because without internet, they would not be able to do things to make a living that they do today. Go to upwork.com for example and see ppl from all over the world making a decent living for themselves even if it is low wages for rich countries.
Seems like you only look at one side. I thought by now we have mostly understood that unlimited globalization also has dark sides, especially for the broader local population in richer countries.
To me the sentiment of GPs post felt like "internet makes it better on average for all of us". You're "now I very easy can find even cheaper workers" doesn't support that, even though it certainly is an improvement to a select few at the very bottom.
I focussed mostly on the jobs thing. But Internet has brought many other great things to the world so I think it is a bit myopic to just focus on the "hire cheaper workers" thing. Just the fact that you can communicate your opinions to me while we both are sitting somewhere totally different is the power of internet. It brings plenty of good. Some bad, sure. If not for internet, I would probably never talk to you and not exchange our different perspectives.
1. I admit "select few" being hyperbole. The intended sentiment was it helping fewer people than it is screwing over.
2. Its nice you want to help the people who have it the worst. But you better be ready for the consequences, like a fascist getting 23% of votes a few days ago in a local german election. What people feel is important. Yes, the policy might be raising living standards of everyone. But if it predominantly helps those at the top of the capitalist system and some "few" people far away, then people will feel screwed over and demand change. Though by now we seem to get closer to "revolution". I'd prefer not to live through a revolution.
Just the tip of the iceberg, the security services facilitate the criminal underworld playing its part keep GDP up, lots of experiments being done on people individually right now, most of it messing with peoples belief systems which in extreme you see with muslim terrorists carrying out acts. I know I've had similar done to me.
Jimmy Saville was a state apparatus intelligence tool, nothing more nothing less and look at how the state labels him a pedo now!
>With all the hate social media gets for example, imagine a life without them again.
Easy, that's my life right now
>I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse or outdated.
That all fits in the original, "utopian" if you want, view of the internet espoused in the article. You can do that with email, IMs like IRC, personal webpages. Facebook-style social media, with its surveillance, addictiveness, toxic feedback loops, is irrelevant to this task.
One of many great takeaways from this article, a great new word to add to my vocabulary:
Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a derogatory geopolitical term for the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or uncooperative with one another.
> With the profit motive taking over the internet, the very nature of innovation changed. Averting risk dominated the direction of technical progress. We no longer pursued “moonshots.” Instead advancement came via baby steps — “design me a 5% faster Bluetooth connection” as opposed to “build me an internet.” An online community that had once been convivial transformed into one of competition, antagonism and extremism.
This cycle is perhaps fundamental to all __human__ inventions and core to the theory of disruption.
This played out out the same way with Bitcoin. Ethereum had to step in to disrupt that cycle and as ETH grows to that size, some thing else needs to come in and disrupt. Same holds true for IBM > Google > Facebook > ...
I met my wife on the internet, on a chat site I created back in 1995, we have a beautiful son, I’ve made countless friends through the internet, had a fantastic 25+ year career.
I guess I’m saying that the internet has been awesome for this family.
That said, I do agree that it has been co-opted in ways that are not good by a few nefarious players.
I think I would probably be making a Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc competitor that night. They exist because people want them to exist, even though they have some bad parts. It's much more effective to work to make them better than to just throw them out.
I would open up their APIs instead. Allow everyone to write their own interoperable frontend or backend. That levels the playing field, allows everyone to compete on the strength of their interface instead of the size of their captive audience.
As you say, the service fills a need (perceived or otherwise). It's the size of the network, not necessarily the service itself, that causes the problem. Make the service a protocol, and move it back into the (web 1.0) fold.
It's a great idea, but I suggest using IndieGoGo and set up the campaign to keep the money for the unlikely event if the campaign fails. Alternatively as a stretch goal add Medium to the bucket too.
We're marking the 50th anniversary at King's College London with an evening of critical reflections by the Department of Digital Humanities, next Wednesday 6 November. Open to all!
