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> Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?

Kind of.

But I also use Fastmail. And Fastmail is shockingly, mindboggling good.

And I basically have the tools I need to work from home in perpetuity. While I have lots of things to critique about Slack or Google Docs, I don't have to spend an hour or more a day in traffic anymore, so that's cool. Also Video chat actually works now, which is crazy if you think about it.

I just bought an album from an obscure artist off Bandcamp. It was seamless. And it comes in FLAC if that's your jam.

Speaking of which I've been meaning to run to a neighborhood bakery today and it took 3 seconds to confirm they're still open.

Is the party over? Actually, I'm not sure.

Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social media is not and never has been the web, despite their power grabs.

/me nods while switching from Safari to TikTok

According to Screen Time, I spend five times longer on TikTok than Safari. HN comes in at just 39 minutes over the last week. The two possibilities are that I’m consumed by the social media cycle, or that I learn more from TikTok than any other source. Since I love learning, empirically social media seems to be the web.

Don’t slay the messenger; I’m just as nervous about this as you. But we’ve all seen what happens to those who cling to old trends, hoping the golden ages will return. It rarely goes well.

For evidence, I flicked through about ten nonsense videos just now before landing on this gem: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtq8Mmc/?k=1

I like the web. It has its purpose. But one could also say it’s served its purpose. The power grab exists because it wasn’t serving a very real gap in the transmission of knowledge.

I agree. I think it's fair to say the entertainment/time-vortex/scrolling element of the web more or less moved on from the open web to mobile apps etc a long time ago and there's no reason to think it will come back. I'm not even on tiktok, but there's nothing open web about my Apple TV either.

If you’d like to give it a try, I’m currently watching a lovely stream where an Irish artist is drawing a pug. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtqCc7E/

The smaller streams seem to be the most interesting, which is sort of the inverse of twitch. Where else can you pass the time while seeing an artist at work?

The history content was the real surprise. I was glued to the history channel as a kid, and watching its demise was a sad point in life. But it seems to be reviving itself in an ad hoc way; there are dozens of channels that go into detail about topics I’d never heard of.

+1 |or that I learn more from TikTok than any other source

You learn from TikTok, for me thats the place to see hot girls(arbitrary).

But,

|empirically social media seems to be the web. '

is true.

Learn has such positive connotation and I want to highlight how a sentence with a not so positive connotation looks like.

The key is to use the “not interested” button. You have to long press on a video. They make it hard to discover, and it’s the only way to get away from the phenomenon you pointed out. Takes maybe 30 minutes of tuning, and I’m also convinced that yesterday’s “not interested” presses inform the content that shows up today, so give it a bit of time. But it’s hard to gauge how any of these black boxes work.

You doxxed yourself sharing that tiktok link.

> Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social media is not and never has been the web, despite their power grabs.

Is this really true? I feel like there are some good social media sites still out there, like certain small parts of reddit and this website we're both commenting on.

I think you’re just getting old. It happens.

Personally, DMs are the only real thing in my life. Everything else feels artificial. You even set aside time to go see your parents, and make plans to go on vacation.

DMs are where the magic is. Even HN comments are starting to lose the feeling, but it’s probably because I’m getting old.

It's not a getting old thing. Corporations ruin everything. Maximizing revenue at the expense of everything else has its cost.

Is there an alternative?

It’s true that in a thousand years, the systems that exist today are likely not going to be those of the next millennia.

But it’s also true that the incentives of society change very, very slowly. And right now the most impactful work seems to be done by politicians and corporations.

Which means the ambitious will always be attracted to those, like flies to sunlight.

I just don’t see the point in even recognizing these truths, let alone trying to change them. There’s nothing —- nothing —- that you or I can do about it. Not even YC could. They sailed with the wind, not against it.

The most we can do seems to be to maximize our own individual happiness.

Speaking of happiness, dear readers, remember that 35 is middle age. Working until you’re 60 is the biggest corporate triumph of them all. Do the things you want before you retire.

> Is there an alternative?

Yes, make the markets competitive.

Competition comes from corporations and start ups.

And what makes it possible for lots of startups to exist? What makes it possible for upstarts to rapidly rise and replace an incumbent?

