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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

That quote was from 1995. You've got wikis, you've got instant global knowledge search, you've got stack overflow, you've got forums devoted to the tiniest minutia of any topic, you've got random youtubers sharing their knowledge of their hobbies every day, you've a million other great things--I feel like we're doing ok.

(I mean, yeah, the sea of interactive shared knowledge also has a garbage island...)

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I cannot dispute the fact that the web is fantastic in many ways, and I did not intend to do so. Nevertheless, the current incarnation of the web is not the full system envisioned by Nelson and even TimBL.

I chose the excerpt from that full quote poorly. I'll try again, but I'd recommend reading the full linked quote (or watching the original source video).

> The "World Wide Web" program, the original browser/editor, was in fact an editor, and you could make links as easily as you could follow them. And that was fundamental. There are two things which seem to me to be totally bizarre. One of them is the fact that you can't do that [now], that we've lost that. So in fact the thing is not interactive. I don't know if I can think of any hypertext experiments in research where you haven't been able to make links just as easily as following them. Authorship has always been right up there. And now, for some historical quirk, which I could go into, I have gone into, I won't go into, we have a whole bunch of things out there which are "browsers".

The big ideas that TimBL is expressing is still fairly applicable 20 years later.