Ask HN: Jaded about the internet?
Are you jaded about The Internet? I've been online 20 years now and I feel like I've reached the pinnacle of what The Internet is about and have in a way reached the end of The Internet. I've seen just about everything you could want, and participated in many communities over the years, and I feel everything is just 'samey' now and follows the same pattern. It's hard for anything on The Internet to stand out and be unique (at least for me). YMMV on this.
Now with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all the things, which is good to see, but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it. This is the shiny thing I look forward to on the web, but it's still early days. Other than that, the web seems kinda boring lately.
Are you jaded about the web too? I'd like to hear your thoughts!
114 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadHate to disappoint, but decentralization won't happen at any real scale. The "sameiest" thing of all will be the manner by which the democratizing hope of technology is once again dashed as it's recaptured by capital (as with the Internet itself). It's already happening.
See: all of the VCs currently touting Web3, NFTs, etc as if they discovered it.
There will be a few new winners, but they will largely win through centralization, and will frequently have the support of incumbents/capital.
Most people seem to think that computers, the nodes of the internet, can't ever be made secure. I believe they're wrong, but still have to wait a decade or so before the basic design defect in most operating systems is corrected.
Most computers "on" the internet aren't fully privileged nodes, but rather second class citizens with "access" to "content", instead of being a fully functional computing peer. I'm not sure if this will ever be corrected.
Humans are always going to fall for scams, but that's not specific to the internet, so we can ignore that in the judgement of the nature of the internet. It speeds, and widens, communications between people, when done properly.
I think things will get better in the next few decades, if we don't fall victim to our knowledge of physics (nuclear weapons) or biology (gain of function research).
[Edit/Append] It's extremely important that we don't lose free access to general purpose computing, if we want to maintain our freedoms in general. With general purpose computing, you can build a sneakernet, or your own internet.
Whether future developments are "better" or "worse" is immaterial. Things will unfold as they are.
Humans fundamentally make choices that reflect their values and biases. They can choose to: build, consume, get scammed, be vigilant, etc.
I am certain that it will be interesting to witness and participate in the new world. What a time to be alive.
Why? Why wait for a while? Why is "leveraging" your goal for it? What does this even mean? 20 years ago were you waiting for things to get fleshed out online before you leverage it? Whatever that means.
No I don't find the web dull. Been here 23 years, always found fascinating stuff. Yes it is different now but also we have aged.
> Other than that, the web seems kinda boring lately.
Sorry but I think it is you not the web here.
You can level the same complaints to wearing fast fashion, picking which city to live in, and even choosing a tech stack to implement on. The homogeneity you're dismissing is what most people want in the first place. Decentralization won't change any of that.
No I'm not bored. But it's just a tool, for me.
There's a lot of fun stuff going on and the future looks bright.
Hopefully the domination of centralized SaaS of the last decade will mostly be an anachronism of our time, and the original hope of a decentralized p2p web will happen after all. We were trapped in a local maximum of thin clients and accounts, but maybe this will be the way out.
The regular web was pretty scammy back then too and the spam problem is arguably what resulted in a lot of centralization (something urbit IDs fix).
Wake me up when September ends ;)
As a more earnest reply to OP I guess you could say I have been "jaded" about the internet/web since the late 2000s. The rise of social media I never particularly cared for. I enjoy[ed] a very small part of it but the negativity is quite draining and it is far too easy to get sucked into a negative echo chamber than a positive one.
With regards to blockchain and related technologies 'driving Web 3.0' I can't say I care all that much. I think some of it is great but a lot of the hyped parts, such as NFTs, are useless.
Yes, yes I know there are some sensible use cases for NFTs (such as concert tickets) but all this JPG NFT non-sense just makes it look like a bunch of adults getting excited over digital beanie babies.
I guess you could say I do miss the internet from the late 90s to the late 2000s. Perhaps it is just rose tinted memories of when I was a teenager but the rise of Napster then P2P then Bittorrent, then web video services, etc. along with high speed internet was truly amazing.
The early years of Facebook was also pretty nice to reconnect/keep in touch with some people but I would say I 'grew out' of Facebook within about a year, maybe two. I realised I had lost touch with those people for a reason and even with Facebook, Twitter, etc. I lost touch again.
