Tedium - The Next Chapter 💾

Adam Curry, wearing a Gopher shirt on MTV to fulfill the commercial terms of using Gopher.

3. Gopher lets the web win

The time: March 1993

The shift: The rising popularity of the Gopher protocol disappeared basically overnight after the University of Minnesota started asking users for licensing fees. This was bad timing, as the Mosaic browser, which supported both Gopher and the Web, came out right around this time—essentially defusing Gopher at a time its profile was about to surge.

The deeper lesson: Open wins over closed, at least in 1993.

While the Fighting Illini, which hosted the makers of Mosaic, were leveraging a golden opportunity to shape the future of the internet, another midwestern school was blowing its golden opportunity. The Golden Gophers seemed ready to step in the way of its own students in an effort to show a little authority. Hence the story of Gopher, the protocol that had much to offer to the internet, but fell into gradual disuse because its school tried to charge people to use it.

I think that it the University of Minnesota realized what it had, it might have responded differently and encouraged upgrades to the system that made it an elegant alternative for websites.

You can hear the echoes of latter-day Twitter from here.

(via Congress.gov)

6. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act passes

The time: October 1998

The shift: One of the first copyright laws written specifically in response to the internet, the DMCA created long-term reverberations in terms of how we approached ownership.

The deeper lesson: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Some might argue that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was more fundamental, but I think the DMCA was a bigger shift in how the internet worked, as I think Section 230 basically was a defensive measure that allowed the internet to function as it was originally intended. (Had the rest of the CDA gone through—it famously was thrown out—then yes, it would have been the bigger shift.)

Over time, the DMCA, albeit frustrating and imperfect, gained a reputation of being something of a necessary evil, as it allowed people to share copyrighted information while largely avoiding the hammer, but gave owners a recourse to get rid of content that violated their copyrights.

The rise of Napster the next year showed that there was an actual need for it, even if it was not well-loved. (Major content industries learned that suing customers was a bad idea, though.)

9. Yahoo shuts down GeoCities

The time: October 2009

The shift: An early, deeply influential online community—one in which many people got the chance to experience web design for the first time—shuttered for no other good reason than it didn’t seem profitable to keep it online.

The deeper lesson: Archival work is going to matter a lot as the internet ages.

Look, sites die. There is nothing that is going to keep that from happening short of new laws. I have a whole theory about what should be done, in fact.

But in many ways, Yahoo’s killing of GeoCities both soured the internet’s opinion on Yahoo as a company and set the stage for other shutdowns of this nature, each more brutal and heartbreaking than the last. For those who keep track of such things, the two worst ones are usually this, followed by Google Reader.

In so many ways, the shuttering of BuzzFeed News and the removal of Twitter’s blue checkmarks, on the same day—a shift that makes this list go to 11—felt like the wholesale destruction of the 2010s internet. So what do we make of this shift in light of the prior ones we discussed?

To start, I think it’s safe to say that the mass experiment of just putting millions of people in the same room and hoping for the best is ending. It is very clearly not working. While, sure, it’s great to be in the same party-line conversation as Jason Isbell or Danny DeVito, niched-down communities exist for a reason, and we spent more than a decade fighting against them.

Secondly, I think that page views and trending topics turned into a very dangerous metric with which to build lasting internet content. Sure, there are some places where this model mostly works—YouTube, for one, has benefited from the communal scale. But the problem is that this tooling, over time, becomes easily perverted. You see it every day on Twitter, where political organizations attempt to push the trending topics into a specific direction, and appear to treat Twitter as a daily battle, rather than a daily conversation.

That’s one factor here, and it amplifies many of the lessons I emphasized we learned in the list above. But add to that the mass culling of understanding encouraged by the wholesale removal of legacy blue checkmarks—which, say what you want about it as a status symbol, it was an easy shorthand to figure out relevance and accuracy in a world that often fights it—and you run into a situation where it becomes less sustainable than ever to use social media as a sustainable real-time tool. We had something important, and we lost it because we failed to nurture it.

When I was working on ShortFormBlog, I would follow news events live on Tumblr and Twitter to see what sort of new angles emerged and report on things that I saw. Elon Musk removed some of the strongest signals that one would need to do this kind of coverage, including information on the tool used to post an individual tweet and the authority of the source, because he inherently does not understand what he bought.

We will need to nurture these lessons from the 2010s on smaller networks, more gradually. The era of the single-network party line is over, at least for now. We need to niche down, then build back up.

At the same time, many of the other underpinnings of this era looked shaky even back in the mid-2010s—particularly the news outlets that were built to cater to these social networks.

I think what we’re starting to learn is that we cannot build things without thinking about the revenue models first, because it immediately puts us un an unsustainable path, where the biggest problems gradually become unsolvable. BuzzFeed News was a great site, but it ultimately struggled because it insisted on putting its revenue model at the mercy of social media. And while it’s not the worst thing in the world to create a parasitic business—that’s what Musk’s former company PayPal did, after all—the problem is that BuzzFeed and companies like it built parasitic businesses on shape-shifting creatures.

It makes sense that boring old HuffPost is staying around, as a profitable part of the BuzzFeed machine, because it is built around search. All the jokes about what time the Super Bowl is aside and fears of AI shifting the conversation ahead, the fact of the matter is, if you want to be a parasite, you need to build a parasite on something that can prove stable in the long run.

I think the big shift we will see from the shuttering of BuzzFeed News is the insistence that, when we build new business models for journalism in the digital age, the money conversation has to come first. BuzzFeed News is dying because that conversation came too late.

Let’s hope we remember these lessons.

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