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Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

Your comment literally begins with "We've lost so much".

"We" haven't. The websites and blogs and desktop applications that you're talking about still exist, as does the general computing hardware to work with it.

What's happened is that newer, more vapid content has emerged. Along with more locked-down hardware for working with that. Aimed at a totally different audience of non-technical people, that never would have been "us" anyway.

It's the argument of an old white guy, who's mad that immigrants have changed the neighborhood. Yeah, maybe so. But our favorite old restaurants are still there. The bridge club is still open, right next to the bingo hall. It's just that we're a subculture now, instead of the dominant scene.

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> Your comment literally begins with "We've lost so much".

> "We" haven't.

Yes, we have.

Look at what's happened to Reddit in the last decade.

Companies with that much power over the signal can adjust what we see. Change the ratios to favor content that earns them money. It destroys open discourse.

Facebook, Google, and Apple are all doing this.

TikTok only lets beautiful people through! I like the app, but that's pretty fucked up.

The browser is becoming a monoculture.

AMP is taking precedence in the search order.

The web long tail is atrophying because there aren't eyes on it anymore.

I can't share apps I write with friends that use iPhone.

Stallman.

It's happening in industry too. Redis and Linux are now AWS.

You are seeing past me.

I am disagreeing with you.

You are using the term "we" to describe 1990's Internet denizens, and 2020's TikTok browsers, as being the same cultural entity. From that POV, "our" online experience has degraded.

I am saying that these are different groups altogether. That the latter has supplanted the former in terms of size and dominance. That all of the things I cared about in the 1990's are still alive and perfectly accessible to me today. That it may be somewhat sad to see the "Internet culture" of old become a subculture, as the casuals rolled in and took it mainstream, but that "we" still exist and are doing fine.

It doesn't matter what the populations of the users are! My partner uses TikTok, and I do by extension.

The only place demographics matter in this argument is how they affect where and how the money is being spent.

Incumbents are turning our field into a fiefdom to lock in eyeballs. Some of this is just unconscious natural evolution because of the gravity their decisions have, but some of it is quite deliberate.

Google shuttered Google Play Music because it doesn't have the numbers they want and they have another internal effort that duplicates the functionality. With one choice, they changed the music listening behavior of millions of people. YouTube Music sucks at discoverability and favors replays of the same music.

In the old web, this didn't happen.

This is a small, unimportant anecdote. It's a drop in the sea of changes that are turning the internet to shit. There are hundreds of events and changes I can point to.

I'll cut to the chase:

Google, Apple, and Facebook need to be split up by the DOJ. Google shouldn't have a browser or any say in web standards, AMP should die, Apple shouldn't lock down iPhone, and Facebook should have extremely flexible data portability.

All of these companies should have their ad units stripped away and instead do bidding. There are too many negatives (spying, ads disguised as search results, etc) to having these in the same business units.

I haven't touched on it yet, but the Cableization of streaming is also something we need to address. It's a very close parallel to what's happened with the walled gardens.

At the heart of the issue is anticompetitive behavior and how it erodes the commons.

This has nothing to do with Gen-Z and everything to do with FAANG.

I get a lot of what you're saying, but I think you're conflating signal-to-noise with disappearance of the old weird web. It's still there, there's just a lot more other stuff out there too.

For the most part I agree with what you say about big tech and their dominance, but you don't have to use their products for the most part. The web standards are the big problem in that context.

Genuine question - why do you feel you have to use TikTok?

The problem is that these platforms have, in a very meaningful sense, taken the place of communications infrastructure. The bulk of us use Messenger or iMessage/FaceTime or some other over-the-top service for things we would have otherwise texted, or sent over email, or called someone about using a dialer, and that contributes to the vendor lock-in that they have. It's the new IRC, or AIM, but with an even wider capability gap and a userbase billions deep.

Even RCS doesn't solve this, because they're still a technically inferior spec - they don't support E2EE, and they still depend on phone numbers, with the terrible user experiences of arbitrary last-century identifiers and the phone companies you (generally) have to subscribe to to get them.

Until social media companies or their chat protocols are forced into some sort of interoperability - a thing we can do, under antitrust law - no amount of data portability will fix this. Because it's a consequence of their owning our networks, not just our content.

