>>456023>Was the internet good or bad ?Are people still using the internet, when they log on to corporate platforms like facebook ?
The main feature of the internet was that it made a million different systems talk to each other, but once you log on to a corporate platform that's no longer the case. Facebook and other platforms like it are closed networks, you can only visit with their system (official website or phone-app) and only their back-end servers are allowed. That's no longer like the internet.
You can of course say that it's still using the tcp/ip protocol but so is your local-lan network and that's not part of the internet either.
So I'm going to say that the internet was good, and that we should go back to it.
You also need realistic expectations, it's just an information exchange system, it's not going to create a better world for us.
There are however a few things about the internet that we fucked up, that is not the fault of corporate platforms locking users into closed systems adjacent to the internet. Even in the web 1.0 days when social media was basic forums. It was possible to click on their account name and read every post they ever made. You don't have that in meatspace when you meat a person, you can't easily find out everything they ever said. Why did we build this shortcut for stalkers and which-hunting-mobs into the web ? We should never have build this on account systems with names that correspond to virtual personas (The intuition that people evolved is for meat-space limitations). We should instead have treated it like a big wall full of drawers and give people 2 sets of keys, the first one allows you to open a drawer and read the letters inside, and the second key allows your to write a message and add it to the drawer. And your browser stores the keys (with usb-stick backup functionality)
If you wanted to sign your message with your name you could still do that.
Another mistake is that links are one-way-valves. You can use a link to go from website A to Website B, but when you are on Website B you can not go to Website A unless there is a second link that links the other way. You have a back-button in your browser but that doesn't help if you start out on website B. Search engines have something like back-link catalogues, some of these search engines give you access, but it's definitely a feature that only power-users can use. The link infrastructure of the internet was build like a road-network that only has one-way-streets. It's technically trivial to make web servers talk to each other to make links bi-directional. It would have been easy to avoid limiting user movement. It also would have avoided link-breakage when moving website addresses, because the 2way link streets could also have been used to send an update for the new address.
The last big mistake we made when designing the internet was that we did not give network-switches storage functionality.
If you have a dinky web-server and 5 users want to look at your website, that works but if 5 million people come looking it can't handle it.
If network switches had storage that could buffer the most popular content that would make even a dinky web-server survive a big rush. Normal people could have a simple web-server at home at least for simple static websites. (add in symmetric internet connection speed for everyone).