The social web vs the software web
Evolution is something we haven’t seen much of in the software world since 2006 or so. Incredible stagnation because of the dominance of the social web. We lost the software web. All the focus was on personalities, celebrity — hype and 99.999% bullshit. It was a 20 year period where all that happened was scaling.
I hadn’t really thought of that, but it feels true.
It’s not like nothing has happened, because a lot of people have come and gone and built huge audiences on the “social web” in the past 20 years. But technologically, it does feel stagnant. The biggest change since 2006 was the replacement of the chronological feed with the algorithmic one. And then TikTok took that even further with the way they sprinkled brand-new, untested content into it. But overall it’s been the same… Just staring at apps. Which is another reason why all this nondeterministic LLM software feels like the first break in two decades.