These Web elegies are starting to become a real drag to read. And I don't mean to come across as flippant in saying this. I feel a sort of concern for the spirit of the authors of these kind of pieces, which are becoming more and more commonplace.
Agreed. I don’t even know what this elegy is for. “what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience, anywhere in the world. That’s the web I want back.” Is that no longer the web? It seems pretty easy to find communities these days.
The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.
From what I've seen, a lot - I'd say most - of the communities that existed outside of the major platforms have dried up or ended (the famous/infamous bodybuilding forum apparently just went down). Web forum communities, mailing list communities, communities built around an individuals website (it sounds strange to say now, but this was pretty common a couple of decades ago). Even the offline meeting sites like Couchsurfing and Meetup are a shadow of what they were in their heyday (about 15 years or so ago).
The actual number of people actively using the internet is much higher, yet the number of people outside of a few small social media silos are much lower. So I can only surmise that these social media silos are giving the vast majority - almost everyone - what they want (those gratifying instant hits). It's just sad to know that there's apparently only a tiny sliver of humanity interested in venturing off the main path and interacting with people outside of these silos.
I'm looking forward to reading an aging GenZ-er's elegy of the web that looks fondly back on the age of TikTok and algorithmic feeds, back when people actually made things.
>It seems pretty easy to find communities these days.
Outside of HN and a few niche subreddits, I can't think of many. Most good communities I'm part of are off the web on things like Discord which isn't addressable by search engines.
100%. I've been writing HTML since 94, and there truly was no golden age. There have been (get ready for this) good and bad things about each era.
It has always been possible to create communities, or break away and do something different. I really like ActivityPub, but it does not really change the dynamic.
With all of that said, sometimes getting a fancy new notebook makes you more likely to draw/write, which seems to be essentially what Dave is experiencing. Nothing wrong with that!
I still remember the screen names of folks I interacted with in and on IRC, AIM, ezboard, IGN boards, forums, etc.
I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere.
Forums used to have large avatars and signatures you could customize and communities were much more tightly-knit. I imagine that's what Discord and VRChat do now.
Don't worry in about 5 years they'll come to the conclusion I did about 5 years ago (because I was like that in 2014) - that is to say, they're realize it's futile and liberate themselves from the angst of it all and just accept the world is shit and the internet is shit and there's no going back and you will be free from such horrific lust for the dead remains of an archaic past. You will be glad when new potential "solutions" come up, but be sad to see the loss of expansion of said places and ultimately learn to accept that it's "creative destruction" on a smaller level, and the only people who care are the old heads who are a dying generation. We're like hippies at a dead show, with a few young hangers on who love to hear the glory of the old days, But they'll soon be dead too. Freedom in acceptance. Freedom in serenity. Free at last, thank god almighty, they will be free of such mental strife at last.
Winer in particular often writes in a style that approaches technology with the attitude that even the most obvious ideas weren't truly finished until he's had a hand in them.
This is controversial and perhaps rude but I've started to copy-paste these articles into ChatGPT to summarize into a single paragraph to help me decide if it is worth reading or not, for me.
Again, I mean no offense but humans only have 2,207,520,000 seconds on average. You can be goddamn right I'll take all the help I can allocating this precious resource called time.
Example output from this article:
> The author reflects on their early experiences in Silicon Valley, feeling at home among peers in the tech world but later realizing that many influential figures, including gatekeepers and executives, lacked a deep understanding of software. This disconnect was disheartening, as key decision-makers often misunderstood the potential and intricacies of the technology they were overseeing. Despite this, the author celebrates the web for its ability to connect people globally with shared interests and expertise, yearning for a return to a time when the internet was a space for meaningful connections and innovation. They also express enthusiasm for their current blogging on platforms like WordPress and Mastodon, envisioning future improvements and business potential.
Learn skimming? I say this as a old person who actually had "skimming" and "scanning" (different things!) as part of my elementary reading curriculum. We even had to practice skimming the whole (printed) NYT in 5 minutes. This piece is seven short paragraphs. I can get the gist and tone in a few seconds. Quicker, in fact, than reading the chatgpt snoozefest.
I'll happily dump an 80 page patent or court ruling into chatgpt for a summary. But if an actual human wrote a few hundred word personal blog post, I'd rather read it.
