Good points and well written, however it all depends on perspective. Most of us don't have the same investment as someone imprisoned for speaking out.
The author bemoans the demise of blogging and the rise of decentralization, I remember bemoaning the rise of blogging bringing about the end of Usenet. It's always sad when you see your favorite niche of the internet disappear but it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want.
My kids think of YouTube as the empowering platform and free streaming music as their birthright. If I tried to get them excited about Usenet or gopher they would call me out as the old fart I am.
Nostalgia is one thing, but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at television as an example.) You can't just write it off every time when someone notices the decline.
Also, centralization is objectively there. Google, Twitter, Facebook. It was obvious where this was going years ago, but instead of warning us, technologist sung odes to Web 2.0. Great. Now, Web 3.0 is shitty phone apps.
it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want
When you don't complain about things simply because masses want them it's groupthink.
>Nostalgia is one thing, but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at television as an example.) You can't just write it off every time when someone notices the decline.
People point to old time complaints about decline as if they prove that decline was never real ("People also complained about the advent of books or the radio, so surely anyone complaining today is wrong").
The forget that there are other, also logically consistent, explanations:
1) Decline is a constant: e.g. people who complained about the radio bring some kind of decline were as correct as people complaining about Twitter now.
2) Decline is always present but not absolute: there's always something missed in sophistication, freedom, etc from previous technologies (e.g. the use of the imagination in radio-theatricals as opposed to being fed images in TV, or the freedom to be the fuck alone for a while as opposed to constantly obligated to be available with mobile phones), but there is also positive change, and what's the total balance depends on what you value.
3) Decline is sometimes true (a thing is totally worse than another it replaces), and othertimes not, and some people in the past were right about claiming decline in some transition, where others were wrong.
All of what you wrote is true. Sometimes decline in mass media is relative. We loose some radio to get some TV. But I think it is sometimes fair to say that we trade something of value for something superficial.
Right now, we have unparalleled levels of global surveillance and media centralization plays a key role in it.
In the past TV channels and publishers competed with one another. Right now every large website is an unchallenged emperor of its niche. The emperor dies and we get a new one, but it's hardly a free market system.
Finally, there are phenomena like Twitter/Reddit hate mobs. The principle is not entirely new, but the scale, pettiness and randomness are unparalleled.
> Nostalgia is one thing, but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at television as an example.) You can't just write it off every time when someone notices the decline.
"Get worse", especially with entertainment media, is pretty much the definition of subjective. So, yeah, if someone whines that an entertainment media has gotten worse, it generally means nothing but that it fits their taste less. Unless you happen to share their taste, you can easily write it off.
I think this is unfair when we're comparing usually-premium, centralised apps with the advertising cruft of major publishing sites.
What is central to the concern in this transition isn't so much the quality of the apps but the (important) fringe content that will be frozen out. If anything, the cost of developing a good app to retain control of your publishing/revenue will be the limiting factor.
>but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at television as an example.) You can't just write it off every time when someone notices the decline.
What decline are you talking about? You don't mention anything specific - just saying "look at television" isn't very convincing. There is fantastic content available on television - something for everyone. But it's hard to make a point when you don't provide any examples of the decline.
I haven't watched TV in more than a decade. Nobody I know watches it. It had been almost entirely superseded by cable channels, which are being superseded by streaming now. I though this is self-evident and does not require an elaborate explanation.
What does require some explanation in the order of events. At some point television had decent TV programs. People still stream and torrent them. They are classics. Than the overall quality declined. Only then cable sort of "stepped in", became more prominent and got good content. (In the process, however, news programs became what they are right now.)
Interestingly, the shift to streaming is quite different.
You have failed to demonstrate that the quality of television shows has declined over time. There are many excellent current television shows, along with lots of bad shows. But this has always been the case. The difference is that the only old shows that people remember are the good ones; all the old dross is forgotten, whereas with current TV it's there for all to see.
