The Internet used to be far better. Once upon a time, only Excellent People could even get here. There was a certain expectation when a new person was encountered on the Internet - an expectation of competency. Review sites, online editorials, news blogs, and even analytic collectors were absolutely saturated with Excellent People, well-defended opinions, and reliable data.
Misconceptions During the Golden Years
At the time, there was a prevailing opinion that the Internet would allow fringe politics, science, and art to thrive where it once merely existed. Based on the empirical data, this seemed to be true; the majority of politics, science, and art on the Internet at the time was indeed more fringe [or at least bleeding edge]. In retrospect, this was certainly just an indication of the active online population’s demographics. We can see now that the Internet merely helps propagate the same popular culture *faster*. Fringe ideas have once again been relegated to the metaphorical dark corners.
Also at this time, many online folk bemoaned the fact that there weren’t more people online, perhaps assuming that the next wave of people would be of the same caliber. Many went so far as to wish for “everybody” to be online. Of course, this was absolute folly, a confusion of the cause and the effect. Specifically, the underlying misconception was that the Internet could transform a Mundane into an Excellent Person. The disappointing fact was that the Internet was full of Excellent People merely because only Excellent People liked the Internet. Mundanes who went online remained mundane.
Examples of the Internet’s Downfall
Perhaps the saddest example of the watered down internet is IMDb. The IMDb “Top 250″ was once upon a time one of the finest examples of Internet collaboration. Based on aggregate user reviews from 1-10 (but with certain unlisted statistical transformations to remove outliers), the list was truly a revelation for me. Having always found the “critics” to be unreliable, public opinion to be less reliable, and the “Oscars” (or Golden Globes) to be an absolute sham, I was always at a loss for how to locate a good movie. The Top 250 was absolutely amazing - never had I encountered any kind of cinematic compendium that so accurately predicted quality cinema for me. I didn’t always like the movies personally, but I could always understand why the movie was great. It’s downfall was almost so slow that I didn’t notice it. At first, mediocre sequels would enter the list at ludicrously high rankings, but slowly fall back to earth. I didn’t mind that IMDb would succumb at first to the popular hysteria, as long as each movie stabilized at the proper place. However, I began to notice that the movies were drifting less quickly to a more appropriate location, and in some cases, had completely stabilized at an altogether inappropriate location. The perfect example is “The Dark Knight”. This was a truly excellent movie with top notch acting, a large budget, and even better box office sales. I have absolutely nothing against it. However, it is *Not* the 7th best movie of all time (the current IMDb ranking at the time of this writing). Surely, any movie buff can think of 100 movies that should be higher - Fight Club, Goodfellas, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Donnie Darko, and Once Upon a Time in the West just to name a few.
Another sad tale is that of Last.FM. Once upon a time, Last.FM was called Audioscrobbler, and it was just a music statistic aggregation service. There was no radio, there was no CBS - some guy started it as a college project. The Audioscrobbler charts were a thing of beauty. It contain exclusively interesting music, just the kind of thing that I expect from Excellent People. As with the Top 250, I didn’t like all of the music, but each artists was respectable in his own way. The list still has the shine of its old excellence, but it has since been sullied by substandard-clone-fempop like Lady GaGa, the kind of music listened to by Mundanes (and certainly not by Excellent People).
A Similar Phenomenon
The circles in which I run are filled with people who desire the world domination of the PC by GNU/Linux and other open source software, to the exclusion of everything else. I understand their rationale, and in many cases it is a well reasoned desire. However, most advocates of this viewpoint fail to understand to implications of a more ubiquitous GNU/Linux. As with the early Internet, one of the finest things about Linux is the population of people who use it. If more Mundanes used it, many things about it would cease to be as prevailingly “good”. In fact, in an effort to make GNU/Linux more ubiquitous, the userspace has already become watered down. For example, the Gnome Desktop Environment, though admittedly prettier and more usable than ever, has *long* since dropped much of the configurability and power that makes GNU/Linux so attractive to Excellent People.
So I’m a Snob - Deal With It