Todays Big Tech replaced the earlier generation. But the markets have been so thoroughly captured that it seems impossible for any startup to replace Meta or Apple or Google. Netflix is struggling not against another startup but industry incumbents replicating its technology.

Until the markets get competitive again, there won’t be much innovation domestically. TikTok should have shocked the entire US tech industry but rather than try to come up with better products the Tech industry tried to dismember the company and gobble up its US assets ( a process that stopped only because of a change in administration).

the alternative is humans decide to invest their energy in improving the quality of life of other humans instead of pure (financial) domination

Not revenue. "Shareholder VALUE".

Shareholder value is a business term, sometimes phrased as shareholder value maximization or as the shareholder value model, which implies that the ultimate measure of a company's success is the extent to which it enriches shareholders.

I really doubt young people don't resonante with this message.

Unfortunately I can attest to the fact that chat apps is where it's at. I personally would much rather make plans in person but it's hard to get anyone to do anything, especially now. One of my friends jokes that COVID turned us all into "online friends" which is just a little too true to be really funny.

There is a small cohort of people, 40-48 years old, who experienced the ideal of instant messengers in the late 90s to circa 2005.

After that, everything in the unified/personal communications space got technically better but worse.

Agree but you did the math wrong. Teenagers in 2005 were all over instant messengers and they would only be 30s.

They were, but at that point it was a truly mass market. I poorly expressed the population that I was trying to describe.

Circa 1999-2000, you could IM random ICQ users and they were not 100% dickpic creeps. It was almost like a pre-AOL internet for people in the know.

I remember! Selecting profiles on ICQ as if on a dating website, and talking with someone in China! No dickpic, just naive remote friendship, well in fact he did fall in love with me but… wait was it only because we had no numeric cameras at the time?

Small? Basically everyone born in the late-80s/early-90s used AIM, ICQ, or MSN Messenger when they got into high school or college.

That's an entire generation!

I agree that classic IM was best IM, though. Unfortunately you can't make money on IM alone, and AOL isn't the portal of choice anymore. (Google was so close with Hangouts!)

I'm 34 and all my friends were using AIM in middle school back in 1999

I exclusively used MSN Messenger in my elementary and high school days (which admittedly straddles 2005).

I can't say that an unbloated app like Signal is a fundamentally different experience except for some of the deficiencies that've been ironed out (better file/image sharing is one that certainly comes to mind).

I'm open to being wrong on this point though!

EDIT: Actually, you can add Discord/Signal/Telegram to Pidgin for the throwback UI.

https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins

We had instant messaging in the 80’s at college on a VAX. Admittedly only 8 people in any one chat.

I'm 34 and my whole school was on MSN Messenger from 5th grade until senior year. Even into college a lot of friends were on MSN until Facebook really started catching on. That's my experience from rural North Dakota.

Give it 15 years and people will be saying this about Discord circa 2020.

To be clear, “at Shoreline” refers to a specific movie theater (probably the Century Cinema on Shoreline Blvd in Mountain View), not a different movie.

Ah, my bad. I read that section three times and still missed that, and feel quite dumb now.

I think the lesson here is not that you misunderstood (which is completely understandable, no reason you should know the name of a local theater) but rather that it's never a good idea to assume the worst reading of a situation.

And also that a movie messenger app might need to be smart enough to know if you know all the local movie theaters?

Closer to Google HQ than FB HQ for extra irony

closest venue to where zuckerberg lives

Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?

I have this theory, for a long time, that a lot of what sucks in computing is simply because at some moment it was the only thing that worked at certain scale.

Computing is said to be the second industrial revolution and therefore there is an overwhelming force to adopt whatever already works, no matter how much it sucks.

Later, inertia keeps the sucking solution for longer that it would stand on its own, until someone manages to put something obviously better in the market.

Some day recomendation systems will stop sucking. Meanwhile, take them for what they are.

I worry that it's an inevitable outcome of capitalization akin to what I think we've seen in physical goods:

Stage 1: make crappy products because you don't know better

Stage 2: make quality products because now you can

Stage 3: realize that you can make more money by making your product cheaper. Outsource the labor, turn the metal into plastic. People won't even mind if it breaks if they can just get another one. In fact, why not design it to eventually break so you can sell even more?

