I think while there's a valid point in here, it strikes me as kind of harsh towards the larger public, which has never heard of IRC … for a reason. It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical. Which is why it's essentially stayed around as more of a backchannel than anything else.
Anyway … While there is certainly excitement in the world of the distributed and it's very much worth encouraging, writing an article which essentially calls 90 percent of the public stupid for not knowing HTML seems counterproductive to your ultimate goals.
Also: "If you want to use the Internet in 2013, you need to pick up some tech skills." That sounds like wishful thinking and assumes that the internet is made up of Hacker News or Reddit users. This is a great community, but I'll let you know right now that the wider internet is nothing like this.
If I'm trying to talk to my grandfather online, there's a good chance that he doesn't know a thing about putting together a VPS. But there's a great chance he knows email—a fully distributed system that isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
You want to encourage the world to go distributed? Meet them halfway. Offer up solutions like email, which actually offer up some helpful things for the button-pressers. Because being hostile to the users of the world is counterproductive and will get you nowhere.
> It's a great service, but it's a bit much for the non-technical.
IRC was full of non-technical people in the 90s. #teenchat was consistently the most popular channel on a number of networks! IRC used to be filled with the sort of inane chatter that seams to be the bread-and-butter of services like Twitter and Facebook. :)
Everyone has an anecdote and all, but I was heavily into IRC as a teenager in the 90's (met my now-wife on there!) and there was a diverse range of backgrounds and ages, although it was a comparatively small group centred around an Irish ISP.
Farmers, teachers, tech workers, school kids, housewives, single mums, people living on poxy islands with nothing to do but with dial up and office workers whiling away the working day.
Good point, and it raises an interesting question.
Is Facebook really that much easier to understand than e-mail, usenet, and IRC? Or is Facebook just better at marketing?
When my Mom wanted to get on to Facebook there was definitely a learning curve. She had to be shown by my sister and myself how to do everything... sign up, post photos, learn about what a "comment" was, how to add people, manage things... Facebook is quite a complex piece of software. I don't necessarily think that Facebook requires less technical skills than decentralized services.
In my opinion, the reason Facebook is popular across all demographics is because it is based on real identities. Real names, real faces. Before Facebook the Internet fully embraced anonymity and this requirement to partake in role playing, having an avatar that was separate from yourself, was confusing and a little bit terrifying to older people. My mom would always wonder WHO I was talking to on the Internet. They could have been a murderer, or a kidnapper! If you can't see their face or know their name, she thought, how could they be trusted? My parents are NOT on Twitter and will probably never be for similar reasons. It is too weird for them to think about having a separate personality. They weren't stage actors or used to the public eye because they were raised in a very different media environment. The distributed Internet turns us all in to celebrities. Facebook keeps things the way they were but allows people to benefit from the same abilities to publish, just to a seemingly private group of close friends and family.
Facebook, in my opinion, is a nice little service to hold your hand while introducing you to this very different new world that is emerging.
On the topic of marketing and technology... I'm just going to use Sun and Java as an example because I was recently talking about this and it's fresh on my mind. Sun did an amazing job of marketing Java on the Internet. In the mid 90s every other web page had that little Java mascot on it. They took the Internet and ran with it, big time. There were much better and much easier tools around but their creators didn't do enough to evangelize their benefits. You gotta get out there and sell this stuff to people.
It took open source software a LONG time to realize this. Products will wither and die without proper marketing and advertising, no matter how much better they are.
"Great marketing and decent technology gives you a better bandwagon than great technology and decent marketing", as said by Ralph Johnson at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JavaVsSmalltalk - which BTW, is a great little wiki full of interesting conversations from a bunch of old timers and academics.
Anyway … While there is certainly excitement in the world of the distributed and it's very much worth encouraging, writing an article which essentially calls 90 percent of the public stupid for not knowing HTML seems counterproductive to your ultimate goals.
Also: "If you want to use the Internet in 2013, you need to pick up some tech skills." That sounds like wishful thinking and assumes that the internet is made up of Hacker News or Reddit users. This is a great community, but I'll let you know right now that the wider internet is nothing like this.
If I'm trying to talk to my grandfather online, there's a good chance that he doesn't know a thing about putting together a VPS. But there's a great chance he knows email—a fully distributed system that isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
You want to encourage the world to go distributed? Meet them halfway. Offer up solutions like email, which actually offer up some helpful things for the button-pressers. Because being hostile to the users of the world is counterproductive and will get you nowhere.