It feels to me the pace of change has slowed though. Maybe that's the way innovation goes. Sometimes in big bursts but mostly incremental.

I agree that small group conversations are probably the next wave of social media, because you need that circle of trust to be fully expressive.

If I had to guess, I would say we will perfect VR over the next couple decades and that we will replicate some of the brick and mortar experiences that way, but it will still not ever quite replace in person interaction. There's always going to be that uncanny valley between the cyber world and the real world.

This lead to needing to install stuff like Trumpet Winsock.

This mirrored the local networking capabilities between Windows 3.x and 3.11 Windows for workgroups.

Eventually, Microsoft would realize the need to include all of this by default in Windows, which led to the antitrust suit.

Real names attach constraints.

On the Facebook of the 1990s, Usenet, people routinely posted with their real name/identity and real email address, and message headers showed each server the post passed through from its origin, the IP address of the poster (which could and did result in doxxing) and often an "abuse@ISP" email address to complain about the post/poster.

Remember some of early Usenet, I wouldn't be surprised if some people had taken advantage of Californian naming laws (at the time, one could use almost any name one wanted, as long as it was consistent and not intended for fraud) to make their legal name more consistent with their online handle.

Mark V. Shaney is an example of a user who was not using their real name/identity (nor even had one).

Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thequux can tell us how pseudonymous usernames were in his time?

    Quaxity quuxity,
    Teitelman's InterLISP
    Has a DWIM feature that's
    Really a screw;
    MacLISP has evident
    Superiority,
    Letting its customer
    Mean what he do.

Moreover, online forums (remember phpBB?) were overwhelmingly pseudonymous on practice.

    finger rwj@cxa.dl.ac.uk

(Our undergrad computing lab had donated CAD workstations, so someone came up with a graphical display of the room, showing who was logged in where. The TA was displeased with me after figuring out that I had set my avatar to the "unoccupied" graphic. IIRC, he added a square outline for logged-in workstations to the display, around the same time.)

Isn't that already happening in the last five years, with more and more people abandoning "public" social networks and spending much more time in private friend chat groups?

Back in 1995 I remember I was very skeptical about what was then called radio modems. I thought that radio wasn't reliable and that Ethernet cables were there to stay forever. I didn't see laptops (let alone smartphones much later) becoming a thing. Though funny thing is, today in 2020, my laptop is connected via Ethernet at home. WiFi interference and congestion can at times become unbearable in a typical residential apartment block. You don't even know who or what creates interference so I was kind of right back then, but also terribly wrong in the long run.

I missed the practical aspect of radio communication within a short range, and I missed the trend that computing devices will get smaller and more portable over time. We thought at the time that computers will get more powerful but the size factor and the "desktopness" won't change.

The lesson for me is: don't try to predict the future of technologies. You can't just take a trend and extrapolate into the future: trends make unexpected turns and jumps all the time. This seems to be the only thing that's reliably predictable: that sudden turns and breakthroughs happen all the time and that each turn and breakthrough discovers some new practical aspect of a technology that was impossible to see in advance.

Could this be solved with the right wallpaper or paint materials?

I hope that change is coming. Hope aside… I expect that, to riff on the quote, in the future, everyone will be globally infamous for 15 minutes.

Personally, I'd rather listen to 1 person criticize me than 10 people who praise me. That 1 critical person's going to have the most valuable thing to say that leads to improvement.

To an extent, note I'm talking about reasonable criticism, not assholes.

I've always been more inclined towards dinner party type experiences, but no one in my social circle has agreed. They all prefer the town square.

One of my best app experiences to date was with Snapchat, when it first became popular. Several of my friends started using it, and it became a way to share funny or interesting things we saw in our day to day. If I saw something that I thought Dave and Jess would find interesting, I'd just send it to those two. Because it was so ephemeral, it was great for small things -- the sort of things it wouldn't be worth creating a group chat for. It was the equivalent of walking down the street with a small group of friends, pointing at something you noticed, and saying "check that out".

Eventually, both Instagram and Snapchat started pushing the story format, and seemingly overnight the experience turned from a dinner party into a town square. No one was sharing with small groups of friends anymore. When you add to your story, it's for everyone to see. I never understood why my friends saw that as a replacement for what we had before. I think perhaps, for most people, the desire to be heard and noticed by a crowd outweighs any benefits that sharing with a smaller group might bring.

Mostly agreed. There also many times when people should look at what they just wrote and say, "maybe I don't know enough about the topic to publish about it."

To choose a non-controversial topic: I have recently found the time to explore programming for microcontrollers. So much of the information that I come across is a simple rehash, to the point where it is clear that people are writing about their own experiences as soon as they learn about it. There is no depth of knowledge, which is problematic when the accuracy of information depends upon the details.

The problem of figuring out who to listen too usually comes down to figuring out who to filter out. In some cases it may be easy to do because the tone or content indicates the scope and accuracy of their knowledge. Unfortunately, it is a time consuming process since you have to hear what they are saying before you can decide whether they are worth listening to.

We were in an IT school and I told them that I wanted to become a software developer.

They laughed at me and said they want to become admins, because basically everything has already be developed.

They had edonkey for music and films, they had video games, they had IRC for chat, what else was there?