Completed my MSc at KCL in August and my topic had to do with coming up with a solution for the issues being discussed here. I think I'll be attending this!
327 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadIt'd be kinda cool if HN had reddit-like flairs for stories so you could tag them as "no-incognito" or "soft-paywall" so you knew what not to bother clicking on.
It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship rather than a consensual one.
Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be like in a parallel timeline where that happened?
As much as I loathe ads, I am still surprised ad blockers work: That vastly more websites haven't simply made it impossible to view them without either seeing the ads or paying money/subscribing.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n...
I don't disagree with some of what the author is attempting to propose, but it's not thought out at all well or clearly, which is a let-down.
It didn't turn into the idealized vision that the author apparently had for it, but that's not unusual.
when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest.
now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.
Meaning, there is no WWW anymore. (Just a bunch of isolated load-on-demand apps distributed by a network.)
Edit: Is this why Google Chrome is hiding the "www." sub-domain prefix, because it doesn't apply anymore? ;-)
I'm not disagreeing with your appraisal - in fact I probably agree with it - but I do find it deeply and painfully ironic to read, given the entire foundation of Google's being - PageRank - is based on analyses of the web of other people's links.
It seems like the parasite doesn't realise the damage it's causing the host.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/social-networks-apps-killing-o...
First (at least for us, for other people there would be another "first") were the basic webpages done in Frontpage or Dreamweaver (if you had enough RAM), uploaded to free webservers like Tripod, Lycos, Geocities, copying and pasting scripts found out there to remove popups and iframes, reading Photoshop tutorials to do some effects or gifs animations. Everything were more crafted, it took more time to do these kind of things (now everything is an app or a drag and drop).
Then came the second version of the internet. Everything was a bit "more pro" - even amateur fansites payed for their hosting, they had forums, online chats, etc. The open source community allowed this. From Wordpress with its themes to phpBB2 forums, vBulletin, etc. Oh, I miss those days.
Then slowly all of that was lost. Nowadays we only have social accounts for things. Fansites? Only accounts on Twitter, INstagram, YouTuber. Ask an INfluencer if they have their own website. What for? Everything is centralized.
My dad, who started using a smartphone just 2 or 3 years ago, doesn't fully understand what the internet is. For him, it's just a set of apps (Whatsapp, Facebook, and the website of his fav newspaper). Outside that he doesn't understand there is (or there was) a full world of websites with a lot of contents.
It makes me sad because "the original internet" will be never be like what we experienced. I don't know who to blame for, tho. If I were in the shoes of Facebook or Twitter's founders I would have done the same. But they definitely have eaten all the webpages around them.
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 ad needs its own website.
The "original Internet" is still there, and I dare say more people are using it than back in the 90s. It's just that a lot more people are also using the newer stuff that you don't like.
And that's fine.
I'd warrant a tiny fraction of users have their own blogs now compared to a decade ago?
If you lived through Eternal September, you kind of knew this was coming.
But again, just because plenty of people consume, and plenty of companies cater mostly to the consumers, doesn't mean there isn't another world out there for those who look.
Or these new things interest them more and they don't like it. Like a frustrating addiction.
E.g. if you were to search "pug lovers" two decades ago, you might find blogs posts about pugs, people's personal sites filled with images and stories of their own pugs, a small community pug-loving, pug-adopting as its own forum.
Now the first page of Google for "pug lovers" shows: a Facebook page, an Amazon page, a Pinterest page, two Etsy pages, two bespoke (catering towards dogs) storefronts, and one cute site (http://pugdogclub.org.uk/gallery/pug-lovers/).
There's no objective better or worse - people want the things all the new top results provide - but I know which era of results I prefer.
It's just capitalism, put a fence around something, sell access, keep people ignorant of what they're missing.
It's impossible for things to stay good under unrestrained capitalism because there's always some [even very minor] deleterious action that can be exploited for profit (financial or control). Those actions tend to proliferate and cascade.