At least it sounded good on paper
Are you jaded about music? I've been listening to the radio for 20 years now and I feel like I've reached the pinnacle of what music is about and have in a way reached the end of music. I've listened to just about everything you could want, and went to many concerts over the years, and I feel everything is just 'samey' now and follows the same pattern. It's hard for new music to stand out and be unique (at least for me). YMMV on this.
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I think this perspective is common and makes sense. Many of us feel it. I am not sure crypto/web3 is the solution. To bring web3/crypto into this analogy, is web3 a new way to decentralize record companies and put power into the "bands" rather than the corporations? If so, then it won't fix the problem. Centralization still finds great stuff and doesn't hinder creativitiy and bands from making music. It eventually finds them and helps change the landscape. However, if crypto is a new way to make music (app platform) with brand new instruments and new sounds.. then maybe it is the future that will take a long time. Artists are still in the basement trying to figure out how to operate these things and get them to make cool sounds
All tribes wax and wane: exciting, rebellious and pure in their early days, bureaucratic and suffocating in their later days -- often giving way to a new generation of tribes which cannibalizes the mindshare they once cannibalized from previous dinosaurs.
It's the circle of life, and technology accelerates but ultimately doesn't alter the very human incentives of the game. Perhaps that's my own being jaded speaking, though!
If you listen to the radio yes. But it's also objectively different. Music up until the 90's was 99% played by humans who had spent years mastering their instruments. There was something more "alive" even in basic pop music. Now you can just press a button and get 3 minutes of a repeating drum pattern and/or bass line.
Granted there's a whole lot of complexity in making good pop music (or "machine music" in general), I'm not downplaying that, it's just very different to (in my mind) the more "personal" music (having to work creatively within the restrictions of the musicians/instruments as well as recording techniques) that came before the 90's.
For example jazz is still going strong and constantly coming up with new exciting artists and music.
Some sort of standardized metaverse protocol is absolutely the next layer that will put the current "internet" to shame.
Some time within the next two decades, most people will be wearing AR glasses and a metaverse will begin to take shape.
Metaverse likely won't obviate the need for traditional internet for some time, but we'll laugh at our arrogance in thinking that we experienced the peak of the internet at any point beforehand.
The ultimate abstraction is not hyperlinked text on a flat panel, but objects, places, and people in our physical reality. Eventually flat-panel internet and UX won't even be a thing.
Our modern two-dimensional flat-panel compute interfaces are ephemeral and will barely be a blink of an eye on the grand scale. Decades from now, we'll look at the iPhone and laptop like people look at hole-punch computers today. Because they really will be that cumbersome compared to peak AR/VR.
Anyone remembers the efforts at realistic skeuomorphism in UI?
You might be comfortable with 2D, just like people before computers were comfortable not using computers. But 2D flatscreens will absolutely be left in the dust.
Having to buy third-party lenses that fit in front of Valve Index headset, works, but it's far from perfect. To have a pair of glasses which act as LCD displays, am I going to pay extra to have them crafted to my prescription?
The human eyes are great devices when you have perfect vision; to those with malfunctioning ones, everything is a crappy experience.
Yeah, no... that was true until Facebook came along and decided they owned "the metaverse," and then the hype train suddenly and all but universally decided they did, before they even did anything.
Facebook is going to write the standard and the protocol and it probably won't be game changing in a way anyone likes.
A lot of private companies write protocols that eventually become standards.
Small forums worked because a lot of people soaked up the cost of running a little web page on a box that wasn't very expensive per year. A lot of them eventually, decided they didn't want to spend the money or time and hand off to a new maintainer.
The new maintainer looks to (reasonably) expand the community and embrace new technologies, e.g. live chat, video. This creates 10x the work at least and eventually they give up and pack it in.
Now, unfortunately the work to take over the community on it's current state is much larger than the original site and so it eventually dies without someone wanting to work a full time job without the pay...
