Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
There may have been passion in the beginning, but no longer. Greed takes over where passion once thrived. Profit is prioritized over functionality, despite profit margins already being sufficient to allow the companies employees to live comfortably and for the company to invest in new things. Measures to increase profit in this situation always replace passion. Companies that try their best to get more money from their users, rather than bringing in new paying users with new features, are the very reason why we’ve stagnated. So a lack of passion indeed. Because without passion what reason does one have to continue innovating? If one does not feel for the project they are developing, does that project not suffer for it? Passion is the root of innovation. It may be passion for giving your family a better life, passion to give the world an easier way to do something, or passion to make the best version of a thing you can imagine, but it’s all passion. Without it, innovation can’t continue. Innovation is required to make things better, but without passion innovation has no seed to grow from.