Internet developments have gone from exciting to dreadful.
Internet developments have gone from exciting to dreadful.
Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it's been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00's every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we're well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don't know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don't look forward to hearing news about it. It's sad, man. We've lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We're at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don't think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Well. Those corporations took their money and threw it in. Basically fusions of different services. Besides that you have a lot of clickbaits and cheap stuff like dropshops and so on.
You gotta be very picky on what services you use. Lemmy f.e. is amazing for me. It does not feel like someone wants to get money off me.
The internet basically became what the analog world was before and it's anything else than amazing.
Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.
Funny I said the same thing in 1995.
The internet is what you make of it. Meaning, you don’t need the entire wide area network, you just need what you don’t want in your local area network.
In terms of an interconnected network, you need only what you need!
This is an amazing time. Lemmy, self hosting, docker, cloud hosting, $100 consumer devices that rival $10k servers from ten years ago, AI, LLM, global gaming, etc….
In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn't really see it as being more broadly useful.
Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there's just no way they could leave it out there, it's too dangerous for them to do so.
Now I look at the thing we call "the internet" in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never "flipped the switch" on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.
I only really watch foss stuff, which should be exciting, but I get tired as it's always much of the same news:
- a new private messenger (like we don't have 500 of those already)
- a new app/program/distro that does the same thing as 10 other ones
- a "simple" app/program that doesn't do much of anything, just like 10 other ones of the same kind, will get 3 updates and then die
- something for the terminal for terminal nerds that could really use a gui but shutup you dirty normie
- a library that sounds cool but nobody except maybe some corporation will ever use it
- announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we'll never hear of the project again
So I'm not exactly thrilled about anything either, tho for every different reasons
The enshitification of all things is so frustrating. You witness perfectly useful technology being destroyed in the pursuit of like 5 dollars. I don't answer the phone unless I've told someone to call me because it's always a robot, my email inbox is full of garbage I didn't ask for so I don't check in much, now they've got robots texting me scams. I can't even pay for petrol in peace, because they make a nickel having a tiny television try to sell me an energy drink. And nothing is done because heaven forefend that anything should come in the way of an extra .02% increase in some asshole's quarterly report.
You gotta get on the FOSS train.
The fediverse makes me excited. I haven't ran a server in years and now I have two DO droplets running my Lemmy and Matrix instances.
HA and WLED makes me excited. I have already built a bunch of motion activated lights that integrate with my home assistant and I am super keen to get more into microcontroller programming. I want to build my own temperature and humidity sensors.
I also just really enjoy woodworking and expoy crafts and using the internet to demystify advanced techniques is something the world wide web was built for.
In short -- stop making the internet part of your image. Internet personas are not real. Your actual image should feed the internet. Finish projects and brag about them online. That's what we used to call OC.
I've been using Linux for decades and I don't use the big tech sites much. I get excited about a new release of Gnome or KDE or some cool command line utility...
Because you are right, the web is taken over and they want to turn it into cable TV subscriptions for sites and verified internet accounts etc.
The goals of the security agencies and the goals of the big tech ad agencies go hand in hand. None of them care about the users, and both of them just wants the user data, as much as possible.
I think using tech like Lemmy and Matrix gets us away from all of that shit, and it's good enough these days for anyone to use without too much trouble.
The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
I read it as: 'They embraced, extended and extinguished what you held dear'.
I totally agree with you here. Now it feels like bots (AI) making content for bots (crawlers) and the only thing we a getting programmed to use is Google, where your question is answered without the need to even visit the website it took the data from.
It's just boring and I'm a website developer 🤷♂️
The death of this guy has to do with some of it, he worked on some pretty cool stuff and was an all-around pretty awesome dude working for the betterment of the world.
The way I see it Steve Jobs marked a turning point with those Apple events. The corporate platitude bullshit with the "you told us and we listened" jargon. Before technology was mainly hobbyist nerds making stuff out of the love of technology. There was a two way relationship where the developers trusted the users and the users trusted the developers be acting in good faith. Now it's lifeless and jaded beneath a veneer of forced corporate smiles. Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.
It's an insult to our intelligence to push anti-patterns. All while expecting us to engage like sheep in the mandatory capitalist pep rally. 'We made 20% efficiency to your oppressive experience. Now cheer! I said CHEER damn it'.
That widely depends on what you are using it for. I think it’s amazing.
I can buy a computer for $500 with 8 cores, 32GB ram, 512GB NVME storage. I can install free open source linux distribution on it that manages virtual machines. It can run dozens of containerized free/open source applications on it.
Then, i can use my domain name and freely available services like letsencrypt and cloudflare to make it securely available on the internet.
Internet is what you make of it, always has been.
If you only rely to 3rd party websites then you’re missing out on a lot of usability.
I guess it depends on when you stared using it.
Today, a lot if people take a lot of things for granted.