The people creating content, stupid simple websites, blogs, catalogs or very niche websites are still there, it's just not that obvious that they are there.
I think it went /okay/.
I strongly disagree that it's a special case, and I strongly disagree that there are only few websites left that feel like part of a bigger something. I think you are romanticizing the past (as most people do with most things they remember from their youth - remember when kids' TV shows were actually good?).
I also remember these days as the days where we had to be very, very nice to other people and play by their rules (universities, free hosters, ...) in order to get something published online. Domain names were expensive. $5 cloud hosting? I don't think so.
I mean, I get what you mean - but I simply cannot agree.
Edit: Regarding availability of webspace, back then some for personal use usually came with an e-mail account for free (but you usually had to pay for this e-mail account, as free e-mail wasn't yet normal.) And, you could find full-fledged dedicated web-space for about $5/month. (Personally, I have been working for/with ISPs since 1996 and am hosting a personal website since 1999, before this using free webspace, which was provided either by the university or the employer.)
Edit #2: Who remembers tilde-addresses (www.domain.com/~<account>/)? – These were usually free webspace.
I'm not so sure about that. This site isn't that different from stuff like reddit or tumblr at it's heart, even if the level of discussion/quality of posts is higher. If you distilled these types of sites even further, it's really not all that different from social media like facebook or instagram. The only difference is the type of content shared and the fact that facebook and instagram are usually used with you being "yourself" rather than just a username. Then again, enough people on hackernews link their profiles to their own personal websites/linkedins/etc. that even that distinction isn't so sharp.
P.S.: Here's an exemplary link to what was once the major FirstClass node in my country, which first migrated to the web and then became obsolescenced [is this a word?] by Facebook (the tagline reads "forum for politics and society", operational 11.11.1992 - 1.12.2012): http://blackbox.at
Even when looking at reddit in the western world, most people don't click the links, they stay on reddit.
I would say we did get something wrong by not regulating enough and allowing companies to monopolize the internet and further to act as private intelligence agencies with no legal liability for the data stored.
I take issue with the author mentioning blockchain though. Im not going to derail the thread but everyone should look into datproject as the future: https://blog.datproject.org/2018/01/16/dat-privacy-models/
Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is up for discussion, of course :-)
Some say the 2000s. For me it was the late 90s. For others, "eternal september" marked the end of the golden age - 1993. And I'm sure the current crop of children will say it was the 2010s.
I think the only common thread here is that the internet changes. And people don't like change. What is new is bad, what was old was good.
I've felt this too. Example: I made a pointless little humor website that got mentioned on HN once. I got a bunch of nice replies, and a few thousand visits that day. Since that day, none. Zero other than robots, literally.
I'm not complaining that it didn't go viral, I'm saying, in the old days, a brief spurt of popularity translated into a trickle of ongoing traffic, because people shared links to sites in a way they don't really do now. Links pages don't exist anymore (unless they're SEO spam). Slashdot and boingboing are just news now. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet used to be a valuable thing, and now it isn't.
In the early days of the web if you put some time into making a funny site there just weren't all that many other funny things to link to. You were one in 1k or in 10k. But now there are so many other options, many of which publish new funny things every day, that you're one in 100k or in 1M.
A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet it still a valuable thing (and more or less the premise of HN, Reddit, etc) but the bar is higher.
(This is a good thing!)
I know it sounds like I'm whining, I'm really not. All I can say is, if you weren't there, it's hard to describe how much "I found a neat site" was part of the currency of social interaction online twenty years ago. To get a dozen positive comments and emails but no shares or links was just not a thing that happened. People shared the urls to weird/funny/awesome things the way they share memes today. And I guess that change is not surprising - memes don't have ads, don't have google analytics, don't beg to put you on a mailing list, etc.
Disappointing article. I don't need this negativity in my life.