This is what over-the-air TV program looks like these days. What percentage of its broadcast time consists of quality TV shows? (Don't forget to factor in all the ads.) How much of it would you watch, honestly?
If you watch broadcast TV on a regular basis, you get to know the times when it's going to be decent and the times when you might find nothing remotely interesting. It's all on a schedule, and that schedule puts better and more expensive entertainment at a time when more people will be watching.
I would say your complaint about quality shows as a percentage of broadcast time is a valid argument for moving TV to more on-demand media (watching a show on Netflix or Hulu vs being on the couch at 9PM on a Thursday). There's still some decent stuff out there. The only thing this doesn't solve is sports programming, which is practically worthless if it's not live and from which NBC makes a fortune as a "premium" football channel.
He never complained about the quality of television shows, just about television. And I concur. The quality of television has gone down a lot. Too many ads, too many channels filled with rubbish. I stopped watching too, and turned to Netflix instead.
This seems like an argument that's easily quantifiable. When was television still good? How much quality programming was available to watch then vs now? How much advertising did one sit through to watch ye olde quality shows of yore?
This is how I see it too. People are simply going to move towards the path of least resistance. Setting up a Wordpress blog is a lot tougher than just opening up an account on tumblr or Youtube or whatever. Paying $10 a month is just going to be easier than hunting through albums at the local record store run by snooty staff. Using a GUI is just going to be easier for non-technical people than using a command line, etc.
We invented things like the internet, mostly/partly, to increase our ease in life. Its funny when people don't realize that what was the status quo in their 20s was built on the same principles of ease. Now that they're older they can't connect with what the young people are doing today, yet not too long age they were the 'confusing' young people.
The larger issue here is why are we letting people who are aging act like curmudgeons and secondly, why do we give in so readily to nostalgia pieces? As someone in his late thirties, I make a special effort to stay nimble and not fall into the "it was better in my day" nonsense. Why do we tolerate this? We should be shaming it. Yet, here we are with this ridiculous nostalgia piece at the top of HN.
I wish I could live long enough to read the "life was better before robots did our work for us" nostalgia pieces from the great-grandkids of today's millennials. They'll never know what its like to have a back-breaking manual labor job or a mind-numbing corporate job.
>The larger issue here is why are we letting people who are aging act like curmudgeons and secondly, why do we give in so readily to nostalgia pieces?
We do so because change isn't always good. This is one of the most frustrating things about working in the tech sector: the erroneous assumption that all change is good and anyone who disagrees is an "aging curmudgeon".
No, we shouldn't be shaming it. Any change or new system that's worth anything will be able to stand up to questioning. And any change, even the very good ones, will possibly have unpleasant side effects. It's really ok to discuss these things.
In this particular case, it's good to discuss whether or not diversity of content will suffer when a small number of sites are the gatekeepers. It may be that the centralization of the web will provide better discoverability and visibility to a wide variety of authors. Or it may be that the content is increasingly homogenized and the number of voices are reduced. And it may be that the few all-powerful gatekeepers are more vulnerable to pressure from outside forces who want to censor certain content. Or perhaps not.
Why would you be so concerned about having such a discussion?
>The author bemoans the demise of blogging and the rise of decentralization
Err, actually it's the inverse: the rise of centralization. Blogging was decentralized -- FB, Pinterest, Twitter is a single source controlled by one corporate entity.
>It's always sad when you see your favorite niche of the internet disappear but it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want.
Well, one complaint about a specific aspect of internet use is not "complaining endlessly".
Besides, things are not always happening because of what "masses want". Masses are served stuff, stuff is marketed to the masses, stuff is taken away or left to wither so they get used to some new stuff, etc.
The author bemoans the demise of blogging and the rise of decentralization, I remember bemoaning the rise of blogging bringing about the end of Usenet. It's always sad when you see your favorite niche of the internet disappear but it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want.
My kids think of YouTube as the empowering platform and free streaming music as their birthright. If I tried to get them excited about Usenet or gopher they would call me out as the old fart I am.