alt Hacker NewsIsn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
Replies
>The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.
>> The point is not the consumers of the Internet
A) They're not just "consumers"; people produce a huge percentage of the content, via facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc
B) The people of a society define its culture. When you change the people, you change the culture
The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.
“Change” is just the state altering. It can be the producers and it can also be the consumers that alter that state.
The GP might be elitist with their view but it’s still just as valid opinion as the others shared.
How can you separate those things? The changes happened because there were more people, and those people were valuable to market too. Hosting and moderation became more expensive, so that created a form of pressure as well. It's convenient to blame the producers (I hate Facebook as much as anyone), but I don't think it's terribly useful to try to hold them accountable.
I believe the economic forces were more or less irresistible. In other words, if the current powers that be had behaved more ethically according to early internet norms, the only thing that would be different is they would have lost in the market and been supplanted by equivalent mass consumer oriented companies pursuing the same enshittification cycle we dislike.
I don't think this can change unless there is a cultural shift away from worshipping at the altar of raw capitalism and GDP at the expense of everything else. The way our political discourse and regulatory capture have evolved recently I am not super optimistic, though I do think the mass hatred of AI across political lines does offer a glimmer of hope.
It's not elitist. It's just nostalgia.
"The change I was part of when I was between the ages of 15 to 25 was the best!"
"The change of the next generation that wasn't recognizably my peer group was bad and ruined everything :("
IMHO, it's more about being a community of choice rather than elitism.
When I joined, nobody was there because they had to be. Including vendors. That's a totally different vibe than now. There was also excitement and optimism of something new, and i was youthful.