This reminds me of Steven Pinker who goes around saying, please stop whining; some/many/most/all things are better than they used to be! while somehow neglecting the fact that to the degree things are better, they usually are because people didn't stop whining.
If you're one of the few privileged elites who benefited from the internet, congrats! You're a very small minority.
Let's not undersell this, it has been 3 years.
> We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties — which means pretty much everyone.
That "everyone" also includes bad actors.
That's a non-starter for building a system that can serve all people on the planet, so it's not the right approach. There is no way back; the only way is forward, informed by the past, but recognizing the weaknesses of its origins as well as its strengths.
weren't they all working for the .mil?
Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" is a satisfactory history of that era, up to the near-present, albeit with a clear political perspective.
There were plenty of us there who were accidental visitors, curious kids who found ourselves in this interesting world. Kleinrock mentions this briefly in the original article, but there was a high degree of trust and optimism on the early internet, and if one was technically inclined and a little outgoing and generally a good egg, it wasn't hard to get an account somewhere.
When I first logged into MIT-ITS around 1982, coming in over dialup as a teenager calling a modem bank near the Pentagon, the login-failed message said something like, "Sorry, that username does not exist. Would you like an account?" It was RMS himself who gifted me (and a lot of others) a free account for the asking.
It's a hard thing to explain to people who weren't there -- I think this is why so many people in this thread see Kleinrock as naive or worse. My girlfriend never believes me when I try to explain the early internet; it seems an impossibility to her, as if I was talking about some pre-historic hunter/gatherer culture.
> Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
I don't know the solution. I'm not sure anyone does, or even that there is one. Maybe this is why the rest of the universe seems so empty.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that most failures to communicate happen between people speaking the same language.
Often overlooked in my opinion is the significance of the unseen barriers to true, high fidelity communication. The ability to translate a written message from one language to another is surely beneficial, but even when sent between two parties who speak the same language, how successful is the "communication" really? Might we be vastly overestimating the magnitude of fidelity (the degree to which something is an accurate copy or translation of something else), where "something else" is often an extremely nuanced idea, with (often unseen) inter-relations to many other nuanced ideas?
For the communication of any given idea, the sender must first attempt to get some reasonable conceptual handle on the idea themself (depending on the complexity of the topic, this is massively error prone right off the bat), pack it into a message in a relatively (compared to the complexity of reality itself) simplistic language (that they likely have a rather imperfect grasp of), put (using flawed communication/articulation skills) that message into some medium of transport (text, audio-only, verbal discussion via teleconference, in person verbal discussion, audio only presentation, audiovisual presentation, etc), each of which comes with it's own variety of shortcomings, and then the receiver must do all the same in reverse, subject to all the same problems, plus some additional issues like the human mind's tendency to subconsciously supplement received communications with additional information from mental storage, a process not detectable to the conscious mind. (This is what they said, but what did they really mean?).
It seems to me a big part of the problem is that we've invested so much brainpower into figuring out how the physical world works, resulting in incredible technical achievements and tools that now have extremely widespread use, but we've invested a relative pittance into understanding how human minds and societies work. Just as nuclear weapons are dangerous in the hands of those who lack sufficient wisdom, might there be something similar going on with mass communication technologies? How would one even know the answer to such a question?
Also I disagree on the "create a new crypto system" to solve our issues trope. When talking about stolen databases I would argue it is a problem of not using state of the art to protect privacy as there is realistically no incentive to do so.
These sorts of policies will completely annihilate small sites. Only large corporations and institutions with their own legal teams will have websites.
Isn't it easier to not use someone's PII?
I think the article is correct to assume the internet will become more balkanized and countries once they gain the ability to will control their internet very tightly
Did you have some particular ability in mind here that countries don't already have? Countries sensor the web, turn off access to services (social media), and such, already.
I can imagine on-the-fly editing might help countries, but can't really see what else you might have in mind?
The Intenet is only one piece though. The other piece is how digital technology makes the production of media cheap and ubiquitous. This breaks the monopoly of media organizations on production, just as the internet and hosted web services break the monopoly on distribution.