We’re definitely on the same page. I’ve been evangelising about interoperability for several years, meeting blank or glazed over stares the whole way. I’m definitely jaded.

StevePerkins has already done an excellent job trying to showing you why you're wrong.

I don't know why this is so hard for you to grasp. For people who liked the way things were in 1990 (or whenever) all that technology is still out there and in use (with a few minor and largely unimportant exceptions). It's even better than it used to be! You can get an RPi system for HOW MUCH! these days. Internet service is often good enough to host your own (small) server if you really want to do that. If you don't, there are dozens of excellent cheap hosting services. Everybody uses open source compilers. Linux is everywhere, opening stuff up (not all stuff, but a lot of stuff).

Now, do the majority of people who use "the internet" use any of this stuff, or even care about. They do not.

I would suggest that what you care about is precisely what Steve noted: Eternal September. You're unhappy that the vast majority of users of "the internet" don't care about the sorts of tools, platforms and culture that you do (and to a large extent, I do too).

But those platforms, tools and capabilities have not gone away. They are all out there, and in most ways are healthier than ever. They have not become a part of the majority experience of "the internet" (Android doesn't really count, though in a few small ways, it's notable). That might matter to you.

But it doesn't mean that the things you prefer are gone, or that "the internet" has been turned to shit. It means there's more than one "the internet" out there, and most people interact with a version of it that you don't like. You can rail against that if you like, but please don't claim that it has destroyed the other versions, because it hasn't.

You're both fixated on this "Eternal September" argument, which is a total mischaracterization of everything I've stated.

I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about companies behaving badly.

I want the entire world on the Internet. I want everyone creating more and consuming things that better fit their interests. I'm a creator! I want people using my stuff!

But at the same time I want our data and our tools to be open. I want portability and the ability to integrate how I want. We had some semblance of that, and now it's gone.

The web is eroding!

Mobile is locked down!

Our data is stuck in silos!

We're being tracked!

Diversity is gone!

Interoperability is gone!

These things happened.

The DOJ should break apart Google, Apple, and Facebook. They haven't been good stewards of the Internet.

I've gotten nearly a hundred upvotes in this comment thread, so I don't think I'm alone in this thinking.

And I don't mean to call either of you out. I just don't think you're seeing why I'm frustrated.

>I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about companies behaving badly.

Your main claim was that the "old web" has been destroyed.

The web is not eroding. It has expanded dramatically, and now includes huge amounts of stuff that were not part of the (say) 1994-2000 version. It continues to contain large amounts of stuff that are directly connected to that earlier stuff, albeit in massively greater quantity and quality.

Mobile is locked down. Nothing to say about that. Mobile is not the web, it's just the platform that most people interact with the online world on. Nothing more (or less).

Data is not deterministically locked in silos, although many people take the easy path toward certain functionality (e.g. email) that has that result. But this still a choice.

Ditto for tracking, though arguably less of a choice. You can do a lot to stop it, but you shouldn't have to.

The software/IT/web world is massively more diverse than it was in 1995. The available material, the participants : way, way more diverse.

Interoperability was never there: we had the Unix wars, Unix vs. Windows, mac vs everyone else. We had Intel vs PowerPC (soon to be revisited as Intel vs ARM).

Unless you've been using GNU since 1986 (I have), your tools weren't open.

Google, Apple and Facebook are doing bad things. They have not destroyed the internet that you loved, they've made it harder to see.

The internet grew and so did its capacity of making people money. In a world which cares a great deal about money, it makes sense the culture would slowly get shifted by industry to keep developers focused on what makes the money, which is apparently not skins.

It’s the filter on ideas of capitalism applied at scale and it’s not unique to the internet (eg Cookie-Cutter houses). It‘s interests are aligned with maximizing access though, but yeah, I get the frustration, we lose a lot in that process. Maybe we can think up something better...

No. The technology is not there anymore. Unless you consider “minor and unimportant” the network news (it’s barren today), ftp servers (they are unsupported by web browsers), gopher (unsupported too), or the muds (barren too).

> Stallman.

Not sure what to make of this. Is this a reference to his tarnished sainthood or that the modern web has largely ignored his sage advice? Or something else?

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