Are We Watching The Internet Die?
Are We Watching The Internet Die?
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
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Betteridge's law of headlines answers this succintly: no
The headline is 6 words. The article is 3,606 words. Expressed as a percentage, the amount of content you have decided to address comes to a grand total of 0.16%.
If you have no interest in interacting with the content, it would be simple enough to state that. But to dismiss the entirety of the article based on 0.16% of the content seems rather short sighted to me. Do you have any thoughts to share about the article?
Nah, I'm allergic to clickbait. If it had a better, more serious title, I'd read it.
If you're the author of the article, you have to find that line between interesting and clickbait. Sensationalist titles like that are like smearing a distasteful substance on the cover of a book. No matter what you write in that book, I'm not picking it up.
Possible titles (without even reading the article) that would make me click with an open mind
- Threats to the open web
- How much has the web changed since $date?
- Where does the web go after $event?
- The future of the web - an opinion
- How do monopolies affect the internet?
I would not have clicked if it had any of those titles. And I do actually agree with the title. We are watching the death of the internet. It will never be again what it was. And what it is now is a clean white washed drip fed version of the expansive and deep knowledge of everything that it once was.
I find that way too dramatic. There was once a firefox extension that randomly clicked on links starting from a randomly generated search term. It went to so many different websites and blogs that I had never seen before. There are still link registries grouped by category out there and they are marvelous to discover on lazy afternoons. Searching for home directories is of course a trip of randomness where people unwittingly expose so many personal thing. Entire music and video collections, family albums, art projects, etc. There is still a massive deep web out there.
There's also of course the dark web (I only know of I2P and TOR). It's smaller and more difficult to find, but there's a bunch of stuff on there too.
The fediverse is also growing, but not only that. There are self-hosted instances of many different things gitlab, gitea, nextcloud, owncloud, wordpress, and so much more. I'm not worried about diversity.
Going down the protocol stack isn't worrying either. Sure, multinationals buy up IP space and have their own AS and require BGP to route between them, but there are still many internet exchanges out there and at least in Europe, every country has multiple ISPs with some countries quite strictly regulating that there must be competition. IPv4 address space is supposedly full, but somehow getting a temporary IP in existing classes isn't a problem. I also doubt switching to IPv6 would "kill the internet".
As a major pillar of our modern society, for the internet to die - not just for a day but for years - the interconnected networks would all have to stop communicating with each other. To reach that level of disconnect, something truly major would have to happen. Infrastructure would have to be destroyed or shut down or legally prevented from transmitting to certain parties at a massive scale.
The world's economic system would come to a grinding halt.Given this world is heavily influenced by business, I highly doubt killing the internet would be in their interest. Neither in the short, nor long term. This is not like climate change where business as usual can continue for a few decades. Without the internet, changes will be seen very quickly - maybe even immediately.
As I said, overtly sensationalist and clickbait title with an article behind it that probably blows everything out of proportion. No way am I reading that.
That's more like it, this is a discussion that people can actually interact with! I am not the author, and I agree with you that the title isn't great, but I am interested in discussing what they wrote and appreciate that you've now at least opened the door to a discussion on clickbait titles rather than just leaving a one sentence "gotcha".
Dude. The 4th sentence of the page you linked says it doesn't apply to this type of open ended question.
The only possible answer to this (admittedly silly) headline is, "it depends what you mean by die". An answer yes or no could easily be rebutted.
The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.
But this is a strict yes-no question
Did you not bother to read the 3rd and 4th sentence of my comment?
The question is open ended. It's subjective, dependent on the definition of "die". It's not answerable with merely yes or no.