Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

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You misunderstood the point the author is making. She is not saying Millenials or GenXers created the Internet as it is now. She is saying that the Internet used to be open and somehow became dominated by a handful of giant companies. No one invented it, it just happened because no one was paying too much attention. Whether the companies that became dominant were founded by younger or older people is irrelevant to the argument.

The main point I took away from this article is that the younger people today, Millenials if you will, are not used to an open internet, so they see the internet as a closed gate community, a divisive force. A completely different view of the Internet than the previous generation had. And as the younger people are the ones with the most energy to fight against what they perceive as injustices, they tend to actually dominate policy making even if indirectly, and what they see as the enemy is things like encryption and even privacy, which the previous generation saw as essential for a free Internet.

I agree completely with that, but I am not optimistic as the author is that GenXers will at some point get their act together and make the internet more open again. I believe what will happen is that the Internet will continue being this divisive force until legislation (pushed by younger people who don't know better) is introduced to curtail freedom of expression and remove all privacy in the name of justice. That will be a very different Internet and not in a good way.

My main gripe is using "Gen X" as "older person" and "millenial" as "young person".

The youngest millenials are ~26 years old, born in 1996 according to US census definition. They were already 13 when Whatsapp was invented, much older when it became popular.

Replace Gen X (avg 47 YO) with millenial (avg 33 yo) and millenial with Gen Z (avg 20 yo) and at least the premise of the article starts making more sense.

The average Gen X had no computer in their teens. Millenial had dial-up. Gen Z had iPhones. Who is most likely to care about open internet vs walled gardens?

The article's opening paragraphs are fairly rife with silly generalisations.

I think you're exactly right... some other commenters who are actually millenials are saying this as well: they were still children then, but they remember using KaZaa and sharing mp3's and p2p. The author just lost track of which generation is which :D but the point is a good one, I think.

"The average Gen X had no computer in their teens."

I don't think this is true. I was born towards the front end of gen x - 1969 - and I had a vic-20 as a teen. Most of my friends, including some that were definitely not in the "nerd" circles I ran in had them. I had friends with commodore 64s, tandy color computers, timex sinclairs, etc. Our high school had macs and my jr high had TRS-80s.

By 96 I had a packard bell 386sx that came with dos but ran windows. AOL was a thing and it was a very, very different world than dialing up BBSs on my vic-20 as a kid.

I don't know how much I agree with the author's premise, I would need to think on it more. But I think at least from the perspective of people my age - there is definitely a big difference between how we grew up and what was available compared to millenials. I didn't own my first cell phone until after 2000. By the time the first millenials were 10 in 2006, 77% of people in the US had cell phone subscriptions. By the time they were 15 in 2011 it was over 95%.

I think the article's tone is problematic and some of the assertions but I also feel some agreement in terms of how I emotionally viewed technology and the possibilities it brought compared to when I talk to younger people now and how they see it.

The old open web still exists. Just because a larger percentage of people prefer the order of walled gardens doesn't mean the web is now closed. I'm sure the lawyers would love for us to believe that and have us normal tech people turn and rage against our most successful members. It's divide and conquer.

Most tech company resources go to litigation and legal fees rather than research and development. They get all the money and they're given the power to read our private emails too, so they can take more money if anything we say using a computer could be portrayed in a negative light. That's the closed internet.

This is the truth. Anyone can go and start a web blog right now, and still say whatever they want on it. Anyone can create a silly web game in any of a dozen competing free game engines (or a Minecraft mod, or whatever), and publish it in a dozen different places. There are small-but-thriving online communities for a gajillion different hobbies, kinks, ideologies, or areas. Facebook Groups hasn't killed them all yet.

But the average person doesn't do any of this, I think because we're all addicted to the fake internet points, and you don't get fake internet points for writing a blog post, or making something fun, unless you post it to social media. And it's so much easier to get those fake internet points by just commenting. (Hence me writing this right now instead of getting on with unclogging the 3D printer which is what I should be doing. I kicked my Facebook addition, only to find myself here).

We can't put the genie back in the bottle. Now we know that humans are susceptible to fake internet points, that's always going to be a business opportunity for someone. We could regulate it, but I'd hate to see what that regulation would look like.

But we can, individually, go and find the old open web. Because, as you say, it's still there.

You make the Internet sound like it's some kind of casino. Karma on sites like Reddit is pretty fake since they optimize towards people like violentacrez but points on twitter and facebook tend to do a better job accurately quantifying social stratification, hence their success. Looking at your account you've got a reasonably healthy karma score so I wouldn't beat yourself up over hanging out here. It's high enough that you're liked but not high enough to be an addict who just snipes threads preaching to the crowd.

I don't believe there is any correlation at all between actual social stratification and any of the fake internet points. Even the successful influencers I met while nomadding around SE Asia were pretty charisma-less (though usually good looking) irl.

The problem with hanging out here is that I'm doing this instead of anything useful or productive, because my brain likes the feel of fake internet points.

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