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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today, despite all of the WASM, WebGPU, JIT optimizations, and other technologies that have been developed in more recent years.

We had torrents, open data, open protocols, and people were sharing data and remixing it freely. Mountains of stuff like this Bluesky demo was released every single day. We had link aggregators to point to the cool things that were happening, and we even had tools that let you pipe data sources between various APIs to enrich and recombine things easily.

Platforms stopped this. Facebook, Google, and even Apple put an end to the wildly evolutionary behavior by delivering a canned experience to the masses.

We need a return to P2P where single platform silos and their army of product managers don't shape how we interact with technology and the bulk flow of information.

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> The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today

Because it seems like this stuff is taught in Management 101 in all of the business schools: once you establish yourself with all this talk about "openness", etc. then the only way to succeed is by creating a walled garden, either through abuse of your monopoly position or by regulatory capture.

Cases in point: OpenAI _and_ Anthropic both pushing for regulation of AI, now that they have a dominant position.

I swear, the moment MBAs get involved, they try the same crap everywhere.

It's a common trope to blame MBAs for all the ills in the world.

But the reality is that having a moat and how to defend it is a fundamental strategy that every CEO is expected to know. Because it will be one of the first things you get asked from YC, investors etc.

And using regulation to lock out competitors definitely did not start with OpenAI and Anthropic.

> And using regulation to lock out competitors definitely did not start with OpenAI and Anthropic.

That's what I'm saying: it started with the MBAs.

Indeed.

Question is whether this all that was in the 90s can again be relevant for the young who grew with TikTok, insta and fb.

I don’t have the answer, only doubts…

Now with GPTs more than ever people can regain their web presence. But do they do it? I guess not as much as one would expect.

You may say we need to go p2p again and perhaps Tim Berns Lee actually meant p2p with the HTML, but are people aware of this daring need?

I see 2 way to do this. A company (and PM) sees demand for the feature and they include it, ot it is forced by regulation.

A lot of these companies that originally had open standards formed with huge amounts of VC money and they prioritized growth over everything else. Then when they reached a certain scale, investors valued profitability and they slowly squeezed and monetized users until all of those open standards features were gone.

This is just revisionist history.

We still have all the tools you talk about today. But with the benefit of much simpler languages and SDKs and tools like LLMs to help generate code. I've seen children learn programming far faster with Swift Playground on their iPad than I had to with C++ books.

And these sort of canned experience are what helped bring technology to everyone. Which was always supposed to be the main goal.

It's a little bit of both in this case.

Kids are all over Discord, Roblox, Minecraft, and VRchat. They're writing scripts and mods, and that's great. They're probably having a blast and a good number of them are learning a lot.

But they're doing all of these things in someone else's walled garden, on buttoned up platforms that typically constrain what they can accomplish. There are fewer degrees of freedom and a lot less ownership in the work they're doing.

These platforms also cost kids money. They use toxic gotcha mechanics and peer pressure to monetize. This part is strictly worse.

It's a lot different carving out your own clubhouse and culture when you're renting. Especially when you're made to speak a certain language and abide by a rigid set of rules.

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