Not to seem pessimistic, but in the 10 years since this article what have we really gained on the internet that we didn’t have then? Seems like we got a lot more social media and some failed promises from crypto. This is barring the current ai stuff since it’s still really shaking out.
There was the mobile and cloud boom. Which resulted in more digital payments (more difficult for crime and corruption), online to offline stuff like ride sharing and e-commerce. Plus a ton of advancements on logistics, especially in developing countries.
I think most of these changes didn't affect developed nations so much, it's probably still good old Walmart and Amazon. But they were lifechanging to developing nations. We had some advancements in the rights of factory workers as they had to match gig workers, and crime dropped drastically in some places because it just wasn't worth it anymore when you could climb out of poverty by delivering food.
mobile and cloud was well alive and booming a decade before 2014 (i guess you could very technically argue not cloud but S3 buckets on aws caught fire almost instantaneously)
S3 didn't launch until 2006, iPhone 2007, App Store 2008. In 2004 we had Palms and VPSs, but that doesn't quality as mobile and cloud in any modern sense of the word.
so I’ll hope you’ll forgive me 2 years then on my “decade” statement which was not meant as literally as you took it.
There were mobile phones before the iphone. Like a whole ecosystem even! They even had screens! and browsers! and internet!
the major innovation the iphone brought was a touch screen (and a decent camera), which sort of existed, but nothing as smooth and crisp as the iphone. please i really hope people out there dont think the iphone was the invention of the cell phone.
Parent didn't say "mobile was invented", said "the mobile boom" - which indeed didn't really happen until (a few years) after the iPhone arrived. The amount of money flowing into mobile software is now an order of magnitude (or more) higher than it was in 2007. I'm your average Apple hater, but without them forcibly removing carriers from the software landscape, today we'd have a much smaller mobile market.
It's like differentiating between "the Internet boom" and the invention of networking - nobody is saying the 14k modem was the invention of networking, but there was no "internet boom" before it.
What about the App Store? I never used a Symbian phone but I don’t remember a device that would have allowed as much as the iPhone in the way of custom apps.
I used the hell out of Symbian. There were stores and telcos would sell apps too. Games were far better on Symbian because it wasn't a touch screen, it was practically a joystick. We had chat apps and dating apps. I was a thirsty college guy who spent a lot of data on these apps but eventually settled for SMS because data was too expensive. Web experiences sucked; my first job was converting websites to jQuery mobile, which later became obselete thanks to responsive websites.
But you can't build a business like Uber on Symbian. The iPhone brought about all these marketplace apps. They stopped being toys, and became more like mini computers.
I graduated around 2012, Malaysia. A few things I distinctly remembered:
- some college girl doing CS was talking about how cloud is the future. I asked her what cloud was. She didn't know but mentioned the S3 stuff.
- my aunt, a clerk, was talking about how her job was training her to put documents in the cloud. She didn't know what a cloud was either.
- I got the worst career advice of my life. Someone said I should stop doing Android and learn to make BlackBerry apps instead, because that's what all the British people were using. On the other end, someone said I'd regret not making Windows Phone apps because they were superior in every way to Android.
- we were doing SVN to our own servers because this dude Joel put it as part of a checklist, and then we switched to Git because of the cloud thing.
- Uber (and similar) were just blasting off. In my country, it was MyTeksi (2011), later GrabTaxi (2013), then Grab (2016). They were the first "unicorn" in the region, where we hadn't experienced the dot com bubble, and regional VCs would pressure to raise and burn.
- Tech jobs were not really a thing here. Someone said that with my EE degree, I could get a real job as a KFC manager and keep all the IT stuff as a hobby. But in Malaysia, tech triggered hard around 2014. SMEs became startups. Malaysian entrepreneurs from the US were coming back here, becoming angels and VCs because it was easier to invest here than in the US. And GrabTaxi started pushed a wave of hype.
It's probably different in different places. 2014 was probably a later stage in Silicon Valley, but it was quite early here in SE Asia. There's delays.
It's also why I'm optimistic on things like crypto, web3, AI, because the tech is at a mature enough stage to build things on, but it'll be years before that tech is built and many more years before it's a household product. The story really starts when the tech is used by a billion people.
Not sure about e-commerce being a last ten years thing, if anything we kind of lost a lot of e-commerce to the consolidation of online shopping into online markets like Amazon, Etsy, alibaba etc. Also online shopping software itself has consolidated up into the big tech companies, and small vendors are somewhat forced into the Amazon psuedi-monopoly.
