Hugo Hacker News

Net Positive

JohnJamesRambo 2021-08-19 02:45:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Has it been net positive?

I feel like sadly no. People are more ignorant and unhappy than ever, this is such a wild outcome I would have never expected if you told early me that as I surfed the net happily in the late 1990s.

I don’t say this to be depressing, we get enough of that. I say it because I know some of you work in places and on projects where you can change it.

2021-08-19 15:17:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

ksherlock 2021-08-19 00:09:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Sadly, the website doesn't work with NetPositive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetPositive

criticaltinker 2021-08-19 04:16:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Very cool website design, I like how the window theming changes with the decade you navigate to.

However the thesis presented is ... a bit nebulous. Maybe the point is to invoke nostalgia in general?

Here is the text from the main page and the other four pages:

> Thirty years ago, the world wide web was a way for scientists to share data. Since then, it’s become a critical force for industry, and how the world connects. But this didn’t happen all at once. The web’s evolution has been shaped by the geography of its creators and users. We explore the stories of people who have defined the web today, and what it means for the future.

> The early internet was an open-sourced Wild West brought to us via a tenuous dial-up connection. Part utopian experiment, part financial gamble, and much slower than any of us care to recall, the web during this decade was a petri dish for commerce and community that laid the groundwork for the internet we know today.

> In the new millennium, the trickling stream of information on the internet grew into a powerful river with the capacity to overwhelm. As more people came online, social networks made the world feel smaller, and companies that survived the dot com bubble began to compete with traditional businesses.

> Better, faster, smaller—in the age of the smartphone, the internet can travel anywhere. A task that once tethered us to our PCs now morphed into a mobile app. Suddenly, we’re always online, for better or for worse.

> As computer power increases exponentially, it begs the question: what can’t the internet do? The specifics may still be fuzzy, but the next few decades will almost assuredly see the internet increasingly integrated into our lives, our stuff, and perhaps even our bodies. That will undoubtedly make life easier and more complicated.

chucky_z 2021-08-19 02:13:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Is this anything more than a box with some text in it and a bunch of graphics? I can't see anything else on the entire page. This is somewhat insulting to how weird (in a fun way) the early web was to me.

DangitBobby 2021-08-19 02:33:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Clicking on the graphics seems to open a corresponding blog post.