Reader mode works fine.
Wrong guess. This happens multiple times per day, thanks to the GDPR legislation in the EU. Annoying, but also correct. I take great effort to disable everything I don't like (ad tracking in particular), and like the article says I should:
> "You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards."
There are increasingly websites I refuse to use because they don't work in a way I consider acceptable.
Some major websites are surprisingly broken. Twitter on Firefox on Android, for example, is notoriously bad.
It would be nice, if those properties, which can be applied globally, were already integrated in the browser as a preferences setting (and enforced by law). Meaning, privacy concerns must become part of the protocol. (What about some kind of 451 response by the browser?)
There is a lot of conflict in the world. As the pool of people on the network grows and changes they will bring conflict with them into this arena. It's a kind of naivete that sees the homogenous origin of the network as a better time.
So Thank you for creating the internet all you tremendous people. I personally wouldn't trade it. Can we fix a few things ? Sure we can. But it has not gone wrong. It has changed lives, mine included for the better.
Hell, without the internet I wouldn’t even have known it’s possible to get here. Both physically and in mindset.
qed
I was so depressed before I came to Silicon Valley...it took years of therapy to overcome that
Side note: I'm in a hotel room right now overlooking San Fran as the morning traffic starts to pick up. It really is a shit-hole city.
For instance, $20k/year is a very decent upper-middle class salary in Poland.
A German and a Slovenian talk about life and work. The German says, "You know, life's pretty good. I make 5k a month, send my kids to school, put 2k in my mortgage, spend 1k on groceries, and there's plenty left over"
And the Slovenian says "Wow that's cool. What happens with the other 2k?"
"Oh we don't ask that in Germany. It's impolite"
So the SLovenian goes "Ah that's nice. We got it good in Slovenia too. I make 2k a month, send my kids to school, put 1.5k in my mortgage, 1k for groceries, and still got enough for a 500 payment on my Audi"
"Wait ... where's the extra 1k coming from?"
"We don't ask that in Slovenia. It's impolite"
I'm not saying I disagree with it necessarily, I don't even understand what you're suggesting enough to disagree or agree with it. It's definitely not _obvious_ to me that the internet has somehow lifted so many people out of poverty, I just don't understand what you mean.
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.
(For starters, I don't even know if fewer people are "in poverty" now than pre-internet or not!)
Your suspicion is wrong. GDP per capita has increased significantly in emerging markets where cheap labor creates these "new types of products", with China being the prominent example
> I don't even know if fewer people are "in poverty" now than pre-internet or not!
That is a well known fact, you'll just have to google it.
> I am gonna want some analysis based on actual numbers of some kind that shows the internet did those things
There are countless analyses on the benefits of globalization which was enabled in part by the advance of near-instantaneous telecommunication
Every innovation has consequences short and long term.
Corporations have lobbied to take away Net Neutrality, and to institute throttling and make running a personal web site much more expensive. Social media sites de-prioritize regular users under corporate (paid) marketing posts...
These days you have to pay to be seen, the Internet was originally based on having everyone on an equal playing field, and now everything is being based around the new rules to prevent us from going back.
The Internet is becoming less effective because it's no longer an equal playing field. Its becoming much more expensive and complex over time to run an independent web presence, when in the past it was simple and inexpensive, I think that's the major issue.
I wish that were true. It feels more like the internet is a reflection of a very small number of greedy, amoral people from the bay area.
If your site requires any scripting at all, it's not a "simple web site".
If you want to use a platform like WIX, sure it's easy, but the minute they run broke and need to shut down you're screwed. Also having your own (independent) domain pointing to a web site that you made is very costly to a layman without an enterprise account...
There is literally no impact on personal web sites. You neither pay more, nor are you throttled.
"In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages," he wrote. "A huge advantage for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in front of people which stifles innovation. This is what's at stake, and that's why we have to save net neutrality."[1]
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/net-neutrality-portugal-how-...