I miss the optimistic lose communities of the 90s when I was growing up. Not to mention the communities on topics which are now no longer of interest to a wide audience. The amount of organic search needed to rediscover any new forums now is also unfortunately a new barrier to entry there never used to be :(
You're just a product of your time - like me and everyone else
The 2010s have been dark. It's easy to see in mass media, which is a reflection of people self perceptions and interest: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheNewTens
>> For the first time in over 70 or 80 years, the political and economic climate has impacted the socio-cultural in an inescapable fashionnote , becoming more watered-down and risk-averse compared to the "alternative" trends of the late 90s and 2000s,
>> On the one hand, the early years of the decade were marked by escapist fare, such as Glee, the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, young adult-geared romantic dramas and "shiny reboots". However, sordid settings and cynical attitudes thrived in media, reflecting the turbulent sign of the times. Dystopian fiction (The Hunger Games, The Last of Us, Divergent) and horror films (The Purge) served as allegories for the growing social and economic divisions in American society. Dark cable dramas (Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad) took away the spotlight from broadcast network shows, and several franchises got acclaimed grim-and-gritty interpretations in the vein of The Dark Knight Trilogy.
I don't think this is "I remember the sky was brighter" or any other common misunderstandings. I follow some simple forums still and am aware yes, they are technically inferior and have issues and even getting https on some sites is effort due to the internet having evolved around old code.
Some do evolve and adapt, and saying "I prefer the way they were" would be closer to what you think I'm saying. The communities I miss have gone. There is no subreddit covering the same topics afaik and as such that probably means I should reach out and start to find these communities myself, but I miss the old forum interactions, hence why I follow other forums.
There are a few still out there who have survived the purge, but only because the people/person behind it have invested personal time/effort/money over the year out of their personal commitment
It's a tool. A substrate. An infrastructure.
All of these things go through a "The sky's the limit!" excitement, when they are first introduced. Electricity, TV, and even nuclear fission, were greeted in a similar manner.
I'm glad it's here. I use it all the time, but I don't feel disappointed that it turned to shit, because I never expected it to be anything more.
http://hmpg.net
https://www.internetisshit.org
NFTs just seem to add an extra layer of bullshit where every transaction happens via a bunch of people wasting an absurd amount of energy to perform useless computation in hopes of being the one who wins the lottery for some cryptocurrency. Don't tell me your favorite crypto's moving off of PoW, it's wasting incredible amounts of energy right now and moving off of that relies on getting a consensus from people who are financially incentivized to stay on PoW.
(The most damning sentiment about NFTs I've seen is that there are two groups who are historically at the forefront of new ways to get paid on the internet: porn makers and furries. And neither of them is into NFTs.)
The first implementation of NFT's is for artwork but that's just one implementation. When you step back and look at the actual technology, it's introduced a paradigm shift for how we think of objects on the internet. Before NFT's, everything on the internet was fungible, if it existed on the internet, you could copy it. Sure there are things like DRM, but that is just an abstraction on top of a fungible thing that tries to make that thing non-fungible.
I don't know where the technology will take us, or what it will look like in 20, 30 or 40 years, but when you think about the idea that everything up until now on the internet has been copyable and we are just starting to figure out how to actually give a digital thing ownership, that will change how we look at just about everything on the internet, from DRM to authentication and many other aspects. I think when I'm your age (mid 20's now), NFT's will be everywhere and "NFT Artwork" will be looked back on as the very first implementation of the technology, and likely with many jokes about how bad it all was.
Furries pay lots of money to have custom work done of their character. They don’t pay to “own” some random pre-existing art.
And basically everything that NFTs do, a database can do better.
I agree with your sentiment. It is probably the most exciting aspect of the internet, and digital ownership concept has a long and exciting road ahead.
I am also utterly baffled by how this sentiment is met on HN. Thoughtful responses are downvoted, cheap shots against this sentiment rise up. I no longer want to participate in discussions about anything crypto on HN, negativity is too strong.
And there is absolute irony that this is happening on a thread called "Jaded about the internet?".
I'm not really pro or anti-NFT. But, I will say that people frequently champion them by stating potential future use cases. I think it's unfair to do that as a basis for claiming current detractors have it wrong.
Right now most enthusiasts are heavily promoting the primary use case as essentially digitized files (be it JPEG or whatever--but mainly art).
So, that's the current argument, as opposed to some future wherein they supplant x or do y.
I hear you, but not sure who the "strawmen enthusiasts" are. The plain case that's being made for the accessible value of NFTs right now revolves around ownership of digital assets, full-stop.
But, when detractors point out their critiques of this use case, some enthusiasts pivot to "well, that's not all an NFT can do or will ever be". It's kind of slippery, and seems to be the straw-manning here.
>it's pretty clear most of those people don't even know the technical definition of an NFT
It's fair enough to say that NFTs are in their infancy. But, enthusiasts are selling the current use case really, really hard. So, maybe they are undermining your arguments for the future use cases of NFTs more than anyone.
And, really, technical definitions of NFTs (or anything) don't matter WRT adoption. What matters is what's been actually implemented of real value. You can't really fault people for not buying into NFTs based on the present-state. But, if other valuable use cases come to fruition, they'll come running. Thing is, their behavior could be considered rational now and then.
Additionally, this is a standard I don’t see applied to anything else that could be reasonably argued to be on the same level of “dumb” as anti-crypto people claim crypto is. Let’s see the same scrutiny of energy usage applied to every TikTok ever made. Let’s see it applied to the training of massive ML recommender systems that serve no purpose but to better target ads (this is one I have seen from some folks, but nowhere near as much as I’ve seen outrage over crypto energy usage). If someone says “well yeah, but at least those recommender systems have value, which crypto doesn’t!”, sorry, but value for whom? Certainly not users.
I’m disappointed that even on HN, there’s pushback against individual creators of digital content trying to capture some of the value they create. Individuals simply don’t have the resources to use the legal system to go after anonymous people online who steal their work, and they shouldn’t be expected to just give it away for free. So other solutions need to be tried, and NFTs are maybe one potential solution.
And this is how the negativity stays so strong on HN. I get it, I usually just say my opinion on crypto, accept it'll most likely be downvoted, and try not to engage in a back and forth too much, but it's tempting just to let things on here be and have those discussions elsewhere because it's relentless.
Which just makes me wonder what other tech trends people on HN are being intentionally obtuse about.
I don't even mind legit criticism (environmental concerns are worrying for example), it's people saying provably false crap like "it's only used for money laundering and crime" or "it's just the new beanie babies" one line dismissal of a $2 trillion dollar industry (and has a larger market cap than physical silver) that's annoying.
I was personally interested in a bunch of them 5-7 years ago and feel burned when none of them have lived up to their promise and seem technologically impossible to fix.
The main winners of crypto hype have always been the ones selling something while the users get burned. I don't want to see any more crypto news until the focus shifts from making a quick profit to delivering useful services. All crypto news is focused on how you can get in now and profit later. NFTs are the latest part of this. I'd rather read an article on how the new postgres server lets you scale to more users or how UI research has helped accessibility.
That everything has been copyable is the accident that keeps giving. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Digital scarcity, albeit through a novel mechanism, seems antithetical. Very confusing.
This must be the hacker culture version of hippies watching their children grow up to be Young Republicans and yuppies.
I'm not being deliberately obtuse, here, but how is that any different from NFTs?
It's weird because I understand the tech, but not what makes this application compelling.
> we are just starting to figure out how to actually give a digital thing ownership
Isn't copyright already doing that? Certainly the movie and music industries have a strong sense of digital ownership without NFTs.
NFTs so provide an easy path to transfer ownership, but that does nothing to keep the material from being copied any more than copyright does.
What am I missing?
I only just recently learned of this. Younger people are equally unexcited by that bullshit. I saw an artist, who's in her early 20s, always posting the link to her Twitch streams as reply to the Tweet where she'd announce that she's streaming. I asked her about it and she told me that links to other sites never make it into peoples' timelines. She and her boyfriend also write words like Patreon and commission in leetspeak to avoid any issues with those.
And you're absolutely right about NFTs. There is only hate for them among the furry artists that I follow (and there's a lot of them given that's all I'm on Twitter for). They hate the environmental impact. They hate the theft of artwork. They hate the scams. And they just think NFTs are overall pointless.
You will probably be unsurprised to find that I am a furry artist. :)
I'm more bullish on technology in general and some of the software that can enable that (e.g. fusion research, CCS, self-driving cars).