I was both too early and too late for e-commerce. I started with it before payment gateways were really around. Paypal didn't like us because of high CC fraud. Many customers didn't even have credit/debit cards - they'd literally drive to the bank in the next town to find a cash deposit machine. Many countries didn't even have cash deposit machines. Logistics were too expensive and always breaking things.
But it's too late now because the conglomerates made it too cheap to compete with and the bar for affiliate programs is too high.
I'm not even sure if they're "tech companies" anymore. At least half their manpower is in blue collar jobs.
I'm a painter pursuing traditional-style work. The education system absolutely failed me, and I have seen it fail countless others with the same desire.
The last 10 years have seen a renaissance of academic painting information and education, and social media, particularly Instagram, has been the fuel.
There is so much now that simply wasn't there then. My life would be so much different and happier if I were coming of age now with those desires instead of a decade ago. Nonetheless, it is still dramatically improved by the advancements I described.
I no longer feel so alone. I suspect many people with different niches are enjoying richer lives like I am, due to the last 10 years of internet.
I had a similar thought but challenged myself to think about the other side. Using this list many companies and thinking about those founded after 2012, because it takes a couple years to enter the mainstream, we can see that there's quite a bit of opportunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa....
Social media for sure, but the entirety of AR/VR. AI, and not just GPTs. but recommendation, detection, sentiment, data mining are all things that are 'new'. We can also think about things like online banking or healthcare apps that didn't exist. I was still sending checks in 2014, and I certainly wasn't doing video visits with my doctor. As someone that is middle age, when I ask younger people they point out how much opportunity as a counterpoint to the cynicism I'm seeing here HN.
> but in the 10 years since this article what have we really gained on the internet that we didn’t have then
Figma comes to mind as an obvious standout example. We didn’t even have the technology to support that level of multiplayer computationally heavy UI in the browser back in 2014. No native apps had collaboration that smooth either.
Collaborative [text] document editing in general is a good example. So mundane these days in all the big web-based work apps that we don’t even notice it anymore.
I believe I recall quake 3 running in the browser a few years before 2014. I imagine if we had the technology to run that, we had what was needed to render a wysiwyg UI editor with multiple cursors.
Figma is a good product and being in the browser was a huge booster for its adoption but as a product, technically it could have existed 15 years ago as an installable program. With the same success? Probably not.
What made those products boom was cheap and qualitative video calls (so, bandwidth) that are totally necessary to work in real time collaboration.
India - and probably many other countries outside of the Americentric West zone - achieved complete adoption of digital (mobile) payments, shot up internet connectivity to the moon (to the point that it now has the largest population of netizens in the world), made huge strides in FinTech and Digital Learning, achieved complete adoption of digital commerce including app-based ride-hailing and food delivery, and saw the blossoming of a gigantic app/digital services-based economy.
Life has changed radically here as compared to 2014.
Zoom? Try having a video conference call 10 years ago. I remember going to an HP corporate office (in Taiwan, if I remember correctly) in 2012 where they proudly demonstrated a video conference room that worked well. Setting up calls using WebEx back then was slow, had poor performance, and usually somebody failed to join and had to call in.
The main thing that happened here was bandwidth. Back then you'd be lucky if someone had the 2mbps needed for a reasonable HD call. The underlying technology has not really changed since then though.
And the commidiziation - ten years ago was 2014 and things like GoToMeeting existed, and were "barely capable" but could share screen, audio, and if your connection was good enough, video from your grainy webcam.
But lots of people weren't using that, they were still stuck with telephony-based videoconferencing, with polycom devices in the middle of a conference table and dual ISDN lines and stuff, stuff built out in the prior decade.
And then connections and cameras got good enough that Zoom could "just work" without all the hassle of following the rules, etc.
In about 2005, while I was IT for a startup, I worked with a counterpart at an investor (Deloitte maybe?) whose job was largely coordinating video calls in advance of meetings. We’d exchange IP addresses and SIP addresses and whatnot so that our Polycom could talk to their Cisco or whatever it all was. She and I would join 30 minutes beforehand to make sure it all worked, stand by during the meeting in case there was trouble, then come back after the execs were finished and shut it all down. The calls were at least as good as Zoom or Teams today, at the expense of two IT people and dedicated equipment. The execs never knew it not to work great. A much simpler time. We have come a long way.