The crappy swings at CaTV-style service bundling that the telcos have whiffed so far such as Uverse failed to grab enough momentum to jack any of the internet streaming video limelight from youtube, netflix, or really anything from anything else at all. Who really uses Comcast's, or even Verizon FIOS' bundled voice service? A gas station before they get fed up?
Also, please consider Verizon's NXDOMAIN[0]: Purposefully hijacking RFC behavior in order to slurp in a few extra ad clicks off of granny. And if that doesn't just scream "Corporate Governance", I've heard they know which porn I visit. I mean, no surprise here, but my point is that while I really like my car insurance and recommend it to my friends, boy howdy, I have never enjoyed interacting with any telco for any reason, ever.
But, I wonder--if the FCC had never bothered with regulating away the gale-force of swarming telcos voraciously borging away at the PCS spectrum in the 1990s, would MVNE services even be available today? And if they weren't, or were just really shabby, How would The Bell Collective choose to market its services to the low end of the cube market? I mean would they program customers to remit extra currency units for a special Verizon speed-charge port for your alcove or something? Their service couldn't possibly be that bad. Everybody here would be out of the job.
Nowadays, AT&T Uverse keeps putting on for some reason, meanwhile at Comcast and Verizon, their top lobbyists have miraculously cured their chronic internet content aversion syndrome, commence with bundling Netflix. On the other side of the cubefarm, just past that one weird closet nobody ever goes into, Verizon Wireless is slowing some of its MVNO customers.[1] This is fair play too, since two years ago I'd say. Who is to blame them for propping up their own quality of service at their competitors expense if there is no regulatory recourse?
I realize that Verizon Wireless and Verizon Verizon are not the same Verizon, for some Verizon, even though they're both owned by Verizon. Regarding Verizon, I have met many former and current Verizon customers. I assure you, we are very certain that neither Verizon nor Verizon Verizon would deign to charge you any less out of the goodness of its heart.
Helpfully, they seem quite eager to itemize regulatory fees and taxes.
So I'd say you're triple-right about looking at Verizon-er, uh, I mean Portugal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking#Manipulation_by_...
[1] How MVNOs compare to Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint: https://www.tutela.com/blog/best-mvno-us-2018-consumer-cellu...
I wish more people internalised this fact.
Everything has consequences. I am pretty sure you would prefer the life you live now than what even kings live 300 years ago.
Maybe this can count as more of a smartphone thing an internet thing.. but it's still largely an internet thing that would allow someone in a rough spot to still be able to connect with people online and look/apply for jobs.
Not that I know the answer, but I would have to see a source on this. Why would a device that may increase access to job postings, but a non-homeless job candidate is much more likely to have than a homeless person, increase the chances of said homeless person in getting a job? I'm not even sure that the ability to access job postings is the main problem there.
Yes, it does help quite a bit. It’s a $50-100 setup and even without data they can go to any million places with free WiFi and get emails, call job listings, keep in touch with family members. It’s a pretty big deal to them.
1. Comparing the chances of a homeless person in the modern world with a smartphone, to a homeless person in the modern world without a smartphone.
2. Comparing the chances of a homeless person in the modern world with a smartphone, to a homeless person in a hypothetical internetless world (where noone can have a smartphone).
The org you volunteered with dealt with comparison #1 above. We're discussing comparison #2.
>>>Not that I know the answer, but I would have to see a source on this. Why would a device that may increase access to job postings, but a non-homeless job candidate is much more likely to have than a homeless person, increase the chances of said homeless person in getting a job? I'm not even sure that the ability to access job postings is the main problem there.
>> [My reply about first hand seeing it]
>We're discussing comparison #2.
I think whatever meaning you had in another thread hasn't been in the one I replied to.
That said, your experience provides an important data point too. I would be curious to know whether it's the phone access or the "among other things" that you refer to, which I assume means other kinds of aid, training, and support, that provides most of the value in them finding a job.
