> “That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of the systems of debate and government—what happened to that?”
Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the internet has proven incredibly useful for enabling people to keep up their deep high-trust relationships (usually forged offline) across longer distances and more life changes. It makes me a bit sad too, but it doesn't appear that being open and distributed is an important ingredient in building these types of communities, as Facebook, WhatsApp, and others have shown.
It's always amazing to me how much more down on technology we technologists seem to be than the majority of people I know, who just think it's amazing that they can stay so connected with their friends and family all the time. If I told them that Tim Berners-Lee is bummed that they're sharing pictures and liking posts instead of creating their own web pages, they wouldn't understand why, and I don't think I could really explain it to them (or myself).
> If I told them that Tim Berners-Lee is bummed that they're sharing pictures and liking posts instead of creating their own web pages, they wouldn't understand why, and I don't think I could really explain it to them (or myself).
This is factually correct, no doubt, but I'm not sure what conclusions you can draw from it. I think more than anything it just shows that 1) most people accept what's widely available and popular without question or complaint and 2) convenience / laziness trumps almost all other things.
Or to put it another way -- which history bears out -- I don't think you want to use the majority's failure to complain or disinclination to dream as an argument in favor of the status quo.
I think it might be an issue of "knowing how the sausage is made". I don't think most people realize how much data acces most sysadmins have in the services they use.
"Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the internet has proven incredibly useful for enabling people to keep up their deep high-trust relationships (usually forged offline) across longer distances and more life changes."
It's interesting that you mention this point. There was a social network designed specifically to leverage the phenomenon by limiting the number of your friends. Here it is:
We also saw this in the Friend-to-Friend model of decentralized schemes, esp crypto- or privacy-heavy. Freenet with F2F is probably best example today that has a mature codebase.
So, it might be worth seriously considering what you brought up when evaluating alternative architectures for the Internet. Probably be an overall boost for efficiency in such architectures.
The vision of the Internet was that the power of the Everyman would expose his insight to the world, incrementally making the Web and the world a better place. But most people use the internet to tighten their bonds with those they are close to, and at best megaphone their thoughts into a canyon where usually no one is listening (cough Twitter cough).
Most people don't want to make the Web incrementally better, but simply use it to speak and be heard. This desire is WAY more baked-in to the human race than any desire to "better the world".
Well, even the hackers post their blog posts nowadays to centralized networks. Why every article has to be on medium.com - I have no idea - but it's very similar pattern the regular users of Internet have.
Because when you create content, you don't necessarily want to create, or host the system to manage that content.
By the same not, more and more projects are just using gh-pages... it's useful, out there, free (of cost to those publishing) and in general works.
In the end, there's a lot of options, I think seeing IPFS support baked into the browsers will see a new wave the likes that we saw in the late 90's of customized content, and then tooling that publishes to IPFS will take hold and some things may become more standardized.
I think there is a need to get to a DNS pointer that can take one from a name to an IPFS directory (similar to a CNAME) though that may need to be updated for each publish. In the end it can/will all be very interesting to say the least.
Well, speaking only for myself, I've thought about leaving medium several times but never bothered because:
• I don't want an article that goes viral to give me huge bills or crush a tiny server. I want automatic scaling.
• I don't want to run or upgrade a web stack. I have a few Linux VPS' and frankly they're painful to maintain. I don't have the time or energy to do this unpaid anymore. If Linux was a better OS maybe this'd be less painful.
• It's free
• They have a WYSIWYG editor that's OK (but merely OK, it's not great). Too many blog platforms want me to write in markdown or whatever.
• If I left Medium I'd lose all the followers who get notified when I write a new blog.
• There is no real value to me in doing so except maybe getting a few more features.
The main thing keeping me there right now is inertia and disinterest in self hosting.
> I don't want an article that goes viral to give me huge bills or crush a tiny server. I want automatic scaling.
I'm not sure that an article that goes viral can do this any more, if you're running a simple static site. Even a million hits a day on my website would only be something like 150 gigabytes of traffic a month, if it were sustained. (I'd expect a much smaller spike).
At Amazon's current pricing, that's about $15/month.
It gets more interesting when you think many post ideologically against surveillance states, ad ecosystems, insecure systems, and so on... from Facebook and Twitter. ;)
"Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say."
It's interesting that you say that here, on this forum, which in my mind has defied that stereotype for quite a long time.
The aesthetic barrier to entry of plain text and limited function along with (relatively) little support or help is, I think, a fairly decent recipe and one we see succeeding in places like craigslist, which has shown surprising longevity and utility.
I am optimistic that this recipe will start to influence designers and builders more and more ...
HN isn't one of those utopian "everyman" (to cop another reply's language) communities. It has a lot of rules, both explicit and implicit, and is very elitist. My (poorly made) point is that I don't see why we need a utopian reinvention when the utopian stuff hasn't worked while the web in its current state is already so useful at connecting people.
Without hearing Tims reasoning, I would hazard to guess that its because interaction has been watered down and simplified to a few basic actions, without any real value being introduced. The end result is a never ending cycle of useless information. The kinds of things foreshadowed in Brave New World. I may be embellishing in the predicament, but I think that's essentially the situation were seeing now with Facebook & twitter. No real meaningful discussion (as far as my opinion goes) lives on those platforms.
> without any real value being introduced
> No real meaningful discussion
I just got back from a big family reunion attended by people from all corners of the country, which was planned over Facebook, and which festivities my infirm grandmother followed through Facebook videos, pictures, and messages. We're now sending each other more thank-you-s, well-wishes, jokes, I-miss-you-already-s, and can't-wait-for-next-time-s. That has real value to us. It is annoying that we sit over here on our techie high horse and tell people that their digital relationships are not meaningful and have no real value.
Who's on the high horse? I described what I considered to be meaningless interaction, and I know you see the same things. Were not proclaiming that the concept behind Facebook is meaningless, but that the way Facebook conducts itself is immoral.
Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the internet has proven incredibly useful for enabling people to keep up their deep high-trust relationships (usually forged offline) across longer distances and more life changes. It makes me a bit sad too, but it doesn't appear that being open and distributed is an important ingredient in building these types of communities, as Facebook, WhatsApp, and others have shown.
It's always amazing to me how much more down on technology we technologists seem to be than the majority of people I know, who just think it's amazing that they can stay so connected with their friends and family all the time. If I told them that Tim Berners-Lee is bummed that they're sharing pictures and liking posts instead of creating their own web pages, they wouldn't understand why, and I don't think I could really explain it to them (or myself).