I think that is not how we can rebuild the internet. The majority don't even know what is wrong with the internet in the place, not everyone reads hnews(That is nichest of the communities), and most users aren't even using twitter for alternatives to have an impact.
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)
I don't think "the majority" matter, in the context of what parent commenter is talking about. I generally subscribe to the idea of Eternal September (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September), where "the majority" is the root cause of the problems.
The early web was not great because capitalism didn't exist and corporations were nicer back then, etc. The early web was great because it was a subculture, driven by a niche population that was more technically savvy and prone to create rather than just consume. Today's web is poor because it is now the mainstream culture, it is driven by a wide population of casual, unsophisticated users that are prone to consume content only and are therefore best served by walled gardens.
As the casual consumer web grew, the early maker web's signal got increasingly lost in the noise. There are still interesting blogs out there, but they are harder to find and attract less engagement because even those of us from the spirit of that original web now spend so much time on platforms like Reddit (and even HN) instead.
Even if you want to produce novel content, you really HAVE to engage with the entrenched closed platforms in order to reach any audience at all now. And therefore there's little way to discriminate, if you want to attract a community of early-web minded people while avoiding the mass normies. Most attempts that try this either fizzle out altogether, or inadvertently take a wrong turn into culture wars, instead attracting alt-right trolls who think the problem with the web is too many political progressives now.
I think it is a pointless goal to try to change the entire mainstream Internet. To somehow change 2020's normies into 1990's geeks. I think the only feasible goal, and only necessary goal, is to carve out space for that geek community to thrive as a subculture once again. Honestly, "the web" itself may be an inappropriate platform for this. It may only be possible with something new that requires some technical savvy and friction in order to access, to discourage all the phone users from venturing in.
