“Biggest innovation in tech” at times feels like 2000 era Nokia smartphones. You got phone with circle keyboard! You got foldable phone that turns into a neat camcorder! You got mp3 player phone!
All with marginal value add and having more to do with fashion than with actual innovation.
Real innovation is synonymous with problem solving. The only problem tech industry is solving nowadays is keeping its bloated valuation afloat.
I think original web standards were solving a completely different problem: sharing information.
Modern Internet is 45% appearances and 50% search traffic optimizations. For better or worse we lost all usable registries of websites, we lost appearance-less and traffic considerations-less websites. Information-focused Web is pretty much dead.
Maybe these ideas did not scale and did not monetize that well, but we will never really know what information-focused version of Internet would have looked like because evolution took it elsewhere. Unless we try building another one with different principles and limitations at the core.
The current web supports flat information delivery, and it's there if you want it. Wikipedia can be presented in pure text. If you write a story or an essay you can post it in many places, including your own web site.
Perhaps what's needed is for an alternative search engine. Assert that you will only index a site that meets some strict set of limits. If that's what people want they will use that engine. If it's popular sites will have have to find ways to get listed, e.g. "simple.amazon.com" which supports that standard.
You are proposing to fix something that is not broken by adding things to it. My point is, the Internet has already evolved in this specific way for a reason.
Few old school sites like Wikipedia aside, modern Internet is serving a very different purpose: being an entertainment platform, being a backbone for building applications and monetizing them.
Yes, technically there are still underlying networks with instant delivery of content to any place on Earth, but maintaining something like Wikipedia on top of modern Internet is like trying to maintain a quiet library inside of a Casino. Monetization means don’t fit. You need a quiet space to read and study, not dingling sounds and bright lights, not free vodka and 50 security guys.
We need a new paradigm of information sharing and new ecosystem if we want to do things differently.
I agree. Even where blogging and sharing information is still around, it is strongly linked with brand-building, monetization, and engagement-maxxing. Look at all the old Wordpress bloggers who switch to Substack in order to have some eyeballs on their posts, and then inevitably begin conforming to its ethos willingly or unwillingly.
For me, the information-sharing part of the internet now is the shadow libraries. I can get access to all (well, still not quite all) journals and university-press publications from the last century? Awesome. Vastly more informative than some blogger who nowadays is probably trying to monetize my attention.
It is the same with forums, trackers and private libraries. They are instantly more useful for information seeking purposes. And none of this really fits into attention-monetizing economy of Internet.
I’ve recently counted movies available on my HBO account and it is in low hundreds. There is absolutely no way to find a specific movie across existing services - information discovery is broken, and their subscription models force me to pay in weird ways (subscribe, watch, unsubscribe.. rental is scarce) for a relatively simple outcome.
Another weird example are books that are widely available on the web in pdf and other formats with absolutely no way to legally purchase them in electronic form. There is a vast untapped shadow network of people doing [often volunteer] work of publishers: scanning, uploading and categorizing content in a searchable way. At the same time most publishers who actually own rights to this content are prioritizing entertainment and attention focused platforms, where 20% of invested work already gives them 80% of business results.
One can argue that this is (a) the only economically viable model we could come up with and (b) most people that are looking for entertainment don’t really have this problem.
You are probably talking about people who just crunch out some half baked solutions for the sake of getting somewhere.
But there are other nerds who care, just not about the code quality, but about conversion, testing out business ideas quickly, getting to know their customers better.
There are nerds who care about business strategy.
There are nerds who care about accounting principles and clean financial reporting.
There are nerds who care about sales targets and partnerships.
There are many types of nerds out there. Don’t limit nerds to engineers, because “tech” world is not just an engineering world anymore. All these nerds you can team up with to build meaningful things, because they do care.
This resonates with me. I'm a Mechanical Engineer who loves the process of coding. I did take an intro to business class in undergraduate though, and my professor said one thing that has stuck with me for 30+ years - 'The fundamental goal of a business is to make profit now and in the future'. Vibe coded slop might get some traction and make money now, but high quality code will reduce technical debt and allow it to be made in the future. So, in some ways, both camps are right. The PM/Manager/VP want to make money now, but if they completely disregard the nerdy engineer, they will sabotage their future.
I see a disconnect between these two camps that will probably cause a lot of chaos in the near future. Those that figure it out will thrive.
While Company A is building their product in perfect hand-coded Rust with zero defects, Company B is on their third iteration of vibe'd "slop" and getting actual customer feedback - which helps them iterate further.
It's mostly a matter whether Company B is smart enough to refactor the code to a stabler and more maintainable form or do they run headlong into a vibeslop wall.
