There has been a severe erosion since then. From car dashboards to web design, software apps to online communities - it’s an erosion on all fronts.
Fuck everything after 2010. It sucks. Fight me.
Windows XP was considered a memory hog because it needed a whopping 256MiB of RAM to run properly. I run text editors that use more of that these days, and they still feel slower than notepad felt on XP.
The good news is that almost without fail, the content on these sites is as good as the coding, and I've proven to myself time after time that I lose nothing by just closing the tab. In fact, I gain the time I would've wasted on reading low-quality content that rarely adds anything to my life.
We have, among countless other things:
- mobile devices, networks, and services that are allowing developing countries to leapfrog their progress in the world
- development toolchains and frameworks that empower a single person to create an order of magnitude more output, enabling smaller teams or even solo enterprises to create major value
- reusable rockets bringing high quality and affordable internet access to the underserved
- mass produced electric vehicles for goodness sake!!
And that's only a few tech-related advancements, the world is largely moving in the right direction in so many areas. I'd never bet against the steady drumbeat of technological progress.
However, this particular thread seems to be about the quality of user-facing software, which, overall, has been on a continuous nosedive for about 10 years, and every time I think it can't get any worse, someone figured out a new way to make it suck.
We need to look at what we can improve. Of course things have improved, but not uniformly across all domains and many things have gotten worse.
If we keep patting ourselves on back, these too will degrade. Using hindsight to definitively say what has gotten worse is how we improve including the things you are mentioning.
I kind of think of progress as navigation on a complex multidimensional domain space filled with lots of local optima. To not consult hindsight (gradient) is a bad strategy. Similarly, to not explore is to stay at the same spot. Sometimes, it is important to roll back and go to the old days and try to explore in another direction.
What does a new flagship phone do better, compared to a 2year old one? A slightly better camera, maybe more storage space, and that's it. "Back in the days" we had phones with 9,10 7-segment displays, then single line lcd screens, multiline, graphical, color, touchscreens and smartphones (each step taking only a couple of years), and since then (so, the last ~5 years) not a lot of "new stuff", that would warrant buying a new phone (except the failing battery on the old one).
Websites have got massively bloated and slow, even on modernish computers, and show even less informations than they did in the past (fscking gallery pages). We've gone from text-only sites, to basic html (with images!), javascript, to 'web 2.0' with dynamic loading... to bloatware.
As mentioned... word has gone from a five, ten...ish megabytes to hundreds of megabytes while not offering much more compared to older versions. Yes, it's a bit more polished, some things are easier now... but not a lot. Going from text to graphical mode was a "revolution", but again, not a lot new after.
Even operating systems... what does windows 10 do, that windows 7 didn't?
I mean... we do get a new feature here and then, but the push to "make a new version" is stronger than the actual need for a new version.... not at first, but once the software gets mature enough, there's (almost) "nothing new to add".
I think this is one nice thing that is very easy to take for granted.
Mobile connectivity is a wonderful thing as long as it is a means rather than an end. Sometimes it takes a glance into the past to understand the former, to realize that networks were created to enable communication rather than to captivate audiences.
Modern development toolchains are great, yet they typically cater to professionals who have the time and incentive to learn them. We don't have to look very far into the past to realize that there was a time when accessibility was as important as productivity.
Creating a world that everyone wants to live in requires a great deal of reflection regarding what we need and how to accomplish it. Letting technological development run amok may achieve some of those goals but it can also be regressive.
I don't know about PS3, but the thing that bugs me about PS4 is that it requires installing games. It can't just run a game straight off the disc like PS1 and PS2 did, it has to copy it to its hard drive first.
> Modern ARM chips are certainly better than what we had in 2009 in every respect.
Modern processors are, generally, great and very fast, regardless of the instruction set. Their greatness is usually compensated with mediocre software that is being constantly rushed to meet imaginary deadlines that no user cares about. The result is that the end user never really realizes how fast and capable modern hardware actually is.
I'd still say modern ARM is a major improvement simply because performance/power ratio-wise it's already neck and neck or better than x86 in a lot of areas. x86, dating back to the P4 era and onward, has been a painful slide into power consumption/waste heat hell.
And it's only worse in modern systems that round-trip EVERYTHING to the "cloud" for reasons understood only by Google.
...and that's a problem, because it encourages half-baked non-solutions and a "we can always fix it later" attitude. As a result, nothing actually improves; it just erratically surges around a local maximum.
And this time around, it will be even better!
I think you are just getting old and not willing to discover new things
Do you know of any sites where people just talk and share, without political nonsense, flamewars, and such? Perhaps focused primarily on humor?
Hacker News is indeed such an oasis, but has a rather narrow interest range. Few people are interested in discussing spirituality here, for example.
Reddit originally had that goal. And was self-sustaining, basically funded by users. This has all changed, and that's all I want to make for a point here. (why is another discussion)
HN isn't self-sustaining that I know of, though it's also not needing to make it's users into products too.
So, is there a middle ground?
Take the HN code base, clone it, and enable these discussion norms?
We have amazing moderators here. Wise.
That's needed too, or the outcome is something we will see elsewhere, and that's by definition, not what we have here.
How to fund that?
Need hosting, moderator or two, and what else?
Maybe not too much. So maybe it won't take that much money either.
I would find any experiment along these lines both something I would want to participate in as well as very interesting to observe, depending on my role, and the nature of the discussion focus.