[edward_rolf]

In nineteen ninetyfive, I was around 20, I started using the Internet. I was amazed and started looking for ways to communicate with others. I realized everyone wanted to communicate with everyone. I started subscribing to newsletters. When I opened my inbox I thought to myself "wow, the Internet is communicating with me".

Today my stomach turns when the internet communicates with me (ads, messages, pretend news). The original idea is lost. Newbies never get a glimps of what I saw, back in the day. I wonder if it's lost forever.

I blame Google. They solved big data. Made it queryable. And then implemented a business idea very far from "not evil".

Edit: spelling

[kasey_junk]

They also solved email hosting and dns and spam and the browser wars and map directions and domain hosting and reactive web guis and streetview and maybe self driving cars...

I get it, I was there, I remember how it felt to see the internet in the first blush of its commercial blooming. Also, I can be pretty biased against where we are today, but to act like it was all lollipops and gumdrops in 1995 and its terrible today ignores a bunch of the improvements.

[edward_rolf]

>but to act like it was all lollipops and gumdrops in 1995 and its terrible today ignores a bunch of the improvements.

Yes, the world was both worse and better than today. I agree. Today is different. Compared to 1995, not worse or better. That's depressing because as a planet, back in 1995, we really needed to improve, as a species.

I don't know how to make an influence in world politics other than to create a business built upon my values. That's what I'm looking for right now. A technical leader. I have given up on politics.

That technical leader is not Google. I personaly share none of the ideas behind ad networks. I like how they solved big data back in the day. And since they have great people they started to solve other problems as well, like mail. And maps. That's not evil.

Sucking the air out of the browser market the same way they did with the web search industry and then standardizing an ad-blocking mechanism is not just evil, it's vicious.

[derefr]

I see those as two orthogonal things: solving problems for the web is the thing Google lives to do. Monopolizing internet advertising is the thing Google does to live.

[edward_rolf]

Is that reasoning a way of solving the problem of doing good for the sake of evil perhaps?

Edit: This and my previous posts are very toxic towards Google. I shall try to be more positive. Maybe they really are doing good for the world. I mean, how will we have selfdriving googlecars if we don't have ads?

[derefr]

The era of the (non-promotion/"lifecycle"-oriented) email newsletter is dead. But, such content is still produced! In order to avoid the devaluation of text (that is, the process where people stopped reading the good newsletters because they blended into the bad newsletters), the creators of worthwhile broadcast-style media have had to move to audio or video production. Those "newsletters" are now podcasts and Youtube channels.

[edward_rolf]

There was nothing wrong with letting commerce do their thing on the internet I suppose but since there was never a non-ad driven competitor to Google non-ad driven businesses now have a hard time succeeding, which is a shame I think.

Before ad-driven internet business, remember what we had? I do very well. It was called non-profitable business. Are we that plain and narrow-minded that we therefore cannot have non-ad driven business on the web today?

The information you leak when you use ad-driven services, that's the product. I know of tons and tons of other type of products that could be driving an internet business where the product was something else entirely. But I don't see them around so much. Most buy in to the Google ad circus.

[manigandham]

What is a "non-profitable business" and why would anyone want that? Unless you truly are talking about registered non-profits (as in charities) and are expecting a Google like organization run that way?

[edward_rolf]

I was refering to the giganting corporations that were created during the dotcom era that investors threw money at but never became profitable.