Is the phone worth more than the sleeping bag? Depends on the temperature. But, yes for the most part the phone is helpful. I would guess a lot get sold, but in those cases they are typically going to someone that does actually want it. Let’s be honest, a Samsung whatever 5 isn’t going to be traded for a 5th of whiskey and sold eventually to some highschooler, they wouldn’t be caught dead with that phone.
People have this impression that homeless are all 60-80 year old bums harassing you for change, there are a lot that have jobs, live in their cars, and could really use a phone, even with their families, or live in other people’s houses. The invisible homeless.
Do they? How?
Are you suggesting that online jobs website make it easier to find a job? A homeless person with a smartphone isn't the only one with access to the jobs website. Nor does the existence of such a website intrinsically create the jobs behind the ads on it.
A sibling commenter talks about the existence of the internet facilitating job creation through other means, but I don't think homeless people having smartphones has much bearing on this.
It's worth noting that income inequality has steadily increased in the last ~40 years at leastm (in the US), so talk of the internet lifting people out of poverty has to be considered in that context.
There is a silent class of homeless people whom I am not clear you are including when you state "homeless", and that is people living on cars and/or "couch-surfing". On the occasion I've seen it mentioned in articles, it seems that it is nearly impossible to come up with reliable numbers on the actual population of homeless people living under such conditions due to their transitory nature.
It is likely true that the genuinely destitute homeless people, which is comprised in large part of people who suffer severe psychological and mental disorders, are only minimally aided by cell phones. I suspect the way they actually benefit is they carry on their persons a means for those trying aid them to find them as well as a life line they can tug, should they so choose.
"Inequality" is a divisive term with no genuine academic definition. Another correlation is that as "inequality" has risen, so has the greatest reduction in people living in subsistence farming and abject poverty in history of mankind, a conclusion that would suggest that "inequality" positively correlates with greater human flourishing, but the real purpose of my mentioning this is to demonstrate that "inequality" is a largely meaningless metric, by itself, used for manipulating people not familiar with broader understanding of what has occurred for so many billions of people on the planet.
Yes they could contact an employer, but
Can they show up reliably on-time? Public transit costs money -> Homeless -> no address, so can't use a bank, cashing of checks can be done, but only if there is credit offered by an employer, or through charity of others. So from the get go, there's a geographic limitation w.r.t body-here types of work.
What about mental/computer work? Assume a smartphone. Still homeless, so no address means no bank. Could send a check to a P.O. Box maybe; but if there is company hardware you need to be vested with, that may not work out well. BYOD is a thing, and can work out, this is truly a success in that regard, but again, lack of address complicates things.
I mean, you aren't totally wrong, but I'm just not convinced that the homeless jobless experience has been revolutionized to the point people in poverty have been uplifted by the billions. If anything, infrastructure automation has allowed more to be done with less in terms of previously manual jobs, and enabled more efficient fund extraction from the average consumer through economies of scale. Especially in terms of rent seeking. If you look at the number of contracts entered into over a lifetime as a metric, software/the Internet has allowed an explosion in terms of the "one-sided contract" and has led to a social tilt away from the original purpose of the construct which was to serve as a meeting of the minds between equals.
Essentially, it's allowed for the carve out of unethical contracts at massive scale, and consolidation of capital intensive workflows through automation and standardization.
Can people learn and share? Yes. Are people all uplifted equally? I'd say no, and certain populations in particular are likely worse off. I'm thinking Kenya's predatory debt crisis, China's maturing surveillance state, and even the United States and U.K. are getting uncomfortably close to that event horizon.
Marketers ruined everything. We just wanted to be able to learn stuff. They had to turn that around and take it to the unhealthy extreme in the name of targeted advertising.
Thankfully, the neighborhood itself was tolerant enough to let them be -- I never saw them being kicked out, and why should they be? They're not making trouble, and life's hard enough if you don't have an address to your name. Give them the small, quiet dignity of a place to stay dry from the rain and browse reddit.
