I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again.<p>As I see it, there are two main issues to solve:<p>1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages”
, in whatever form they envision?<p>2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community&#x2F;shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.