The early internet was like some settlers' shacks, built uncontrollably and unsystematically whereas the modern web is all skyscrapers, residential and business. Uniform apartments, uniform offices all looking very similar differeing in only subtle interior design details here and there.
Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. But maybe we should start a new era of land exploration and start over. It shouldn't necessarily be Internet 3.0, might be something else completely. AR/VR? Possibly although that has already failed once.
The only thing missing from your analogy is the fact that the shacks were filled with personal diaries and curios, while the skyscrapers are mostly chock-full of homogenous sewage slurry.
Also the shacks weren’t really particularly shabby or anything, they were just more like well-enough-constructed single family homes.
Old websites before scripting became popular were pretty much solid in that boring-tech way. Hardware and networks were not as reliable, but the sites themselves could be fine via simplicity.
Modern overdesigned sites are sort of like modern apartment buildings: shitty build quality under fake plastic marble and wood.
Keep in mind the early websites were mostly built by an enthusiast minority, technical or not but willing to learn HTML and Netscape Composer. You can't expect the whole humanity to be as enthusiastic. The skyscraper era, no matter how much we all hate it, makes the web more democratic: it gives everyone some standardized space (Facebook, Youtube, etc) with algorithmized discovery which is parking and elevators if you want to continue the analogy.
Hard to live through what social media has done to society over the past decade without at least entertaining the idea that the higher barrier to entry of being online was maybe not a bad thing.
I wouldn't agree that the higher barrier to entry was a good thing, but I also would say that the barrier to entry was actually pretty low, with angelfire, geocities, etc. Dreamweaver + other wysiwyg, and the lack of a necessity of a giant js framework with bundling and tree-shaking.
The problem is that the barrier to entry got too low, so it was necessary for large companies to interpose themselves between producers and audiences, starting with google (becoming something other than a grep for the web, and instead becoming the editor and main income source for the web) and expanding outwards into facebook.
Remember that we started with walled gardens like AOL and Compuserve, and the web (and the end of those companies) was people desperate to break out of them. Now people have been herded in again since the indexers bought the ad companies.
I don't disagree but notice how it's about the second decade of Web 2.0, not the first one. Profit-driven algorithms is a separate era in its own right. I.e. you can't blame the skyscrapers themselves for your shitty life, you just need to demand more regulation.
yes, for sure! It was a different time. Early website authors were pioneers. They had something worth sharing and they thought it worthwhile enough to learn some coding. Nobody was trying to push ads and monetize, and there was no ubiquitous tracking or cookies
If we're talking about the internet before Eternal September, maybe, but putting up a site on Geocities or Tripod or using Dreamweaver certainly was not a high barrier to entry.
Facebook and YouTube are top-down managed systems, and I think it is a real disservice to the idea of democracy to call this sort of thing “more democratic.” They are democratic like a mall is, which is to say, not.
I like to compare today's web to radio in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Back then, if you could piece together a transmitter and throw an antenna up, you were a broadcaster and many broadcast whatever they felt like. Just like today's internet.
Social media is the CB radio of the 1970s and 80s when anyone could buy a small rig and do all kinds of weird and wild things for cheap.
But, eventually, something had to reign in all that and the FCC along with international laws and standards came up to calm all that down. In the same way, I think the internet will eventually become licensed and regulated.
The rationale behind the FCC is that it's regulating a limited resource (spectrum space.) The web is not a limited resource (although bandwidth is, but that's a different debate.) The web is also international, and we're already seeing conflicts where one country tries to force their regulations onto another. That metaphor just doesn't work where the web is concerned.
I agree that the web in the US, and specifically large social media platforms, will probably be regulated because that seems to be one of the few things both parties agree on for their own reasons. But more so because the government wants to control information and surveil citizens. I think the balkanization of the web as a whole into smaller, closed networks is probably inevitable.
But what's most depressing of all is how many people in tech and on HN would be thrilled if one needed a license to publish on the internet just because that would implicitly push most people off of the web and leave it for a privileged elite.
As bad as social media can be (and I think its harm is often oversold for political ends) having a space where anyone can publish and communicate and create freely, where different platforms can exist and cater to different needs, where media isn't entirely controlled and gatekept by corporations, is critically important. More important than any other communications paradigm before it, including the printing press.
It's really going to be sad when we burn it all down, because it seems unlikely anyone is going to make something as free and open as the web ever again.
> But, eventually, something had to reign in all that and the FCC along with international laws and standards came up to calm all that down.
No, it actually stayed pretty lively until the 90s, when the government decided that there could be huge monopolies in media, all the stations were bought up by like 6 guys, and were automated to play Disney music 24 hours a day.
> Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not.
I am not sure. Different people want different things. I ran a Hetzner cloud instance where I toss a simple webpage with locally hosted travel photos for friends and family. And a Jupiter server (with a very weak password) on the same instance for myself and any friend when we want something more powerful than a calculator.
And this messy, improperly organized, breaking all design patterns way works just fine for me. So I'm fine with a shack for personal communication and as a personal space. My 2c.
Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. But maybe we should start a new era of land exploration and start over. It shouldn't necessarily be Internet 3.0, might be something else completely. AR/VR? Possibly although that has already failed once.