Is the Internet About to Get Weird Again? (rollingstone.com) 83
Long-time tech entrepreneur Anil Dash predicts a big shift in the digital landscape in 2024. And "regular internet users — not just the world's tech tycoons — may be the ones who decide how it goes."
The first thing to understand about this new era of the internet is that power is, undoubtedly, shifting. For example, regulators are now part of the story — an ironic shift for anyone who was around in the dot com days. In the E.U., tech giants like Apple are being forced to hold their noses and embrace mandated changes like opening up their devices to allow alternate app stores to provide apps to consumers. This could be good news, increasing consumer choice and possibly enabling different business models — how about mobile games that aren't constantly pestering gamers for in-app purchases? Back in the U.S., a shocking judgment in Epic Games' (that's the Fortnite folks') lawsuit against Google leaves us with the promise that Android phones might open up in a similar way.
That's not just good news for the billions of people who own smartphones. It's part of a sea change for the coders and designers who build the apps, sites, and games we all use. For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations....
In that era, people could even make their own little social networks, so the conversations and content you found on an online forum or discussion were as likely to have been hosted by the efforts of one lone creator than to have come from some giant corporate conglomerate. It was a more democratized internet, and while the world can't return to that level of simplicity, we're seeing signs of a modern revisiting of some of those ideas.
Dash's article (published in Rolling Stone) ends with examples of "people who had been quietly keeping the spirit of the human, personal, creative internet alive...seeing a resurgence now that the web is up for grabs again. "
That's not just good news for the billions of people who own smartphones. It's part of a sea change for the coders and designers who build the apps, sites, and games we all use. For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations....
In that era, people could even make their own little social networks, so the conversations and content you found on an online forum or discussion were as likely to have been hosted by the efforts of one lone creator than to have come from some giant corporate conglomerate. It was a more democratized internet, and while the world can't return to that level of simplicity, we're seeing signs of a modern revisiting of some of those ideas.
Dash's article (published in Rolling Stone) ends with examples of "people who had been quietly keeping the spirit of the human, personal, creative internet alive...seeing a resurgence now that the web is up for grabs again. "
- Digital artist Everest Pipkin
- The School for Poetic Computation (which Dash describes as "an eccentric, deeply charming, self-organized school for people who want to combine art and technology and a social conscience.")
- Mask On Zone, "a collaboration with the artist and coder Ritu Ghiya, which gives demonstrators and protesters in-context guidance on how to avoid surveillance."
- There's projects and tools from makers like Stefan Bohacek, Darius Kazemi, and Elan Kiderman Ullendorff (including Youtune ("a stream of relatively unviewed original songs posted to YouTube.")
Dash concludes that "We're seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we've witnessed since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it's likely that 2024 is the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a platform that's being run by a regular person instead of a commercial entity.
"It's going to make a lot of new things possible..."
A big thank-you for submitting the article to long-time Slashdot reader, DrunkenTerror.
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Companies have power over what words are OK to use and what words gets you banned for life from any website where you can write or comment
What words do you want to use, but can't?
Re:Companies (Score:5, Interesting)
Not the OP, but it doesn't have to be specific words.
A guy posted to my country's subreddit asking for phone numbers to prank call. I checked his post history, made an educated guess on which city he lived in, and looked up the phone number for his local police station.
That got me permabanned from ever posting on Reddit again. It's been three months so far, and I am yet to even receive a reply to my appeal.
Considering Reddit was my main source of interaction with people in my own language, and the main place that various games use as a forum, that's been quite the frustrating experience.
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Draconian TOS policies are pretty much the norm in the tech industry. If you manage to make too much of a dick of yourself on Xbox Live (or whatever they're calling it this week), Microsoft will actually ban your entire console and you'll lose access to all your digital purchases as well.
