Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Now it’s up to you to take a shot at creating the next exciting thing. Aim high and give all you can to succeed.
Exactly. I think lemmy is flawed, but it’s a lot more exciting than the status quo, so I try to help out. Right to repair isn’t Internet specific, but it’ll likely have an ripple effect as people decide to take back ownership of their devices and data. Cryptocurrency is a ponzy scheme, but the idea of a decentralized service as important as a currency is exciting, especially for the ripple effect it’s likely to cause (e.g. we could use similar tech to decentralize lemmy).
There’s a lot of exciting stuff if you know where to look.
Do you think it was invented as a Ponzi scheme, or has that just become the perception based off the massive initial growth in value? I think that the goal was always for the eventual stabilization of the currency, which of course means that mining becomes less and less profitable. It needs to eventually hit a point where mining produces no new coins for the currency to hit stability. But then idk why anyone would run the servers required for verification. At that point the verification becomes massively power intensive. So maybe it was always a Ponzi scheme? I’m no crypto expert, so I don’t really know.
It was corrupted in much the same way the stock market was corrupted. That whole thing is mostly speculative gambling now, when it was supposed to about profit sharing with companies that were either sound investments currently with steady profits or up-and-coming companies that had potential. Now it’s just casino gambling betting on prices that are completely divorced from reality that expects infinite growth of made up value.
Go read a bit of Satoshi’s white paper on Bitcoin. It was created in response to the banking industry as a way for individuals to securely own digital currency without a centralized institution.
I have. I know the stated goal. The question is do you think that was the actual intent, or was it always intended as an elaborate ponzi scheme? I think it has more or less lived up to its stated goal, but as a currency. People think it’s a Ponzi scheme because it’s treated as an investment. From that perspective I can see why they think that and I wonder if they think that’s what it was originally created for.
If it was a Ponzi scheme from the get go he would have cashed out his billions by now.
No, it just didn’t get traction for actual transactions fast enough and it just became a target for speculation. That’s a positive feedback loop where volatility discourages use as a currency while encouraging speculation.
I think what we need is to establish an independent digital currency first, and then decentralize it. For example, GNU Taler, and then build out the infrastructure and a cryptocurrency could then be phased in. Once the mass market uses digital payments outside the banking network regularly, they’ll be ready to adopt something like BitCoin for international use.
A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They’ll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.
The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it…and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.
Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people’s lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you’ll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.
Part of that is just experience. We’ve lived though a few ‘revolutions’ for which the net effect was…arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they’re bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn’t there before.
And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn’t there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.
I think ever since I came here, it was with the same message: the time for postmodern cynicism where nothing ever matters is over, it’s time to embrace a new sincerity, a return to a more human Internet we imagined from yester-year, while still acknowledging the the advancement and progress that happened during the Web 2.0 era.
And I think the Fediverse, decentralized social media to something more akin to the various independent forums and blogs that still has all the advantages of centralization, is the start of something beautiful.