Not to mention, ignoring any other measures of quality of life or progress besides raw dollars. It's judging capitalism via a metric internal to capitalism. Pure circular reasoning. E.g. subsistence farmers in rural areas made 0$ and were "poor" by that metric, now they work 14h a day at factories for 2$ a day and are "not in poverty" anymore. Congratulatory handshakes all around!
1. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-home-production-and-consu...
Almost none of the desperately poor had internet between 1990-2000, yet poverty fell steeply.
Look at the US. We went from ~0% internet penetration in 1990 to 75% in 2017. How much have real wages changed since then?
We fantasize about an impoverished person learning a new skill, but it's not the reality.
So I don't have exact data and technically I am guessing the impact but considering how many people live in countries like India, China, African countries, I would assume internet has helped millions out of poverty because without internet, they would not be able to do things to make a living that they do today. Go to upwork.com for example and see ppl from all over the world making a decent living for themselves even if it is low wages for rich countries.
To me the sentiment of GPs post felt like "internet makes it better on average for all of us". You're "now I very easy can find even cheaper workers" doesn't support that, even though it certainly is an improvement to a select few at the very bottom.
1. "a select few" is disingenuous. A lot of people have benefited from it.
2. One could say that morally, the people "at the very bottom" deserve more help than "the broader local population in richer countries".
2. Its nice you want to help the people who have it the worst. But you better be ready for the consequences, like a fascist getting 23% of votes a few days ago in a local german election. What people feel is important. Yes, the policy might be raising living standards of everyone. But if it predominantly helps those at the top of the capitalist system and some "few" people far away, then people will feel screwed over and demand change. Though by now we seem to get closer to "revolution". I'd prefer not to live through a revolution.
Just the tip of the iceberg, the security services facilitate the criminal underworld playing its part keep GDP up, lots of experiments being done on people individually right now, most of it messing with peoples belief systems which in extreme you see with muslim terrorists carrying out acts. I know I've had similar done to me.
Jimmy Saville was a state apparatus intelligence tool, nothing more nothing less and look at how the state labels him a pedo now!
Knowledge was much harder to ackuire and more valuable, and it was harder to compare prices.
That led to an environment where many, both business owners and employees could akuire some valuable competitive advantage, and make a decent living.
Now that's much harder. Significant competitive advantage(or significant bargaining power) rarely exists, for most.
Most have little economic power. And psychologically that's probably more important than relative wealth.
I can imagine that easily. I know others differ, but is all social media went away tomorrow, my life would be none the poorer for it.
I just personally stopped. I use reddit sometimes but otherwise I have been much happier for it.
Easy, that's my life right now
>I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse or outdated.
That all fits in the original, "utopian" if you want, view of the internet espoused in the article. You can do that with email, IMs like IRC, personal webpages. Facebook-style social media, with its surveillance, addictiveness, toxic feedback loops, is irrelevant to this task.
Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a derogatory geopolitical term for the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or uncooperative with one another.
It's about the origins of the internet, starting with the birth of arpanet and going from there.
I like it, it's interesting to know how it came to be.
This cycle is perhaps fundamental to all __human__ inventions and core to the theory of disruption.
This played out out the same way with Bitcoin. Ethereum had to step in to disrupt that cycle and as ETH grows to that size, some thing else needs to come in and disrupt. Same holds true for IBM > Google > Facebook > ...
I guess I’m saying that the internet has been awesome for this family.
That said, I do agree that it has been co-opted in ways that are not good by a few nefarious players.
Still, it’s not all bad.
As you say, the service fills a need (perceived or otherwise). It's the size of the network, not necessarily the service itself, that causes the problem. Make the service a protocol, and move it back into the (web 1.0) fold.
Facebook would probably be a net benefit for me if it weren't for the political manipulation it has enabled.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/happy-packet-switching-ticket...