Though, I'm fairly certain the OP was actually referring to their desire to inject their opposing political opinions into discussions where it is unwelcome. That's the usual reason when people phrase it in a hint-hint, nu
Re:Companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly so, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a general point. Companies have claimed the right to dole out lifetime punishments with no judicial overview just because they claim ownership of their version of the town square. With how much we tie into our online identities, losing that identity can quickly become problematic.
Re:Companies (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies have claimed the right to dole out lifetime punishments with no judicial overview just because they claim ownership of their version of the town square.
They don't own the town square. The infrastructure of the internet itself is the town square. People have just stupidly decided to have all their discussions inside the Mega Mart rather than doing it in a proper decentralized manner as was originally intended. [wikipedia.org]
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They certainly do 'own' the town square. At the very least, they lease the publicly owned bits from the FCC under terms that give them control of what its used for. The wired bits are even more privately owned, excepting a few municipal broadband operators that managed to sneak in under the industries nose. A few enlightened politicians have proposed building out a publicly owned network [forbes.com]. But I suspect that such press releases are intended to scare the crap out of the incumbents and remind them of where thi
Re: Companies (Score:2, Interesting)
This is exactly the status quo the progressives have not only been asking for, but outright demanding, over the last decade. Used to be that governments decided what activity is lawful and what isn't. Then came hacktivism, which progressives felt was perfectly acceptable so long as it's only used against speech they don't like, basically forcing everybody on to just a few large CDN providers. So then they started demanding that internet companies, including companies that offer nothing more than infrastruct
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You have X now. You can post FBI crime statistics and “just ask questions” all day in this apparently very important town square.
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That analogy is a bit like saying the town square is the entire town. It's not. The town square is where a lot of people pass through. That was the whole point of it. Yes, there will be people walking down the side streets and back alleys too, but to reach the most ears - you would stand in the town square.
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Yes it was. Way better, at least for the literate.
Town Squares for idiots (Score:1)
Oh no whatever shall we do when the mouthpiece to the idiocracy is shut off. How ever shall we market and propagandize to people who don’t read books or watch news anchors without panty shots.
Maybe they should go back to viral email spam?
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Not the OP, but it doesn't have to be specific words.
Spoiler: It is a short list of specific (hateful) words.
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That got me permabanned from ever posting on Reddit again.
Looking at his posting history got you banned? That does seem harsh. I'm sorry to hear that. Did they use that to decide you were the person who contacted the police?
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No, posting the phone number to his local police station so he could teach himself a lesson got me banned for doxxing. Because apparently the phone number for a police station is a personal secret.
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Companies have power over what words are OK to use and what words gets you banned for life from any website where you can write or comment
What words do you want to use, but can't?
It's not that they can't use certain words, it's that they'll get called out for lying if they do. And they don't like it [tumblr.com]. Using facts isn't in their repetoire so all they have left is lies, otherwise known as "alternative facts".
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Yep, "alternate facts", the facts without facts. The problem is many of these people do not actually know they are lying because they are not smart enough to understand things. That makes them dangerous.
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Given how mastercard is making a moral witchhunt using internet payment processors as a proxy? probably anything even slightly lewd in a few years.
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What words do you want to use, but can't?
"s[censored]t", "p[redacted]s", "f[banned]k", "c[not pc]t", "c[nope]ks[certainly not]r", "m[blocked]r", and "tits" ... [NO CARRIER]
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Re: Companies (Score:2, Troll)
So youâ(TM)re saying that you donâ(TM)t want to do it, but the fact that you canâ(TM)t do it is somehow a bigger problem than the actual, real abuse, harassment and incitement that would otherwise go on?
Strange hill to die on.
Nineteen eighty four didnâ(TM)t teach us anything about the outcome of reasonable, balanced, well thought out policies. It suggested one possible outcome of many steps are taken to get to a completely unreasonable place. Itâ(TM)s possible to take this policy
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There are appropriate situations to use every word, though in this case I can only think of singing rap songs and linguistics discussions-- but the latter is not considered okay by society.
