Even more importantly, they are not people. By that I mean that (marketing departments in) so many companies just love to take credit for the things people bring to the table. Which is a pet peeve of mine, so this rant is probably a bit besides the point.
It's people, friends or otherwise, who can make simple things like communicating via ASCII fun. In school we exchanged pieces of paper when the teacher wasn't looking, in forums we came up with things, and so on. It's great to have better tools, of course, but it's not like this "enables" us in some fundamental or even very meaningful way - if you don't give us tools, we make our own, if you only make tools to make communication harder we find ways around them. If we don't have decent search engines we use things like web rings or word of mouth. The internet with its routing around faults is a mere shadow of human ingenuity, and the reasons why we do that are also what makes the communication interesting in the first place.
A lot of people seem to be making kind of a cult around completely forgetting that, putting the horse before the cart. The internet isn't that special, we already were a network. Everything is, and scale and speed matter most to people pulling fast ones. The rest want to live in integrity and dignity first and foremost, and then "add value" or numbers.
So the internet isn't special, and the way it's going, since commercial interests came to the forefront, it's becoming kind of a shit show. So if we're going to call that a great achievement of humanity, that's kind of depressing. Maybe it could have been one, but right now we have what we actually have and do what we actually do. Sorry for ranting, but I'm so sick of the hybris over things that are so mediocre in such large parts, that are just becoming more bloated without ever having been good.
If you travel, yes. I know many people who have stayed with distant relatives while traveling the world. The same thing happened before Facebook but at least now people have some insight into the person/family before they turn up on the doorstep and also have the ability to keep in touch afterwards.
My immediate family is spread across three continents and Facebook is an essential tool for keeping in contact with them. We still talk on the phone/video chat, exchange emails/letters/postcards, and visit in person but it's difficult to beat the convenience and frequency of Facebook.
We've also seen how much of it is truly fake, curated by foreign companies and political groups to push agendas.
Like it or not, it provides value to some. Which is, coincidentally, about the nicest thing I've ever said about them. Please don't make me defend them again, I feel dirty.
I don't think that ntsplnkv2 disputed that. He points out that benefits should not be considered in isolation, and instead argues for a cost-benefit analysis.
We can probably all agree that they are sinister bastards who don't have your interests in mind. That's not really up for debate.
Alas, they do create value. Seriously, stop making me defend Facebook! LOL
In some sense those relationships were fake. How can you call someone a friend if you aren't willing to have a discussion, even argument, with them and respect them afterwards?
Personally I don't discuss politics or religion with most of my family. I know that my views are in strong opposition to theirs. Things may be more harmonious this way, but it does mean that no one challenges anyone's ideas.
People used to buy printed books with lists of useful websites to help find things.
So yes, the internet existed before Google and would exist without it, but Google Search was a game-changer in making it useful to the average person.
These companies appropriated the natural course of evolution of information exchange between humans.
I see it this way too.
As usual, most of this confused brain dump by yet another technology-challenged journalist could be reduced, per the "engineering mindset", to few lines: Facebook is a website protected by a password. There is a backend database. It contains photos, among other things. (Including personal data no web user would have shared with some random website in the 1990's.)
How to explain a website's popularity? Not easily. Do not be fooled by ex post facto "explanations" by those pontificating about already popular websites. If we knew the reasons why before the fact then we would not be having these discussions about the perplexity of network effects.
Does every web user really want to visit the same website, all day, every day? Do they set out to do that? ("Where do you want to go today?") If they do, then why even have a "web" of different sites? Why not stay on the same site and just visit its many pages (e.g. "profiles")?
For example, as a technical matter, do all web users need to log in to the same college drop out's website in order to share photos, or send messages to each other? The engineering mindset says no. The engineering mindset says there are many ways to accomplish this using a variety of methods. The most popular method may not be the best method, from an engineering perspective.
According to the journalist the engineering mindset yearns for a mathematical formula that proves why and how things become popular (cf. became or stay popular). But there is none.
The Google employee states that "web search" was cumbersome and slow back in the early 1990's. True.
Today, thanks to networking and hardware advances it is much faster.
But today's "search" is also manipulated to an extent not seen in the early 1990's. And increasingly, the web of "different" sites are (not obviously) owned by the same company, perhaps the same one providing the "search". Users are in some cases literally searching from among a selection of websites all part of the same enity, though it does not appear to them that way.
Indeed, in some aspects we have come a long way from the web of the 1990's.
How to explain a website's continued popularity? Manipulation of existing users and acquiring all potential competition. The list of methods is too long for an HN comment.
Needless to say, copying all the web's data and allowing access only by slow, small scale querying (with each query being recorded and used for advertising purposes) is not clearly an advance for users. It is just a tradeoff.
No technical barriers exist to opening up the web's data in bulk to every web user, and that would certainly be an advance for users.
Actually in the 90's the theory was that people did want this, they were called portals and various companies competed to build the ultimate portal that would have your news and stock quotes and weather and whatever else all on your browser's start page.
we have come a long way from the web of the 1990's
In some ways yes, but in others we've come full circle. Facebook is AOL.
Exactly, it's so spammy for many keywords that more and more curated resources appear, i.e. Link Directories 2.0.
For example, if I need some software then I'm going to check Hacker News, Product Hunt, AlternativeTo but not Google's results.
Many people traversed around from Links section to Links section, or around web rings as their primary use case.
Web sites were connected as trees and rings as opposed to a few central hubs.
This is why the term "surfing the web" used to be much more germane. Today, we don't surf much: we simply target information and acquire it. Or we check daily aggregators/social networks.
Have you tried using Livejournal to communicate with friends and family? It was certainly possible, but had tremendously worse usability. You know, that thing that HN readers care about much less than actual users.
These companies add value but they are not the Internet. If they didn't exist the Internet will continue being useful.
What they have been able to do is inject themselves into communication pathways, provide a network effect in the case of facebook to leverage social curiosity about others which in the larger scheme of things is not important, and now sit on tons of data which has zero value to users and thus does not enhance communication in any way, but helps advertisers.