Not so much rude as.. silly. What's your goal here? Optimal resource consumption? Can't relate. It's not like absorbing more information faster makes me smarter or more capable. Or happier. If anything it's the opposite.
Hate to admit this but reading the comments will give a person way more knowledge than any given submission and if the comments are good the article is required reading before adding your own comment. Not sure ChatGPT is worth the effort here. By the time you cut and paste then read the gibberish one could have already read the top few comments (you can use the minus to minimize them and read the next thread). Like the time spent leaving this comment would be better used any where else, but yet here it is (all 300 seconds or if you like 300,000 ms)
> I later learned that the execs at most of the tech companies were similarly clueless on what made software possible, and basic stuff like trading off time for space and vice versa.
Why would an exec ever need to know about time/space tradeoffs? That's an engineering detail that is almost never relevant at the executive level. If you're pitching a business idea at this level, you're going to have a rough time.
>> was thinking about making a product, they’d invite this person to hear the pitch and if they didn’t like or understand it, they wouldn’t make it.
He says this like it's a bad thing. When really the company is just trying to find out if the thing being pitched can be sold to a not-engineer.
Too often engineers love an idea because it "can be done". They can list features all day long, but lack the skills to understand (or articulate) the benefits to the prospective customer.
Prioritizing time makes a product fast. Prioritizing space makes it cheap. Customers often do care about the outcome of a tech decision even if they don't care about the decision itself. Therefore the leaders at a company should care too, or should at least empower people below them to make good decisions.
An exec that does not understand core tenets (and challenges) of the industry his company operates on is an exec that will drive said company out of relevance. Whatever the size of the company.
Boeing is one but a glaring recent example of that.
That description of time/space trade-off is completely orthogonal to the concept of software. If that was the author's intent it would be applicable to all consumer-facing industries.
Is it a space-time trade-off if you end up with little space and little time? Twitter chose to minimize both by storing less, that’s not really a “trade”.
I usually understand the term to mean that using more space lets you use less time and vice versa.
It's also pretty disheartening that certain famous 'tech' podcasts are hosted by people who've never written a line of code in their lives. Like who are you to comment on where AI will be in 10 years? You don't even know what back propagation is.
Building a product or business is a multi-skilled task. Broadly speaking you need to cover product development, marketing, finance.
Good leadership covers all 3 bases, but leadership in the latter 2 is more important than leadership in product.
Which sounds backwards, but you're the tech guy providing the tech. Leadership is figuring out what / how / to who of marketing coupled with the balancing of finances to make the business work.
VC funding of course up-ends this model. It removes financing and marketing (and even product fit) from the equation. Here's a pile of money, "go build something and we'll figure out the rest later..."
Sure 90% fail to figure it out, and the business part fails, but that's OK because the VC (although not always the techie) comes out a winner. It's a great model to handle the edge-case of good ideas that are hard to pull off.
If you end up in a non-vc business though, don't be surprised if most of the layers above you don't care about the tech.
There’s a difference between technical at the leadership positions vs every position.
Nvidia’s CEO is technical. Google’s was technical for a very long time. AMD’s is technical. Amazon’s was for a very long time. Microsoft’s was for a very long time and is again.
I think it’s a bold claim to make that technical people are only capable of designing for technical people. There’s plenty of people who understand how to build products that connect to the consumer and non-technical people don’t have a unique ability to do so.
You imply you believe that technical people are one-dimensional and lack some fundamental skill. You imply that some other people have this empathetic skill that technical people lack...
I worked in a very small corner of the modern Silicon Valley area recently. I was surprised to see so many companies, VCs, and founders giving such a similar mystique to a certain youtuber/streamer that i won't name here.
Its very confusing to see people who have been in the industry for potentially decades more or less blindly following the whims of a person with very little real world experience in the industry to back up such strong, opinionated claims. Interesting to see based on the OP that its not necessarily a new phenomenon.
Readit News
The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.
From what I've seen, a lot - I'd say most - of the communities that existed outside of the major platforms have dried up or ended (the famous/infamous bodybuilding forum apparently just went down). Web forum communities, mailing list communities, communities built around an individuals website (it sounds strange to say now, but this was pretty common a couple of decades ago). Even the offline meeting sites like Couchsurfing and Meetup are a shadow of what they were in their heyday (about 15 years or so ago).