Stage 4: realize you can make even more money by turning your product into a service with app integration

And it's difficult to go back to a previous Stage because you'll always lose, like trying to un-invent gunpowder weapons. From the perspective of a consumer who cares and wants Stage 2 products, the system's decayed to maximum entropy; the forest is gone; all the trees have been chopped down; the soil's depleted. :C

My favorite example of this is the “whirly pop”, which is a stovetop popcorn maker with a little device for stirring the popcorn kernels. They did the MBA thing and slowly chipped away at the cost, to the point that the lid is a piece of aluminum equivalent to 3 sheets of foil. It’s non-functional and possibly dangerous - but still $30 at Walmart.

The twist is they did go back - you can buy something closer to the 1990 version at Williams Sonoma, except it’s $90.

This is just how we've fought inflation for many years. Things have gotten more accessible, not by accident, but through innovation. And, if your want to pay for quality, you typically still can. Seems like the best of both worlds.

Oh, I'm sorry, did you want to get all the quality but at the low-ball price? Doesn't work that way.

(Not intending to direct this at you specifically spooky. Just hammering your point home for parent poster.)

As a counterpoint international calling/messaging has become free and of much better quality.

> Did you want to get all the quality but at the low-ball price? Doesn't work that way.

This is patently false. Look at innovation in things like TVs and personal computers. Technology has gotten significantly cheaper and significantly better quality (although TVs have started to decline in recent years).

I understand your sentiment but I don't think it's impossible to ask for innovation to allow old products to be created cheaper without compromising on quality.

Sure, not to say it's impossible. Sometimes you have early technology that can be refined through mass production. But at some point, you optimize as well as you can, and then the only way to continue driving or keeping prices down is to make compromises.

> fundamentally get one thing wrong

I don't think they do.

The user is the person who consumes your product and gives you money for it. 'End users' are hostages. The real user is the ad-company. Once your product is feature complete, your ability to make money from the product doesn't scale with the technical quality of the product itself.

Facebook cares about making money. Period. Zuck's emails clearly show that his eyes are pointed at the exact point where some form of advertisements can be brought into the messenger platform. (indirectly through new feed in this case)

Youtube tried to sell people a subscription model, and most users do not want to pay the kind of money that youtube would lose by allowing them to avoid ads and low-quality content wormholes.

Netflix has an entirely different problem all together. It is a bunch of mega companies burning capital faster than it can be replenished, hoping to win the 'streaming' game. Unfortunately for Netflix, Disney practically has a warchest ready to go at all times.

Funny thing is, eventually a product comes along that provides the same value to the 'end user', without all the baggage of the 'money making' service. This is usually the point of exodus (digg/orkut/myspace) or acquire. (whatsapp)

I feel as though you're just being nitpicky for the sake of missing the point.

the overarching issue is that this " 'End users' are hostages. The real user is the ad-company" is a terrible problem which needs to be addressed, and politicians and other elites are terribly failing to do this in the west.

> Facebook cares about making money. Period.

you misspelled "every modern corporation"

all this to try to highlight how there's a problem here, and there seems to be a failure of society at large in the capability to deal with it.

> The user is the person who consumes your product and gives you money for it. 'End users' are hostages. The real user is the ad-company. Once your product is feature complete, your ability to make money from the product doesn't scale with the technical quality of the product itself.

Clearly this is not what society wants, and it would be great if there was a law against this business model (at least until there are plenty of competitors who behave better).

I actually like the YouTube recommendation system. It manages to pleasantly surprise me pretty often. I don't have significant privacy concerns about it - the stuff I enjoy on YT is quite aligned with my public persona, so to speak. I'm not disclosing anything that I don't already disclose to the outer world.

And furthermore, "bare" YouTube experience (what type of stuff they promote on their front page when it's not customized by my recommendations - basically what I see when I'm not logged in) is truly nauseating to me.

> if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets for hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw my phone into the ocean.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point here. You asked for 9 and it gave you an option of 9:10 at the Shoreline theater by the Googleplex. That’s usually the most common spot in this area. Are you saying it’s the wrong location for you?

> This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the first time, and then make a search for something completely different, one of a first few results will be a video of the user you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any information about myself for recommendations just because of that.

