Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that he wrote this as a user of the internet for 2 decades in 1995. So between 1975 and 1995, the pace of change was just not that great. Then between say, 1995 and 2015, a lot changed indeed. Faster connections, ubiquitous wireless internet, e-readers, fast laptops, smart phones, e-commerce explosion, video portals and streaming, social media, etc.

It feels to me the pace of change has slowed though. Maybe that's the way innovation goes. Sometimes in big bursts but mostly incremental.

I agree that small group conversations are probably the next wave of social media, because you need that circle of trust to be fully expressive.

If I had to guess, I would say we will perfect VR over the next couple decades and that we will replicate some of the brick and mortar experiences that way, but it will still not ever quite replace in person interaction. There's always going to be that uncanny valley between the cyber world and the real world.

The "web" generally refers to http/html which were extremely new in 1995, much newer than generic tcp/ip networking. The first netscape navigator was released in 1994!

Yup. "The web" = www.*

Or rather, http://

It was an interesting time with Windows 95 being shipped without IE or a TCP/IP stack by default.
This lead to needing to install stuff like Trumpet Winsock.
This mirrored the local networking capabilities between Windows 3.x and 3.11 Windows for workgroups.
Eventually, Microsoft would realize the need to include all of this by default in Windows, which led to the antitrust suit.

It's worth noting that this was a contrarian view in 1995, and that most of us saw things going the other way.

I agree. I remember hearing Clifford Stoll interviewed on the radio around 1995 and reading reviews of his book "Silicon Snake Oil," which was published the same year, and thinking that he was obviously wrong. It was just such a game-changer for me to be able to sit in my home in Tokyo, and, through a dial-up modem, get information I needed from throughout the world—information that otherwise would have required a trip to a major library or bookstore, if it was even available there. And to be able to find people interested in chatting about topics that no one else in Japan would have cared about. The Internet was clearly the future.

Cliff's viewpoint was definitely contrarian, but on the other hand many people thought that the internet would be a kind of utopia - either full of rational speech leading to better decision-making in the real world, or even a separate independent "nation" that governments could never control. Neither of those turned out to be fully true either.

When the internet was handles you could say anything and rarely worry it would follow you back in life. Now people use real names on social media.. which makes it about defining what imagine I want to be.
Real names attach constraints.

I dunno, weren’t university logins tied to real identities for many decades?

University logins were handles (usually close to "real", but not tied) in my time. I firmly believe the whole real identity thing has always been driven by advertising considerations.
(Our undergrad computing lab had donated CAD workstations, so someone came up with a graphical display of the room, showing who was logged in where. The TA was displeased with me after figuring out that I had set my avatar to the "unoccupied" graphic. IIRC, he added a square outline for logged-in workstations to the display, around the same time.)

For some reason the myth that in the old days of the internet people used "handles" or nicknames and not real identities crops up here all the time. I can only assume people making the claim weren't on the internet in the 20th century and/or were on AOL.
On the Facebook of the 1990s, Usenet, people routinely posted with their real name/identity and real email address, and message headers showed each server the post passed through from its origin, the IP address of the poster (which could and did result in doxxing) and often an "abuse@ISP" email address to complain about the post/poster.

True, but that was for convenience, not because we thought we needed to have a "real identity". (IP addresses were later, ISPs were much later, but yes, UUCP hops were recorded. FWIW, my UUCP paths ended in something close to my legal name.)
Remember some of early Usenet, I wouldn't be surprised if some people had taken advantage of Californian naming laws (at the time, one could use almost any name one wanted, as long as it was consistent and not intended for fraud) to make their legal name more consistent with their online handle.
Mark V. Shaney is an example of a user who was not using their real name/identity (nor even had one).
Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thequux can tell us how pseudonymous usernames were in his time?
Quaxity quuxity, Teitelman's InterLISP Has a DWIM feature that's Really a screw; MacLISP has evident Superiority, Letting its customer Mean what he do.

As a teenager at the time it was impressed on us how important it was to not use our real name on the internet. I didn't use my real name for anything on the internet for at least 10 years after I started using it.

My university login was a pseudonym. Sure, you could have tried to get my real name from the admins, but it would have taken at least some effort.
Moreover, online forums (remember phpBB?) were overwhelmingly pseudonymous on practice.

Pretty sure you could have done:
finger rwj@cxa.dl.ac.uk
and found out who I was all the way through to the mid 90s.

> Stripe's founder mentioned that the internet is probably going to trend back toward "dinner party" type apps rather than "town square" type apps
Isn't that already happening in the last five years, with more and more people abandoning "public" social networks and spending much more time in private friend chat groups?