The actual number of people actively using the internet is much higher, yet the number of people outside of a few small social media silos are much lower. So I can only surmise that these social media silos are giving the vast majority - almost everyone - what they want (those gratifying instant hits). It's just sad to know that there's apparently only a tiny sliver of humanity interested in venturing off the main path and interacting with people outside of these silos.
I don't think so
>It seems pretty easy to find communities these days.
Outside of HN and a few niche subreddits, I can't think of many. Most good communities I'm part of are off the web on things like Discord which isn't addressable by search engines.
It has always been possible to create communities, or break away and do something different. I really like ActivityPub, but it does not really change the dynamic.
With all of that said, sometimes getting a fancy new notebook makes you more likely to draw/write, which seems to be essentially what Dave is experiencing. Nothing wrong with that!
I only remember a handful of HN usernames and absolutely zero handles from elsewhere.
Forums used to have large avatars and signatures you could customize and communities were much more tightly-knit. I imagine that's what Discord and VRChat do now.
Again, I mean no offense but humans only have 2,207,520,000 seconds on average. You can be goddamn right I'll take all the help I can allocating this precious resource called time.
Example output from this article:
> The author reflects on their early experiences in Silicon Valley, feeling at home among peers in the tech world but later realizing that many influential figures, including gatekeepers and executives, lacked a deep understanding of software. This disconnect was disheartening, as key decision-makers often misunderstood the potential and intricacies of the technology they were overseeing. Despite this, the author celebrates the web for its ability to connect people globally with shared interests and expertise, yearning for a return to a time when the internet was a space for meaningful connections and innovation. They also express enthusiasm for their current blogging on platforms like WordPress and Mastodon, envisioning future improvements and business potential.
(it's worth reading for me so I'll read)
I'll happily dump an 80 page patent or court ruling into chatgpt for a summary. But if an actual human wrote a few hundred word personal blog post, I'd rather read it.
Why would an exec ever need to know about time/space tradeoffs? That's an engineering detail that is almost never relevant at the executive level. If you're pitching a business idea at this level, you're going to have a rough time.
>> was thinking about making a product, they’d invite this person to hear the pitch and if they didn’t like or understand it, they wouldn’t make it.
He says this like it's a bad thing. When really the company is just trying to find out if the thing being pitched can be sold to a not-engineer.
Too often engineers love an idea because it "can be done". They can list features all day long, but lack the skills to understand (or articulate) the benefits to the prospective customer.
Why not rewrite the twitter stack from scratch?
Why shouldn't a CEO be able to sell the idea that P=NP. We can have the engineers work out the details later.
Boeing is one but a glaring recent example of that.
Twitter traded space (initially 140 characters) for time (you read it fast). That turned out to be a pretty substential decisions, also for consumers.
This is how I read the notions of space and time in that post.
I usually understand the term to mean that using more space lets you use less time and vice versa.
Deleted Comment
What's wrong with dumb keyword text search for people using near-hapax interest- and experience-specific vocabulary?
Building a product or business is a multi-skilled task. Broadly speaking you need to cover product development, marketing, finance.
Good leadership covers all 3 bases, but leadership in the latter 2 is more important than leadership in product.
Which sounds backwards, but you're the tech guy providing the tech. Leadership is figuring out what / how / to who of marketing coupled with the balancing of finances to make the business work.
VC funding of course up-ends this model. It removes financing and marketing (and even product fit) from the equation. Here's a pile of money, "go build something and we'll figure out the rest later..."
Sure 90% fail to figure it out, and the business part fails, but that's OK because the VC (although not always the techie) comes out a winner. It's a great model to handle the edge-case of good ideas that are hard to pull off.
If you end up in a non-vc business though, don't be surprised if most of the layers above you don't care about the tech.
Nvidia’s CEO is technical. Google’s was technical for a very long time. AMD’s is technical. Amazon’s was for a very long time. Microsoft’s was for a very long time and is again.
I think it’s a bold claim to make that technical people are only capable of designing for technical people. There’s plenty of people who understand how to build products that connect to the consumer and non-technical people don’t have a unique ability to do so.
Its very confusing to see people who have been in the industry for potentially decades more or less blindly following the whims of a person with very little real world experience in the industry to back up such strong, opinionated claims. Interesting to see based on the OP that its not necessarily a new phenomenon.
Said link immediately redirects you back to Wordpress.