Does the majority need to be part of it? Since day one the web was always built by the oddball minorities. It's easy to forget how weird it was considered to spend any amount of time online in the pre-smartphone era.
I noticed a kind of sickness that seems to have taken hold of many people working in tech over the last 15 years. The belief, that nothing can be done unless you got dozens of people, millions of funding and years of time. Or maybe it's just more younger people in this space, who don't remember that we used to build social networks in our free time in our garages?
Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site.
But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when
indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it.
I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!
Yes I've been thinking about this a lot too. There are these unquestioned notions about what is possible, and they're more often than not self-fulfilling prophecies.
I think it's easier to convince someone they're wrong by showing than telling. This is fairly central to what I'm trying to do with my search engine project. Build something so profoundly contradictory to expectations about what is possible to make sticking to those notions completely untenable.
I think the SerenityOS gang does a fantastic job at this too, much better than I do arguably.
Think of the numbers of tik-tok, youtube, facebook, instagram, snapchat, and all those Social media users.
All these users are "normal" people nowadays. Maybe the effects habits of the minorities on the trajectories of "The Internet" are diminished.
(Just thoughts. Not based on anything other my opinions)
Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site.
But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it.
I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!