| I think it is misguided to think that the web is "broken." I am sure there are more people online doing more interesting things and producing more interesting content now then back in 1996. It is just that now the internet is used by billions of people the signal to noise ratio is much lower. Back when the internet was a few million people globally it was a very select group. That same group of people using the internet for cool interesting stuff has grown dramatically but it is still probably only a few million people globally. The difference is that now there are a couple billion other people using the internet. There is nothing wrong with billions of people using the internet for things that interest them (mostly drama, porn, pyramid scams, and cat videos, apparently). It doesnt detract from my ability to grok some avant garde research paper that I would otherwise never have access to, run programs that do research that pulls on terabytes of data published in public databases around the world, have access to virtually every film and television show from anywhere in the world, any newspaper, etc, and collaborate with other weird people all over the world who are doing this stuff. It is too bad that Google stop actually being a search engine and became an ad trap, but that just means going back to how you found stuff before Google: on chat (IRC then, but lots of places now) and in forums. On the plus side google translate has transformed access to content. Back in pre-2000 the internet was basically English only. there is now so much more diversity, and google translate makes it possible to access content from a far larger group of people than what was possible in the good ol days. |