The Internet emerged by connecting communities of researchers, but as Internet grew, antisocial behaviors were not adequately discouraged.
When I [Aleks] coauthored several internet standards (PNG, JPEG, MNG), I was guided by the vision of connecting humanity. . . .
The Internet was originally designed to connect a few academic institutions, namely universities and research labs. Academia is a community of academics, which has always been based on the openness of information. Perhaps the most important to the history of the Internet is the hacker community composed of computer scientists, administrators, and programmers, most of whom are not affiliated with academia directly but are employed by companies and institutions. Whenever there is a community, its members are much more likely to volunteer time and resources to it. It was these communities that created websites, wrote the software, and started providing internet services.
“Whenever there is a community, its members are much more likely to volunteer time and resources to it” . . . so true!
As I wrote a few years ago, Create your own community (if you need to).
But it’s not just about community; you also have to pay the bills.
Aleks continues:
The skills of the hacker community are highly sought after and compensated well, and hackers can afford to dedicate their spare time to the community. Society is funding universities and institutes who employ scholars. Within the academic community, the compensation is through citation, while plagiarism or falsification can destroy someone’s career. Institutions and communities have enforced these rules both formally and informally through members’ desire to maintain and grow their standing within the community.
Lots to chew on here. First, yeah, I have skills that allow me to be compensated well, and I can afford to dedicate my spare time to the community. This is not new: back in the early 1990s I wrote Bayesian Data Analysis in what was essentially my spare time, indeed my department chair advised me not to do it at all—master of short-term thinking that he was. As Aleks points out, was a time when a large proportion of internet users had this external compensation.
The other interesting thing about the above quote is that academics and tech workers have traditionally had an incentive to tell the truth, at least on things that can be checked. Repeatedly getting things wrong would be bad for your reputation. Or, to put it another way, you could be a successful academic and repeatedly get things wrong, but then you’d be crossing the John Yoo line and becoming a partisan hack. (Just to be clear, I’m not saying that being partisan makes you a hack. There are lots of scholars who express strong partisan views but with intellectual integrity. The “hack” part comes from getting stuff wrong, trying to pass yourself off as an expert on topics you know nothing about, ultimately being willing to say just about anything if you think it will make the people on your side happy.)
Aleks continues:
The values of academic community can be sustained within universities, but are not adequate outside of it. When businesses and general public joined the internet, many of the internet technologies and services were overwhelmed with the newcomers who didn’t share their values and were not members of the community. . . . False information is distracting people with untrue or irrelevant conspiracy theories, ineffective medical treatments, while facilitating terrorist organization recruiting and propaganda.
I’ve not looked at data on all these things, but, yeah, from what I’ve read, all that does seem to be happening.
Aleks then moves on to internet media:
It was the volunteers, webmasters, who created the first websites. Websites made information easily accessible. The website was property and a brand, vouching for the reputation of the content and data there. Users bookmarked those websites they liked so that they could revisit them later. . . .
In those days, I kept current about the developments in the field by following newsgroups and regularly visiting key websites that curated the information on a particular topic. Google entered the picture by downloading all of Internet and indexing it. . . . the perceived credit for finding information went to Google and no longer to the creators of the websites.
He continues:
After a few years of maintaining my website, I was no longer receiving much appreciation for this work, so I have given up maintaining the pages on my website and curating links. This must have happened around 2005. An increasing number of Wikipedia editors are giving up their unpaid efforts to maintain quality in the fight with vandalism or content spam. . . . On the other hand, marketers continue to have an incentive to put information online that would lead to sales. As a result of depriving contributors to the open web with brand and credit, search results on Google tend to be of worse quality.
And then:
When Internet search was gradually taking over from websites, there was one area where a writer’s personal property and personal brand were still protected: blogging. . . . The community connected through the comments on blog posts. The bloggers were known and personally subscribed to.
That’s where I came in!
Aleks continues:
Alas, whenever there’s an unprotected resource online, some startup will move in and harvest it. Social media tools simplified link sharing. Thus, an “influencer” could easily post a link to an article written by someone else within their own social media feed. The conversation was removed from the blog post and instead developed in the influencer’s feed. As a result, carefully written articles have become a mere resource for influencers. As a result, the number of new blogs has been falling.
Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook reduced barriers to entry by making so easy to refer to others’ content . . .
I hadn’t thought about this, but, yeah, good point.
As a producer of “content”—for example, what I’m typing right now—I don’t really care if people come to this blog from Google, Facebook, Twitter, an RSS feed, or a link on their browser. (There have been cases where someone’s stripped the material from here and put it on their own site without acknowledging the source, but that’s happened only rarely.) Any of those legitimate ways of reaching this content is fine with me: my goal is just to get it out there, to inform people and to influence discussion. I already have a well-paying job, so I don’t need to make money off the blogging. If it did make money, that would be fine—I could use it to support a postdoc—but I don’t really have a clear sense of how that would happen, so I haven’t ever looked into it seriously.
The thing I hadn’t thought about was that, even if to me it doesn’t matter where our reader are coming, this does matter to the larger community. Back in the day, if someone wanted to link or react to something on a blog, they’d do it in their own blog or in a comment section. Now they can do it from Facebook or Twitter. The link itself is no problem, but there is a problem in that there’s less of an expectation of providing new content along with the link. Also, Facebook and Twitter are their own communities, which have their strengths but which are different than those of blogs. In particular, blogging facilitates a form of writing where you fill in all the details of your argument, where you can go on tangents if you’d like, and where you link to all relevant sources. Twitter has the advantage of immediacy, but often it seems more like community without the content, where people can go on and say what they love or hate but without the space for giving their reasons.