YouTube's recommendation system has been terribly broken for me for years.

I used to occasionally watch Lex Fridman's show casually, but now I despise it because it's all that YouTube's autoplay and homepage steers me towards. I guaran-fooking-tee you that I can fall asleep to Spongebob Squarepants clips and wake up in the morning to Lex's monotone voice... every single time.

Worst yet, it doesn't even do much to show me episodes I haven't watched yet. It replays the same ones countless numbers of times.

Thing is, I do want to watch some of Lex's episodes when they come out, so unsubscribing isn't a good answer. I've tried telling YouTube to "show me less of this" or whatever the equivalent option is, and it doesn't get the clue that it's overwhelming me.

People wonder why I'm such a pessimist about Silicon Valley and the world of software engineering despite that I'm a programmer. UX patterns such as those found on YouTube and The Google are the opposite of excellence. Either they lack competence or they are specifically designed to waste your time.

I don't even buy the notion that "most users don't care." People in my life who aren't technologists complain about tech all the time.

Same as it ever was, I suspect. Why do all parents know in their bones that TV is kind of bad and they should limit their kids' consumption of it?

It sucks that a lot of problems are very old and just keep manifesting in different ways. But the flip side is the strategies for resisting are also old and well-known.

My toddler is unaware that there is a whole world of video content made just for him - as far as he knows, the only videos that exist are nature documentary clips, cooking shows, church services and tech conference talks.

I know that as soon as some of his daycare classmates can really start talking, the veil will be pierced and he'll be begging to see (judging by said classmates' t-shirts and backpacks) Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig and Frozen.

And I'm not sure how we're going to deal with that.

Probably time limits.

I'd disagree with the characterization that Facebook is maximizing user engagement with messenger. Rather, they wanted messenger to

1. Be the de facto protocol used by companies

2. Let people spend less time on messenger, and render planning of events efficient

For point 1, this is evident with the mention of the Facebook SDK being used by many apps, thereby rendering the adoption of a messenger API easy. I find the timing of these emails __very coincidental__ since Facebook recently announced an API for WhatsApp that effectively achieves "app-to-person messages" [1]. Based off rapper Ryan Leslie's great success with automating consumer engagement [2], I think this will succeed given a right signal-to-noise balance (also mentioned in the emails!). That said, interesting __anti-trust questions__ also arise, see Twilio, SuperPhone, etc.

For point 2, I frankly welcome messenger facilitating the planning of vacations/outings. It's very common for people my age to say "let's hang out" or "let's go to this concert", yet no one wants to spend the time to plan it. If my non-vacation-planning messages can be hermetically demarcated from every advertiser's eyes, then I wouldn't mind this addition.

Relevant Note: This comes from the perspective of a Gen-Z denizen.

[1] - https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid0TGYGr4hijxJdL9CawU...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PtyXnFVNDw

P.S. As an aside, it would be interesting to see the implementation of a cryptocurrency to reward users for engaging with ads. I conjectured this was the purpose behind the ill-fated Libra coin. That said, it's not immediately clear how proof-of-work would be implemented, or if blockchain would be needed at all.

>With Messenger specifically, . . . I'd much rather just use it to make plans with the person I want to hang out with.

Same. I'd much rather tell them to download Discord, add me, and then we talk on there. Why are we talking over an inferior IM platform?

Then use Discord to tell them to download an XMPP client and join a real IM platform that isn't some vendor's proprietary, inferior, walled-garden B.S.

One can dream. :`)

Matrix IMs like Element look cool, but feature parity and usability seem far away...

Fat-client P2P IMs like WLM died because there was no business model, but there's not even much of one in thin-client ones like Discord (which I praise for refusing to be bought by Microsoft).

It seems like a market failure thing perfect for an open source solution, but alas.

yes. The YouTube results are horrendous. I get a mix of things unrelated to my search that YouTube wants me to look at and a mix of related things and what feels like a never ending loop through some other material.

Older videos can be very hard to find at times. I sometimes use a regular search engine to try to get to it.

This probably isn't because of bad technology though, although that is possible. I suspect it is part of a revenue maximizing strategy, like you implied about them not valuing user time, to get users to focus on viral content to drive engagement (addiction) and highly monetized content. But it could be because of poor machine learning models I just suspect it's a new type of dark pattern.