Carl Borg-Neal was fired for using the full racist slur during a discussion about the impact of language at an online race education training course.
(source [fortune.com])
How weird is it that we have to say "the n-word" like children when discussing it? That guy was fired simply for declining to talk like a child. How can this word be more radioactive than words that are much worse? (There are slurs that carry implications that can get people shunned or inspire violence.)
Re: Companies (Score:2)
I was just reading about the Hmong people:
Although "Meo" was an official term, it was often used as an insult against the Hmong people, and it is considered to be derogatory.[74][75]
Imagine if a historian had to risk being shunned for writing that sentence because the slur was considered unsayable.
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Companies have power
They have the power because they pay the bills that keep the servers humming. An old mantra we used to have back in the BBS days was that if you didn't like the way the system was run, you could download some shareware BBS software, install it, and make your machine available to equally ungrateful users who will criticize you for everything you're doing wrong, on your own dime.
Of course these days if you do manage to launch a competing service which attracts more than just crickets, you'll also be faced w
Android already allows third-party app stores (Score:1)
Android already allows third-party app stores.
Witness F-Droid, as one worthy example.
Third-party payment options are not currently available.
Neither third-party app stores or payments are available on iThings.
3rd parties (Score:2)
We're /. aka massive geeks: you can use our experience as a reference point for what average Joe does.
Yes, it's technically possible to install a 3rd party store beside Google Play Store. But Google has designed the whole thing to make it slightly discouraging (accordingbto the Epic lawsuit), so the end result is that only a few geeks are on F-droid, Chinese are on alternate store because they're banned, and virtually every single other Android user on this planet is only using Google Play Store exclusively
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But Google has designed the whole thing to make it slightly discouraging (accordingbto the Epic lawsuit)
Google just has absolutely terrible lawyers, because Apple managed to beat the same accusations and sideloading on iOS is a genuine pain in the ass due to the way Apple manages app signing.
On Android, you just go into the device settings and enable apps from untrusted sources. The fact that people don't want to do this to install your 3rd party app isn't really Google's problem.
Re: 3rd parties (Score:2)
What *should* be happening is that Google and Apple should be allowing users to add trusted root certificates, and there should be an agreement on a set of trusted app sources.
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Google just has absolutely terrible lawyers, because Apple managed to beat the same accusations and sideloading
One claims to be a walled garden, the other claims to be the mainstream internet. You're not a lawyer, but that's not enough of an excuse to think those are the same.
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While Valve is definitely user friendly in a different way they were a bit of the progenitor to "open a marketplace, take a 30% cut". Now obviously they don't have an exclusive like the app stores but in 2003, boy howdy nobody had anything really like that yet.
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While Valve is definitely user friendly in a different way they were a bit of the progenitor to "open a marketplace, take a 30% cut".
I gotta say, I'm genuinely surprised at Steam's success. I didn't think PC gamers would be so willing to accept a DRM-ridden marketplace where you own nothing and like it. But I suppose with the death of physical media it was bound to happen eventually.
Re:3rd parties (Score:4, Interesting)
That's part of Valves success though that other companies, especially game companies failed to copy and just want the sweet sweet cut.
The DRM is as close to invisible as you can get in that I have never opened Steam and not been able to play, at this point the platform is 20 years old so it has user trust, it's not going anywhere, even with the DRM you are still free to mod your game however you like and they've added tons of value to the platform;
mod workshops, discussion forums, a 2 hour no questions asked free trial window, cloud saves, local streaming and perhaps the best gamepad customization tool available today.
And by far the biggest thing is that there are always sales, sales, sales that will keep people coming back. When you get a AAA title for $8 most don't tend to care if it's DRM'd
At least with Steam compared to the other app stores I can sorta see where that 30% goes.
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Not to mention, if it's a single player game, you can play it in "offline" mode. Never had it not let me play a game. Ever.
