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The Internet Technology

More than Half of the World's Population is Now Online (axios.com) 63

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Mary Meeker, the general partner at venture capital firm Bond Capital, delivered a 333-page slideshow that looked back at every important internet trend in the last year and looks forward about what these trends tell us to expect in the year ahead. Some takeaways: 51% of the world -- or 3.8 billion people -- were internet users last year, up from 49% (3.6 billion) in 2017 and only 24% in 2009. Growth slowed to about 6% in 2018.
The percentage of U.S. adults who say they're "almost always online" has grown from 21% three years ago to 26%.
The percentage of U.S. adults trying to limit personal smartphone use has grown from 47% in 2017 to 63% in 2018.
Apple, Google, Facebook, and YouTube have all rolled out tools to help users monitor their usage.
People are more concerned about privacy than a year ago (but these high concerns are moderating).
Encrypted messaging and Web traffic are rising.
And yet, U.S. users still view the internet as a positive for themselves (88%) and society (70%), though both metrics have slightly decreased since 2014.

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More than Half of the World's Population is Now Online More

More than Half of the World's Population is Now Online

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  • Half the world are LOSERS! Not sure which half though, but HA HA!
  • I remember a time when the Internet was very new, and the only people on it were Computer Science professionals, all highly educated and excited to be on the Internet. It was a golden era with no trolls, cat pictures, politics, selfies or average regular folks who don't know the first thing about computers.

    • I remember a time when the Internet was very new, and the only people on it were Computer Science professionals, all highly educated and excited to be on the Internet. It was a golden era with no trolls, cat pictures, politics, selfies or average regular folks who don't know the first thing about computers.

      We did have ASCII line art comix tho.

      • There is absolutely, literally nothing wrong with cat pictures. You take that back!

        • You need to remember, there are people out there who have to be serious all the time. Cats give us a stark reminder that the world can be very different, with a new point of view.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Were you actually on the internet back then? The only thing that wasn't a thing back then on BBS was selfies.

      - Trolling: Constant, i was one of them. We were just less obvious in our shit stirring.
      - Cat Pictures: There most certainly were. Cats are cute. They just didn't have text over them.
      - Politics: There most certainly was.

    • My son was an early adopter. I bought him a Compaq Presario that was obsolete when I bought on sale for around $1000. His computer was too slow to compete in on line gaming and he built his own. There was an industrial park near San Diego that had many small shops selling parts where we bought items. He upgraded the CPU and memory a few times in a huge Antec case. Two of them are still working.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      You don't sound like someone who has been on the Internet all that long. Even if you only go back 20 years, on Slashdot you had to filter through a bunch of Natalie Portman Petrified & Hot Grits posts to see the real comments. If you go back even further to the BBS days things weren't much better. Perhaps you were actually born in the 90's and have imagined an idealized version of the Internet that never was.

    • No trolls? You clearly didn't spend any time on USENET...

    • When was this? I was on for a couple years before "eternal September" and there were already trolls and politics. Before that I wasn't on BBS's but I knew people who were. They showed me print-outs of boobies and bomb-making instructions. That was in the mid 1980s.

      While there's a bit of truth in what you say, the past wasn't 100% pure. At least the part about knowing things about computers was true. Getting on in the early days definitely required that; but plenty of immature jerks learned how to use

    • I am a highly educated Computer Science professional and I like cat pictures.

    • I remember history a bit differently
      I remember a time when the Internet was very new, and the only people on it were Computer Science professionals by professionals you mean college students, by Computer Science you mean Engineering, Mathematics, Physics majors. The Liberal Art Majors mostly had Word Processors and not full computers, They did use the Library Computers to send emails to their friends in other colleges.

      all highly educated and excited to be on the Internet. being that many of them were colleg

    • I remember a time when the Internet was very new, and the only people on it were Computer Science professionals, all highly educated and excited to be on the Internet. It was a golden era with no trolls, cat pictures, politics, selfies or average regular folks who don't know the first thing about computers.

      The average regular folk who didn't know the first thing about computers usually just restricted themselves to being able to send emails to their kids or grandkids. Once Facebook became popular, it became an easy way to see Susie's latest trip at the beach. Problem started once its use escalated to major things like getting one's news from anywhere. But had newsrooms not been deluged by Leftists bent on turning countries into one party states, the rest of us would never have thought of getting our news f

  • Not anymore... (Score:3)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @03:13PM (#58746352)

    Someone just logged their computer off... it's only 49.9999999% now.

  • Early on, people would try to learn about the technology they were using and thus would on the balance act as better citizens of the internet. Yes of course there were asshats and trolls, but we're talking the big picture here, not the minutia.

    Then came in the influx of people who had no desire to learn what was good for the shared commons. They were duped by sociopaths into signing up for Facebook. Duped into centralizing email in the hands of a multinational ad agency. Duped into installing spyware on

  • Probably half of the users post stuff like that.

    • It's getting better, w/ the generation that needs snapchat to communicate. Although how much worse is it than people who use 'Word!' as a term to express agreement?
  • Tech companies will need to influence countries' economies so more people can afford access. Then encourage population growth so theres even more advertising eyeballs.

    • Logical strategy seems to be to increase penetration in the most populated countries of the world - China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and then target smaller populations in Africa and Latin America

  • Hello World! (Score:4, Funny)

    by tinkerton ( 199273 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @03:35PM (#58746470)

    (waves)
    ok, half of the world.

  • That fits with the old joke (Score:3)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @03:47PM (#58746522)
    When a new employee asked the boss "how many people work here?" The reply was about half of them

    I would guess that isn't the half that is online right now.

  • I wonder what it's like to have a job where expectations are so low that you can put together a 333-page slideshow and actually pretend it's a positive. She must be on the fast-track short list for upper management!

    • She must be on the fast-track short list for upper management!

      Mary Meeker [wikipedia.org] is already upper management.

      She is a full partner at Kleiner Perkins, and is on Forbes list of "World's 100 Most Powerful Women".

      Plenty of people will sit through a 333 slide presentation if the speaker is Mary Meeker, because what she says matters. Her decisions can make or break companies.

      • Plenty of people will sit through a 333 slide presentation if the speaker is Mary Meeker, because what she says matters. Her decisions can make or break companies.

        If she has to use 333 slides, Mary Meeker doesn’t know how to do a presentation - regardless of how wealthy she is.

    • Did that include the visual effects that one can use w/ PowerPoint? One can use 8 slides, or one can combine those 8 into one slide using visual effects, depending on one's skill w/ PowerPoint
  • And half of the students in my Midwestern city qualify for free lunch at school even though we're considered to be doing very well. Progress or regress?
    • Are they? The only places that are considered to be doing well are the coasts. Although the tent cities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle seem to suggest a different story

  • https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/11/newzoo-smartphone-users-will-top-3-billion-in-2018-hit-3-8-billion-by-2021/

    The idea that we only have 3.3 billion _internet_users_ is absurd.

    Is that an idea of "america is greater" than the rest?

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