But general purpose computing? The open source scene and people tinkering is cool. The commercial side is just pointless, I can't think of anything _useful_ (as opposed to merely being addictive) in the last ten years.
Whenever I speak to software developers in real life now I get the sense that they're just "not my people". No, I don't want to talk about social media VR, or advanced data mining, or facial recognition or whatever.
Even the more mundane stuff is like... okay, so you work at Amazon. Cool, I like to shop on my high street, err... let's talk about something else then.
It's either environmentalism or alien abductions.
We have moved too quickly during the last 30 years, and we're still not providing better solutions to our users. Not by a lot at least. The IT industry is more focused on solving the problems that we've created for ourself, rather than providing better solution.
I don't care about machine learning, data mining/science, social media, Kubernetes or scaling to 500 million users. Most problems can be solve easier and better with less. It's cool that we can do these things, but they get in the way of creating actual solution in most cases. Oracle makes hardware that allows you to run global businesses or infrastructure for small nations on a 2U server. People seem more interested in running a global marketing platform that will handle the scale of Black Friday, because god forbid that you couldn't tracking customers once a year.
Could we please focus on making good solutions to actual problems? Utilize the resources we already have? Most days I feel like most of my tasks could be solved just as well using 20 year old Unix tools.
Feeling like the work I'm doing is at least somewhat important and/or useful is very important to me, and it's EXTREMELY difficult to find jobs in tech that aren't "make work" and just redoing something that's already been done, but in a slightly different way to try and trick some investors into giving you money for it. It's either that, crypto scams, or fintech.
It's gotten so bad in the past few years that I'm seriously considering a career change. I got into software development because it let me flex my creative muscles while also making money in a secure job. But at this point, the day-to-day is so painful for me that taking a serious pay cut might be worth it for my own sanity. After being in the field for around ten years, it gets pretty obvious where everything is headed and I just don't have the energy for it. I'm so tired of arguing about frameworks, build systems, how to plan and manage work, interpersonal relationships with people who are just entirely full of themselves and think they're doing the Lord's work by writing business-to-business software.
Web is made by humans, there will be dreams, lies, fluff, wins, fails, rot. It's just another organs amongst organs.
I also believe it was an extrapolation of the previous era (as you do) and that like all extrapolation.. it's partly wrong. Being able to talk to gazillions of people is not necessary a boon.
In any case I'm more and more in the process of focusing on disconnected time. Reading, doing, learning and sharing. Especially with the potential climate change acceleration and societal quakes.
ps: about web3, I just wrote a bit about how it might be useful to keep an eye on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370620
>Now with Web3/NFTs/cryptocurrency people are building an abstraction layer on top of the web and want to decentralize all the things, which is good to see, but I want to see all that fleshed out properly before I dive into it and leverage it.
People care about UX not technology. If Web3 has better utility and UX than Web 2.0 then people will switch to it.
I do remember that the more technical content, and all the tiny user created websites about someone's pet trivia, we're more easily found, back in the day. Perhaps it's just a problem of discovery.
For me, the internet is getting more interesting because it is increasingly materialized. It is unbelievable that we can deploy a fleet of battery-powered flying robots, linked over 5G and sharing intelligence while pathing with superhuman precision.
It's sad that in America, IoT/smart cities were more or less a temporary fad, probably having to do with cultural opposition to "surveillance" and low standards of governance. We've only scratched the surface with what's possible with it.
"Web 3" is just a cash grab under the guise of a "blockchain". As an analogy, crypto is a channel on IRC-- it is a topic, people love talking about it, but the underlying tech (IRC protocol, blockchain) isn't being fully utilized, and may never have a solid, widespread commercial application. Yes, governments have adopted some crypto, DAOs are a neat concept, but how many applications are so novel that blockchain is actually the best and/or only application of said tech?
For the "new web" concept, we have yet to see internet for the people, created and curated by people without monetization as their primary motive. Will Gen Z (or whoever come next) be tired of the walled gardens and try to reinvent what the old web was, or will they just be amused by the shadows on the wall of their caves?
Decentralized stock exchanges.