Regulators vs "regular users" (Score:3)
Well, I for one, don't see so much of the mandated technical solutions from "regulators" as being in the best interest of users. I'm tempted to take my Lightning cables and mail them to Brussels. Breaking the curation in app stores benefits different big tech companies, it's not clear to me at all if end users will benefit. A HUGE advantage of the current Apple single store is a single unified easy way to cancel subscriptions.
The continued proliferation of websites with all kinds of pop-ups and 'sign up for our notifications, mailing list, log in with Google' enshittification again has no benefit for end users. I do give the EU credit for GDPR, and think US is -way behind- in regulating the surveillance industry. Beyond that, the knee-jerk reaction of too many politicians and regulators seems to be "they're too big, they must be doing something illegal" is something I find appalling.
Re:Regulators vs "regular users" (Score:4, Interesting)
Take for example a smart watch like the pebble. people still have them, but both the vendor and apple took away support. If there was a big enough niche, someone could get their smart watches working again with IOS by side loading, which is currently impossible.
Another example is like fortnite, get banned, well no big deal you can just side load!
Web browsers are not currently allowed on the apps store that use anything other than webkit. The likes of firefox and chromium could use a (potentially better) different web renderer.
Apples walled garden it is nice, but so is choice. now you can have both, and dont HAVE to use side loading. It is literally win win. there is no downside.
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How can getting Apple to use USB C be anything but good?
If you like Apple's subscription management, and don't mind paying more, stick with Apple. Nobody is forcing you to use other systems.
Google' enshittification (haar) (Score:2)
"free-for-all nature of the Nineties" (Score:1)
there's no going back to pre-myspace levels of Septembers, any entry friction has been eliminated by fischer-price hardware/software they have no control or understanding of, the services themselves are fully committed to pandering their vapid appetite for ego and celebrity
corpos didn't come marching in to take over Just Because, the shallow masses are here to stay and thus so is their odor for attracting commercial interests
opening up mobile stores is all well and good but the Septembers don't care, it's n
Re:"free-for-all nature of the Nineties" (Score:4, Informative)
are you ok
They're referring to the Eternal September. [wikipedia.org] That's the point at which some folks argue the floodgates to the internet opened and all the normies poured in. Personally, I'd say things really started getting bad in that regard after about 2007. I'll leave it up to the reader to figure that one out.
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i dated it slightly earlier but it's not like saturation is overnight, on top of that it takes time to notice cattle levels have become lucrative and start moving in after them, to develop the means, especially for a new frontier
i've now noticed this timeline also dates microsoft shifting their future projects, shifting windows, why the "control it or be controlled" graph plummets after 7
one of the big distinctions between PDA-style devices and an iphone was that the latter could deliver on the tourist trap
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The 90s and 00s internet was great. It had problems but it didn’t have our problems.
Well the current smallweb is no doubt bigger than the 90s internet. You just have to start using it and start ignoring Twiteers, tiktok, insta, and so on.
Some of you might be upset that you can’t blast the nword over and over anymore but that’s not true either! Stormfront, 4chan, and bb.com misc still all exist! Though bb.com will censor it to N******, you probably won’t get a ban.
Greatly exaggerated (Score:3)
The death of Twitter is greatly exaggerated. While revenue is down to 2014 levels, the number of annual users is growing steadily upward (aside from a plateau 2015-2020). https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ [businessofapps.com]
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Re:Greatly exaggerated (Score:5, Insightful)
Can Twitter pay its bills in annual users? The number of annual users is a cool metric for billionaires to brag amongst themselves, but it's pretty useless if their ability to monetize those users keeps dropping.
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Can Twitter pay its bills in annual users?
That depends on how good Musk is at selling blue checkmarks. Or selling raffle tickets to win a free Cybertruck or one-way trip to Mars aboard a SpaceX rocket.
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User eyeballs will sell ads. Maybe to different advertisers, but eventually, they'll find their market.
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I hear that Disney was paying more than Jack-Off Pants in terms of Twitter ad spend.