I still remember the days of waiting for a website to load, making myself coffee while it’s loading.
Now i can stream realtime 4k video of my house on my phone, served by my computer.
I can game with friends conencted to my voice chat server that i own and has awesome voice quality and low latency.
I can have all my files available wherever i am, instantly.
I can forget my phone and my laptop, login to my server at a friend’s computer and do whatever i need to do.
All that wouldn’t be possible if the internet was stuck in the 90’s.
In my teenage years, the Internet was my favorite escape from the horribleness of my offline life. I thought it would always remain so, so decided to start a career in software engineering because that would be an improvement to the world.
Now that I haven't been a teenager for nearly ten years, often enough the Internet is actively bad for my mental health and I have to get away from it to improve my mood. I have no interest in participating in propaganda wars.
Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt "the real Internet" was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.
I've come to realize that it's always been shitty. That's my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn't understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.
The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn't because computers weren't powerful enough yet.
Things that are hard to believe still exist:
- Linux
- VLC media player
- Pirate Bay (torrents/filesharing in general)
- hard drives
- google earth
Being a somewhat tech illiterate millennial (only knows how to navigate windows and passed a data structures class) it feels like any of these things could be eventually taken out next (probably not Linux just because it'd be the hardest)
I wouldn't at all be surprised if they found a way to monetize hard drives into a subscription based storage service
Mostly I don't understand much, but I know that I witnessed the internet turn from a fast clickable diverse wonderland to a place dominated by 6 websites which take up 4GB RAM to run, followed by the further decline of youtube (started going for ADHD related results in 2011), google (search results started sucking in 2019) and reddit (mods started getting banhappy in 2020)
We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:
Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.
Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.
Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.
Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.
There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.
Well, at least in terms of information security a lot of progress was made, you just don't tend to hear anything about that. I'd say the 2010s was the time where all that was being put into place, actually.
That exciting early 2000s Internet was unbelievably shitty. Nearly every widely-used protocol was easily exploitable or had massive flaws, hardly any encryption being in place, bad password practices and very little security-awareness among users, very widespread malware, etc.
There's definitely a lot of answers that are looking for a question out there, with lots of corporate greed in play, but I don't think it's quite as grim as you make it out to be.
Currently use the internet for Steam, Lemmy and streaming I cut down from Gigabit to 12mbps because I just don't use it any more.
It's not just the Internet, it's all technology. In the 90s, there was sort of excitement over anything new coming to the market. Now it's ”oh good, new tech for our overlords to somehow screw us with”. Doesn't help that back then there were a hell of a lot more true technological progress, just look at what a PC was like in 1990 compared to 1999.
Yeah and the most popular services absolutely suck. We haven't stagnated due to no more room for innovation, we've stagnated due to a lack of passion. It's hard to make infrastructure, I get that. Seriously though, we can't claim innovation is impossible due to what's already been done, while ignoring hundreds of services that suck due to no innovation.
It’s the equivalent of a dead and abandoned shopping mall in a shit hole city once popular. It was a course charted long before the 00s though.
Optimization is the natural path of all things commercial. When the Internet was young it was more experimental as a whole and that was fun for people. Computing is still experimental but the experimentation isn't obvious as it was back then. Unfortunately that means adventure finding you across your computer screen doesn't happen as often. You either need to look for it around the fringes or look beyond the monitor.
The 00s were also filled with corporations monopolizing entire portions of the industry with almost no resistance, even going so far as to have protections for their empires legislated. We're aware of what happens and we get mad about it, before we were ignorant to everything except for what we were told by those mega corporations.
IBM's proprietary software runs all financial transactions in the USA. Apple and Microsoft are the only commercial operating systems. nVidia can sue the pants off of anybody who even thinks about rendering things in a similar manner to their GPU firmware capabilities.
It's just that the Minitel was invented again to work over Internet. But internet is still there. What's sad is when the people who are interested in the technologies don't understand what internet actually is.
Capitalism "nostalgised" the internet and technological growth. Good times create weak men and all that. Now that the kinetic energy of growth is no longer there to excite us and fulfill our dopamine needs, we find the stability and refinement boring and dull.
Touch grass, get your sunshine and do some dopamine detox. Life is not meant to be an infinite loop of endless consumer innovation.
Life is exactly what it means under socialism, and it so happened that we as millenials got to experience this burst of the most enriching era of technological giant leap for humanity, with growing from CRT computers with slow internet to high speed internet with porn, democratised fast speed computers and powerful smartphones unifying dozens of gadgets as a 200 gram glass slab into your pocket.
I am using a 4 year old Android smartphone, and the next phone will probably be used for 5-6 years (8-10 if I get Fairphone 5, on my next phone shortlist), signalling smartphones peaking like computers and laptops. My modern ThinkPad is over 6 years old. Linux is fit for desktop use. Tech has matured.