If everything is high prio nothing is and if the backlog is always full it's not a problem if it fills up even more. If I am at the assembly line, I am doing my darnedest not to make it run faster. One can only sprint so long.
It is not a problem if you are an assembly line robot making motions. People, however, are not robots. They get held accountable by their higher-ups for delivering on these (often nonsensical) priorities, they risk getting fired when expectations are not met, and high uncertainty of faulty planning systems like that is extremely stressful in itself.
Expectations will be raised until they can't be met anymore. There is always a ceiling.
It is on every single worker to make sure that they don't please the system beyond what is reasonable. Often the problem is people who overwork themselves to please and set the bar over the reasonable amount of work. Still when the majority does not raise their output to an unhealthy amount that must be accepted as a ceiling.
I think you are mixing cause and effect in real life dynamics.
In real organizations people tend to raise their performance to the [often unreasonable] level of expectations, even when situation stops being sustainable long-term for the whole group.
Suggesting that people should simply avoid overperforming assumes a level of control they don’t really have.
What do you think will actually happen at Coinbase now? Is it more likely that people will start saying hard “no,” or that they would stretch to meet the new expectations despite the personal cost?
I can tell you how I would react. They can't fire everyone and I am not going to be the one who is going to fill the gaps that other people's decisions created. If everyone acted the same there would be no problem. Things would just go slower. Expecting the same output from fewer people is stupid. My employment is not by their grace but for their benefit.
Exactly! What a high-profile actor’s life represents to an accountant or a programmer, that accountant’s or programmer’s life similarly represents to a factory worker, and so on.
I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.
There is no cookie-cutter approach to all software products at once.
"I want classic sound / look / feel" of entertainment products like WoW is very different from, say, "I want old spreadsheet shortcuts / simpler UI" of office products where you have to actually balance many functional features that are in demand with simplicity and past product behaviour some of your users got used to.
Edit: I think I just rubber ducked myself with this comment into understanding that it is user segmentation which is key regardless of your product; real challenge is to try embedding and balancing all product features as a single package, instead of splitting core product into multiple different parts that fit different segments (like Blizzard did)
> as long as there are relatively good options of apps that do have privacy (and I think there are)
Once you have enormous network effect like TikTok has, you don't really have any free selection of alternative apps. You are free to use one, but you will be the only sad user over there.
Regulations are needed that would force large platforms like TikTok and Instagram to enable federation, opening them up to actual competition. This way platforms would be able to compete on monetisation and usability, instead of competing on locking in their precious users more strictly.
> MySpace is well on the way to becoming what economists call a "natural monopoly". Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.
> "In social networking, there is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on MySpace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are".
Sure, but then everyone moved to Facebook. The monopolist changed, but not the monopolistic market and the lack of consumer choice.
And nobody gained privacy in the process (I rather think everyone lost even more of it).
The situation currently permits only a tiny number of winning companies at a time, and the userbase is locked in even as the site becomes wildly unpopular, until some threshold of discontent is reached, and then everyone moves, and then that new site also enshittifies and the cycle repeats.
Federation is a mechanism whereby people would be able to actually choose providers as individuals and at any time, instead of having to wait years for a critical mass of upset people to build up and leave [current most popular social media site], and instead of being forced to go to [new most popular social media site].
federation would never work. How would it work here? Either you are forcing tiktok to give pageviews to federations of spam, or you are letting tiktok decide which federations to work with, which essentially results in no federation.
Nobody stops spammers from creating websites, but we still have search engines and web. Nobody stops spammers from sending emails, but we still use SMTP.
It is just a matter of tools we build to rank and filter content. With open protocols platforms can actually compete on antispam tools, among other features.
Lolololol. No, not regulations. Regulators. With the people we currently have voted into office in the US the only regulations we are going to get are ones saying Sam and Peter must look at everything you do all the time.
Until we stop voting for more authoritarianism, expect ever increasing amounts of authoritarianism.
I would argue the only thing that does stop current situation from snowballing into something much worse are pre-existing institutions and regulations.
That's also why dismantling and challenging these is often the very first priority for authoritarian actors.
Because building complex product that is also useful is not quick and is not easy. Contrary to the idea that many people are floating around these days.
Some of us lack access to good physical bookstores which are curated and allow for casual non-biased exploration. Amazon and other digital players never picked up on curation or segmentation, their store fronts are hot messes similar to digging through a random bin of books at a second hand store. To top it off they skew your opinion with customer ratings visible next to every single title.
So a list like this is a somewhat working digital alternative to browsing books in a curated bookstore.
All with marginal value add and having more to do with fashion than with actual innovation.
Real innovation is synonymous with problem solving. The only problem tech industry is solving nowadays is keeping its bloated valuation afloat.
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