Tinder was technically launched in 2012 but the swiping thing came out in 2013. These tools are an essential part of connection for a large group of people. And you can't really handwave social media aside, it's been absurdly relevant since 2014. The Apple watch launched in 2015 and had led a revolution in wearable internet-connected tech. 4k TVs and subsequently hq streaming wasn't a thing til after 2012.
Amongst the other examples, IoT. 10 years ago it was still in its infancy. As an example, Amazon didn't acquire Ring until 2018. beyond just smart home stuff, payments like Apple and Android Pay impact daily life. The EV boom is also a massive part of IoT. Every TV is now a smart TV (which is miserable, but that's a whole other discussion)
And an IoT world has nearly as many drawbacks as it does benefits, but I think it's hard to argue it hasn't changed the way we interact with the internet in our day to day lives.
I don't think the things you're referring to have had nearly the impact you're claiming they had. They've just taken things we already had and made them slightly more convenient.
Ring is just doorbell cameras. Japan has had these for decades. Smart home is a complete failure, nobody uses Alexa or siri or ok google seriously. EVs are just cars but slightly different. Smart TVs just simplify the process of having to buy a Chromecast or plug in a laptop to your TV.
Also the new things are objectively worse for the customers than the old things were. Ring's improvement over doorbell cameras is video quality. Smart TVs may simplify the process of having to buy and plug a Chromecast, but you buy and plug a Chromecast specifically to avoid all the bullshit and planned obsolescence that Smart TVs come with. Etc.
If you take a true assessment of all these things, you find that for lots of people the Ring doorbell is just a doorbell now, the video part is ignored; the smart home stuff is just a light switch, and the smart TV is configured enough to get to YouTube or whatever.
People, especially tech-types, way over-estimate how much hassle we're willing to put up with day-to-day.
> People, especially tech-types, way over-estimate how much hassle we're willing to put up with day-to-day.
They also just as often underestimate it. It's part of why "data driven development" fails. Regular, non-tech users have long been conditioned to assume computers and tech in general is buggy, finicky, and full of annoyances. They use it anyway, and bear the frustration silently[0], only occasionally begging a techie relative or friend to "fix my computer, it's slow now because it got viruses". Devs and PMs look at their telemetry, see users using a feature, and think they like it. They probably don't. They just suffer through it.
As a techie, I have very little tolerance for hassle. Which for IoT, ironically, means I'm running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi now, because it's a net save on annoyances - even though it's extra work, it lets me and my family use the "smart" parts of home appliances without frustration.
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[0] - With who knows how much accumulating "death from thousand papercuts" psychological damage...
Discord and slack figured out messaging, and the web development tooling now is infinitely better than 2014. On the front end, HTML5 and responsive web design were still new in 2013, and React came out in 2013/stabilized in 2015/released Hooks in 2019.
On the backend, Next.js brought us SSR in 2016, MongoDB brought us document databases by winning “fastest growing database engine” in 2013 and 2014, and Docker brought us disposable containers in 2013.
The list is stacked towards older tech but that’s maybe because recent tech hasn’t proven itself yet: svelte in 2020 is still maturing AFAICT, and ive never heard of Vite (2021) or SolidJS (2022). I personally think many exciting non-AI trends are also ramping up now, such as Local First development (formalized in May 2023).
I think that the economy and innovation in general were curtailed due to the climaxing rampant corruption in the US, but the internet is something of an exception IMO.
This is all talking about developer abilities, of course: the constraints of corrupt capitalism mean that many of the actual sites released in the past decade have been terribly bloated and over-featured. But I think that’s partially a consequence of businesses moving everything into mobile-first websites and apps —- you’re gonna see a lot more low-margin websites.
The first part was responding to the idea that the internet hasn’t really gotten better for the consumer in the last decade, despite technological advancements. And I see the reason for that being the regulatory capture of the American government, which allows a few massive conglomerates to monopolize and organize cartels in various internet-adjacent domains. Any reasonable version of America would have invoked antitrust a long, long time ago.
The second part is referencing the specific problems most HNers see with the modern internet: giant SPAs with huge packet sizes and questionable, non-accessible, hand-rolled functionality. And I think the reason for that is that our system is barely functioning right now: we made stock buybacks legal again for some reason, and executive pay and shareholder dividends were already absurdly high. Big SPAs that supposedly do everything, and the mobile apps that they mimic, have become a way to lower expenses rather than an additive new medium for business. When was the last time you talked to a business on the phone?
Long story short, capitalism makes bad websites by underpaying, underhiring, and overspeccing.
