Ask HN: How would you design internet 2.0 to make it personal again?

  • There's nothing wrong with the internet itself. The reason all of these "problems" exist is because they work on a lot of people. Many people WANT to have endless content shoved into their eye-holes while they passively scroll. Either consciously because it takes no effort or unconsciously because they are addicted.

  • Is this Internet 2.0 just for a supposed 0.01%, who would be happy to pay all the associated costs out-of-pocket, while ably serving on the non-profit boards which ran the whole thing?

    If not - well, there's a lot of evidence that 99.99% of people are willing to put up with all that shit, so long as they get an endless stream of shiny new click-bait which is minimal-effort & mostly-free-seeming.

  • Iunno. You can't?

    Stallman had this figured in the '80s; you'll never defeat the commercial desire for software. But you can undercut them to the point that their business is no longer sustainable, a-la GPL software like Linux and Emacs. Twitter almost had this figured out, in that a user could share and curate their own feed of content from different sources. But Twitter had many mounting issues, which eventually reached an inescapable breaking point.

    So, you could try building on the Twitter model with a more decentralized approach. But drawn out to it's logical conclusion, a feed-based CMS is still just a website in fancy clothes. The future of the internet is probably still the internet we use today, with minor changes made to facilitate convenience for users.