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Golly, but Disney can't possibly be more important than Pillow Guy, can they? I mean, everybody has to sleep, right?
Re: Greatly exaggerated (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ve long espoused the evils of social media, but Twitter/X/whatever is growing by thousands per day. Canâ(TM)t say the same about Threads or whatever the other stuff Jack Dorsey is doing.
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Right! All the bots Musk was worried about when he bought the company, have now been replaced by AI.
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the number of annual users is growing
The number of annual bots is growing. Not "users."
Headline is a load of crap (Score:5, Informative)
The internet isn't "about to get weird" - the author just discovered some new-to-him websites and is trying to create some bogus narrative based on that. Not to mention that his derived narrative doesn't really support "weird". But, in any case, none of this is particularly recent.
The site everett-pipkim.com was created in 2018. stefanbohacek.com was created in 2014.
The School for Poetic Computation was founded in 2013, they've just added a few additional URLs that take advantage of new TLDs coming online.
Mask On Zone was created in 2020, same TLD comment as above. Similar stories with Elan Ullendorff and youtune.glitch.me.
Re: Headline is a load of crap (Score:2)
Re: Headline is a load of crap (Score:2)
Re: Headline is a load of crap (Score:4, Informative)
I just realized - glitch.me is this dude's site. This may all have been a roundabout attempt to promote his website, which he'd included in the list.
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They do charge a LOT for this -- $10-$20k a month for a minimum of six months is what I was quoted last year.
Wow, I'm in the wrong line of work!
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> Perhaps he paid for bots to get this article on Slashdot?
i coulda got paid?!?
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The internet isn't "about to get weird" - the author just discovered some new-to-him websites
I assumed that he's talking about websites he's invested in as if they're new-to-him.
Big tech business model... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...was, is, & will be winner takes all. If it's not Google or Apple, it'll be some other company that finds a way to become gatekeeper. With AI bots now flooding the interwebs pipes, let's see who or what gives, & which corporation can capitalise on becoming the new gatekeepers. They don't care about our wishes, aspirations, or feelings, only their revenue streams.
You're right about the outcome, but placing the blame (if blame it is) in the wrong place. The reason the web has become centralized and will continue to be centralized, and the reason it wasn't that way early on is not because of tech companies but because of users, and especially abusers. In the 90s the Internet was a niche, fairly geeky thing, and there was a non-trivial percentage of its user base that was happy to run their own servers and build their own sites and systems. This was facilitated by t
In other news... (Score:1)
2024 has been declared the Year of the Linux Desktop
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Death to the Linux virus. All hail Microsloth!
Incoherent (Score:2)
The author says we're going back to a more decentralized Internet, but fails to give any concrete/technical basis for those points - and then mentions a bunch of irrelevant and highly niche "social art" type sites.
I feel like I'm being gaslit.
What was distinct about the 90s wasn't someone's ability to make a niche website about their interest or group. That never changed - though the less technically adept have avoided it, usually going to a social network group (eg. facebook group) instead of paying it don
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[In the 1990s] The content on the Internet was largely written by technical, knowledgeable people.
I was using the internet back in the 90s. Unless you're only talking about the first part of that decade (when the web was just getting started), I don't think that's an accurate statement. Garbage sites and non-maintained link farms were everywhere in the second half of the decade. Geocities started in 1994. Web rings of low-quality-content websites were rampant.
Could go either way (Score:2)
For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems.
If the argument is that regulators are going to change all that, then we'll see if the regulators do any "hemming in" themselves.
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Um ... (Score:2)
Is the Internet About to Get Weird Again?
About to? Again? :-)
Not unless they are going to ban all the scum (Score:3)
Worthless... (Score:2)
Meaning of no value. Zero new solutions are part of what they're talking about.
Is the Internet About to Get Weird Again? (Score:2)
Corp interests in putting everything behind a wall wont allow it to be.