> This shows how hard it is to be right about the future
Back in 1995 I remember I was very skeptical about what was then called radio modems. I thought that radio wasn't reliable and that Ethernet cables were there to stay forever. I didn't see laptops (let alone smartphones much later) becoming a thing. Though funny thing is, today in 2020, my laptop is connected via Ethernet at home. WiFi interference and congestion can at times become unbearable in a typical residential apartment block. You don't even know who or what creates interference so I was kind of right back then, but also terribly wrong in the long run.
I missed the practical aspect of radio communication within a short range, and I missed the trend that computing devices will get smaller and more portable over time. We thought at the time that computers will get more powerful but the size factor and the "desktopness" won't change.
The lesson for me is: don't try to predict the future of technologies. You can't just take a trend and extrapolate into the future: trends make unexpected turns and jumps all the time. This seems to be the only thing that's reliably predictable: that sudden turns and breakthroughs happen all the time and that each turn and breakthrough discovers some new practical aspect of a technology that was impossible to see in advance.

"WiFi interference and congestion can at times become unbearable in a typical residential apartment block"
Could this be solved with the right wallpaper or paint materials?

> It's also possible to express yourself without fearing criticism. I wonder what the next 30 years will be like.
I hope that change is coming. Hope aside… I expect that, to riff on the quote, in the future, everyone will be globally infamous for 15 minutes.

“Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it” https://mobile.twitter.com/maplecocaine/status/1080665226410...

Without criticism how can there be improvement? Criticism isn't a bad thing. Criticism leads to self reflection which leads to self improvement. At least it should.
Personally, I'd rather listen to 1 person criticize me than 10 people who praise me. That 1 critical person's going to have the most valuable thing to say that leads to improvement.
To an extent, note I'm talking about reasonable criticism, not assholes.

I agree with you, except that I like criticism when it challenges my thoughts and gets me to improve. On the internet you're at risk of losing your job over things you said 10 years ago, or getting death threats from random strangers. Criticism is great when it's well thought out and well intended. When it's an opinion someone formed seconds ago based on an image or a news headline or an image of a news headline, there's probably nuance that they're missing and their angry response just makes things worse

> Stripe's founder mentioned that the internet is probably going to trend back toward "dinner party" type apps rather than "town square" type apps
I've always been more inclined towards dinner party type experiences, but no one in my social circle has agreed. They all prefer the town square.
One of my best app experiences to date was with Snapchat, when it first became popular. Several of my friends started using it, and it became a way to share funny or interesting things we saw in our day to day. If I saw something that I thought Dave and Jess would find interesting, I'd just send it to those two. Because it was so ephemeral, it was great for small things -- the sort of things it wouldn't be worth creating a group chat for. It was the equivalent of walking down the street with a small group of friends, pointing at something you noticed, and saying "check that out".
Eventually, both Instagram and Snapchat started pushing the story format, and seemingly overnight the experience turned from a dinner party into a town square. No one was sharing with small groups of friends anymore. When you add to your story, it's for everyone to see. I never understood why my friends saw that as a replacement for what we had before. I think perhaps, for most people, the desire to be heard and noticed by a crowd outweighs any benefits that sharing with a smaller group might bring.

> When everyone has a voice, it's hard to know what to listen to. ... The weirdest part is, misinformation != lying. Most people spreading misinformation genuinely believe it.
Mostly agreed. There also many times when people should look at what they just wrote and say, "maybe I don't know enough about the topic to publish about it."
To choose a non-controversial topic: I have recently found the time to explore programming for microcontrollers. So much of the information that I come across is a simple rehash, to the point where it is clear that people are writing about their own experiences as soon as they learn about it. There is no depth of knowledge, which is problematic when the accuracy of information depends upon the details.
The problem of figuring out who to listen too usually comes down to figuring out who to filter out. In some cases it may be easy to do because the tone or content indicates the scope and accuracy of their knowledge. Unfortunately, it is a time consuming process since you have to hear what they are saying before you can decide whether they are worth listening to.

I fondly remember talking to some class mates in 2002.
We were in an IT school and I told them that I wanted to become a software developer.
They laughed at me and said they want to become admins, because basically everything has already be developed.
They had edonkey for music and films, they had video games, they had IRC for chat, what else was there?

Can I ask, since I am curious, why misinformation != lying?
To me, I have always found that the statement "truths are the best lies" is very correct.
To me, you can tell a little bit of truth, and leave a large amount of true information unsaid. However, that does not mean that the whole encompassing "truth" - whatever you end up expressing in the listener's mind as a whole - is true. This is not about whether they believe, but how they perceive. Whether the listener believes is another story.