Yes I wish that more software (and hardware) focused on being good tools. I should use software to achieve my ends, not the inverse.

Accept my input, produce the output I need, and do it with as little friction as possible. Don't assume what I want, and definitely don't shove it down my throat.

> With Messenger specifically, I absolutely don't want to…

The big issues with a proclamation like this are:

1. You’re 1 person and you have to recognize you don’t speak for anyone other than yourself.

2. The things people say they don’t want to do and what they actually don’t do are often surprisingly different.

Found the FB dev

edit: take your own advice

That's nonsense. First, he never spoke for anyone else. Second, ask any expert in econometrics; they'll tell you he's correct.

Also, it's obvious he's right just based on Facebook's interest in Messenger. Otherwise, they'd just work on implementing functionality to manage scheduling and meeting with friends in person and never develop all their extraneous Messenger features to begin with.

I know you don't realize this, and you think you're a legitimately good person. But you're basically saying "We know you better than you know yourself, and we're going to manipulate you into pissing away as much time and energy on our platform as possible because we can"

I hate Facebook as much as the next guy, but this part is correct:

The things people say they don’t want to do and what they actually don’t do are often surprisingly different

When television ratings measurement started moving from people writing down their viewing habits in a diary to automated system measuring what they were actually watching, suddenly "PBS" ratings tanked, and have stayed down in automated measurements.

The same thing happened in radio. People would write down that they listen to whatever station was trendy, or cool, or advertised the most. But when Portable People Meters became a thing, we found out that people listen to a little bit from all different kinds of radio stations.

People are sometimes untruthful. Even when they're assured of anonymity.

While that's true, there's another layer to it: impulse control.

When I consciously think about what I'd like to watch on Youtube, it doesn't include some of the things I'd click on if they were put in front of my face. The same is true of food I might take from a buffet versus what I'd order for a catered meal.

I'd like to have an algorithmic feed that gives me the kinds of things I say I want rather than basing it on my actual behavior. I'd spend less time on Youtube and watch things my conscious mind says are more valuable to me. Of course, that's less profitable.

There is a third interpretation I'd like to posit starting from the oft-quoted phrase "Know thyself." One, it implies that knowing thyself isn't a guaranteed ability - it takes effort for example. Furthermore, we can without difficulty agree that knowing thyself has degrees, dimension, and quality.

So what then, if someone does not know thyself in some way? They leave open the possibility to have others define them, take advantage of them, and influence one's agency. This doesn't exclude the possibly of someone knowing something about you better than you know, only to say that maligned agents can capitalize on one's lack of self-knowing.

We can then extend the original quote in this specific content to "Know yourself so that you alone can define your agency." This extension allows for nuance in epistemological introspection and accounts for inter-subjective manipulation.

I agree with you here, but bringing it back to the context at hand: Facebook knows what will keep people hooked in a way that helps Facebook, and sneakily optimizes for that. They don't care if the product sucks or if it radicalizes people with aggressive, difficult-to-debunk BS memes and grinds them against each other.

Yeah, OK, a lot of people don't know themselves well enough to turn their phone notifications off and delete their Twitter accounts. That's the part I don't like, and it's all cloaked behind "We're increasing engagement with a data-driven approach!"

Yes, I know that is what I’m saying. And no, I don’t think of myself as a legitimately good person. Fairly stupid. Pretty selfish. Decent cook, so that’s something.

What people ideally want to do and what they actually do are different, yes, but that doesn't mean it's moral or good to disregard what they ideally want.

If a heroin user wants to get clean, and you are the dealer, it is not okay to say "sure, you say that, but you keep coming back to me". It is morally monstrous.

> It is morally monstrous.

Bro, I don’t know if heroin dealers are generally known for their morality.

I can imagine.

>2. The things people say they don’t want to do and what they actually don’t do are often surprisingly different.

Personally I find recommendation engines abhorrent. And still, when a recommendation engine works well for me, I am pleasantly surprised and happy with the product.

N.B. that shoreline is a cinema local to silicon valley, not a different movie.

Market utilization. We must change the rules to change the game.