Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

One of my pet meta-theories about Hacker News is that the frustration expressed over several apparently different stories really has a single source: Hacker News likes the internet of 10-20 years ago a lot more than the average person.

One place this shows up is a frequently-expressed sentiment that the internet is a less magical, less weird, and more corporate place than it was 10-20 years ago. Part of this may be because SEO has diluted the voices of individual creators. But part of it is also because way more average, everyday, tech-unsavvy people are on the internet now.

Another example is the periodic highlighting of somewhat garish HTML-based websites. I like these too! My own personal website falls in this category! But as far as I know, the generic internet user likes the generic slick-graphics-and-whitespace style, and so go the websites that want to attract them.

More relevant to the topic at hand, many comments in this thread argue that targeted ads are unnecessary for a functional internet, since the internet of 20 years ago seemed to work just fine without targeted ads. But, again, it's less clear to me that general internet users -- that is, mostly people who never experienced the internet of 20 years ago -- have the same preference.

It's funny, because I'm to a large extent on HN's side on this one. But my enthusiasm is tempered by my sneaking suspicion that the other side is a lot bigger, and my side is actually powered by more elitism and nostalgia than I thought.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I miss the early Web mainly because I was young, had my life ahead of me, and everything was an unknown frontier to be explored.

Do you remember how f'in hard it was to find stuff online back when a) there was less stuff online and b) you had to use a metasearch engine like Metafind or Dogpile to aggregate the terrible results from multiple engines into something remotely useful? Remember surfing because actively searching fog data was next to impossible? Remember 300ms-per-hop latency and being impressed by 6KB/sec downloads, taking a week to download a Linux distro and rarely upgrading your packages because it took forever? Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared? I do. I won't go back. I have a few PDP-8s and a PDP-11/03 and various 8-bit micros and some Teletypes and 80s-90s UNIX systems and Winboxen if I want to go back to the old days. They're not dead, they're still here and they still do exactly what little they did in the past. I don't love how dystopian tech has become, but it's a ton more useful to me and most other people than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago.