I like this article and the author makes a lot of great points. However I also disagree with the main thesis that the internet has become worse or dumbed down.
> I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares.
My disagreement is on two main levels. One, the internet of yore, that the author describes in this quote, is not gone. It still exists. Trivial proof lies in the existence of this post and it's ability to shoot to the top of HN. The internet has only expanded, to include different types of content and different communities. The "book internet" still exists and yes a "tv internet", which some might describe as worse, also exists.
And the expansion of the internet to include new forms of content brings me to the second reason I think the "new internet" is not worse: it is more accessible. The mainstream has come and joined the whole internet thing. And yes, while it might be decried by those who enjoyed it the way it was before, there are a lot more people other than them who are enjoying it now. And I think that's a good thing.
Amanda Palmer recently wrote this about her and Neil Gaiman:
neil and i, and many other bloggers, have discussed this with more and more worry lately. we used to have blogs, on our websites. we'd link to them. people read them. LOTS of people read them. this was in the days before twitter, bookface, instagram, tumblr, etc. it was when you woke up in the morning and read people's blogs and posted thoughtful comments and it felt like the internet was ripe with possibility and freedom.
it's going away. even though we both have far larger fanbases than we did ten years ago, our blog readerships have been halved, quartered, more.
I don't have any reliable statistics, but that would suggest that the "book internet" may be shrinking.
Traffic is certainly shifting from desktop to mobile e.g. https://twitter.com/lukew/status/626792657684029440 - a mobile only generation is upcoming while millennials find themselves addicted to Facebook. So we may indeed have a decline in the "book Internet"
> I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares.
My disagreement is on two main levels. One, the internet of yore, that the author describes in this quote, is not gone. It still exists. Trivial proof lies in the existence of this post and it's ability to shoot to the top of HN. The internet has only expanded, to include different types of content and different communities. The "book internet" still exists and yes a "tv internet", which some might describe as worse, also exists.
And the expansion of the internet to include new forms of content brings me to the second reason I think the "new internet" is not worse: it is more accessible. The mainstream has come and joined the whole internet thing. And yes, while it might be decried by those who enjoyed it the way it was before, there are a lot more people other than them who are enjoying it now. And I think that's a good thing.