the public's wants are always reduced to trite generalizations, so maybe it's not about thunder, maybe the upset is that one can generate lively conversation easily by exploiting trite dichotomies, and that such a behavior is distasteful. everybody has an opinion on the hoi polloi from the vantage of their phantom high horse. a chat gpt could write the rest of the thread.
"real communism has clearly never been tried" is a set expression, from the internet. it's a variation on doing the same thing, but expecting different results, with a touch of ideological stubbornness, "this time around if we let people choose, they'll choose a very different internet, from the one they chose before, i'm sure of it, because I believe in people". of course the reason I choose this particular set expression, rather than some other one is to play off your comedic choice of terminology "people's internet". they have "people's internet" in "people's republic of china". you know? I'm not saying communism bad, it's a funny phrase. jeez, you brits used to be keen on subtle humor.
jeez, krapp, you've been posting on hacker news since like forever, doing drive by hate posts in random threads all the time, and you tell me to "touch grass". I'll change the password on this bad boy, and won't interact with you fucks for at least like another half a year. /but you're here forever/
danny's meaning didn't have this romantic component. it was specifically "bad internet as experienced by non-technologically sophisticated users in the early 2000s", as opposed to the "wild internet". the example that he gives is something like spamassassin with naive bayesian filter, which meant that power users at that point in time "won" against spam, while naive users were still getting tons of spam in their inboxes. I personally always thought that it's play on "hinder net".
I'm curious about this type of response. it sort of implies that I don't know why things have changed the way they did. the causality is implicitly in the original also. we have a lot of mobile first websites, because most people use phones to access internet. and all the bad things happen on the internet have reasons behind them like that, because it's an emergent dynamic process. emails are to be collected, for they are a valuable tool in sales pipeline. things buzz and blink because it's easy to hack human attention system, which is also why casinos do it. but that's kind of, like, not what the comment is about.
thanks to the bbc brit, the subthread essentially culminated in your comment. I'd like to clarify that this dichotomy didn't exist in my original. "technology elite" like somebody hinted elsewhere in the thread, could be a dirt poor kid from underprivileged background, whose accidental access to a computer was the only means of escape from the oppressive reality. at a certain level of technological sophistication one could gain capabilities and access that make one belong to a select group, making one part of the elite. from this perspective, "the masses" are literally everyone else who wasn't on the internet in the early 2000s. yes, by weight and numbers there will be an inordinate amount of talented individuals among them. there will also be perhaps an even bigger number of complete and utter mediocrities. since the person you're responding to doesn't use the term "elites", I can only assume it's everyone you don't like, because some of them would've been technological elites, who then became financial ones, but then some of them would've been financial elites, who remained financial elites never becoming technological ones, and yet by the power of their capital they've exploited technology. they are I guess bad. most of the humanity are good, because a lot of talented ones make art. what a pointless subthread, god damn.
I'm not hn, and primarily it's because I don't believe that pseudonymous conversation generates interesting dialog. I mean user a says something, user b misunderstand, user c attacks user b's misunderstanding. in aggregate it's fun to read, if you don't have a goal, but mostly it's just an opportunity to read your own clever writing.
dearest Kenneth, I did not mean to single out apple or iPads. it's just that in my circle nobody uses androids (and my circle is predominantly non-tech!). I've not even seen an android in a very long time. I've spent some time trying to "libre-ify" chrome books, and discovered, like you said, that the devices are heavily locked down, with multiple tiers of mystery chips (for your protection!) ensuring that you can never really de-google them. but when I think "locked down consumer device for checking your mortgage account" I think "iPad", because that's all and exclusively what I ever see.
it's quite cyberpunk, in a dystopian sense, I don't think most people realize. it can of course be framed as benign and I'm sure there are protective policies in place. but you know, if you take a sweeping look from a distance, the fact that the login system for government website, which every single citizen might at any point be forced to interact with, has a profile option (enabled by default) to "receive emails featuring ID.me offers and discounts" seems quite insane to me.
think of it from a subjective experience of somebody who was "from the internet" in the early 2000s (because that's when Danny coined the term):
mIRC made irc easy, jabber was already a thing, you're have a bunch of bookmarks (in non-monetized, non-ad supported online services) to high quality content, you're posting on forums, you get your news from blogs of intelligent people, etc. etc. the internet you're interacting with is great!
alas you have technologically unsophisticated users joining in and what they are experiencing is "hinternet": banners everywhere (we had adblockers), spam all the time (we had spamassassin, and our host Paul graham just invented naive bayesian spam filtering, which at least early on worked spectacularly), phishing and trickery (the computer told me to put my credit card, or similar). it's a miserable broken experience, that potentially results in your information or money being stolen, and all kinds of other indignities.
I'm saying that modern internet is more like a hinternet of old than it is anything else, but we are all forced do t use it.
you misunderstood the concept, brought in your own windmills, and then successfully attacked them. I guess it generated an interesting subthread, even if it did derail my point into the tired "internet ain't what it used to be!" direction. god, I was hoping what I said was more subtle than that. other people in the thread have done better, even managed to use google to search the original posts on oblomovka so that they can reflect on the point, instead of just typing things.
but to your "people's internet" point, the real communism has clearly never been tried! it's not the people that want TikTok, it's the power structure. left to their own devices they built cathedrals!
Danny o'brien, he runs one of the oldest surviving blogs, oblomovka, coined a term "hinternet" sometime in 2007, that was when the internet was still being run by the technological elite, for themselves, but normal people have also joined. The idea of hinternet was that there was essentially two internets. One is the sophisticated technology and a value add, and the other one is the internet of the viagra pills and popup banners. We, the technology elite, would rarely venture into the hinternet, like going into a bad neighborhood, where's normal people had no such mechanism for discernment, so their experience of the internet was distinctly different and inferior.
Now most of the internet is hinternet, and we're all forced more and more to rely on it. Banking systems, mortgage platforms, car payments, utilities payments are generally designed mobile first, desktop later, they employ various dark techniques for "verifying real user", which break on open platforms, forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all. If hinternet used to be the dark shady streets where hucksters were peddling you knockoff watches, then now hinternet is the dystopian landscape of vertical information integration, ran, behind the scenes, by para-governmental institutions. You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things.
There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success. On a personal level there's a strong disincentive to participate in the hinternet beyond the mandatory, carefully navigating poorly designed and conceived systems just long enough to achieve an objective. One has to login into irs, but one doesn't really need to read that popup and upsell blocked, mobile centric news article.
From this perspective "mobile-first web design" is a symptom removed from its greater context.
"real communism has clearly never been tried" is a set expression, from the internet. it's a variation on doing the same thing, but expecting different results, with a touch of ideological stubbornness, "this time around if we let people choose, they'll choose a very different internet, from the one they chose before, i'm sure of it, because I believe in people". of course the reason I choose this particular set expression, rather than some other one is to play off your comedic choice of terminology "people's internet". they have "people's internet" in "people's republic of china". you know? I'm not saying communism bad, it's a funny phrase. jeez, you brits used to be keen on subtle humor.